Steve

Something has been bothering me, and I want to know if it bothers anyone else (specifically those who make use of sponsor hosted galleries).

Why is it that many sponsors have extremely shitty hosted galleries? Or, even worse, a long, complicated process that has you click thru several pages of options - only to reward you with an extremely shitty hosted gallery link.

What's up with that? They must have seen somebody's hosted gallery and said, "we need to get our affiliates hooked up and pick up some more joins, too." So why make it a waste of time, and resources?

Here are some friendly suggestions for any sponsor who is considering whether to offer FHGs, or is unhappy with the performance of his program's FHGs:

1) Hire a professional to bang out a bunch of templates.
Yeah, Bobby from the mailroom might surf a TGP, but chances are, you shouldn't entrust your business to him. Shake a tree, and it's raining gallery designers. Pick a few, place an order of 5+ wth each, and have Bobby start selecting the images to plug into the templates. Why so many galleries? 30 days in a month, and the more FHGs you offer, the more spots you can suck up on a TGP. And you'll be able to see which gallery designers are worth the money. If a guy builds a gallery that converts like shit, don't use him again. Go give that tree another shake.

2) Make the FHGs easy for your affiliates to use.
This is simple. DON'T make me click thru page after page of options. I want to log in, click the FHG link, and see a nice big list of URLs. If you want to offer a chioice of color options, that's nice - but have them already built and hosted - just say "/grn/01/lihwh/?ACCOUNT is the green background, while /blk/01/lihwh/?ACCOUNT is the black background." See? Simple. K.I.S.S.

3) Make the FHGs series galleries.
Surf a TGP. How many galleries will you find that have 15 assorted pics? Or 3 pics of 5 different series mixed together?
Few, if any. So why would a sponsor only offer me this stuff on their FHG? I don't know. I thought they wanted to make money. I guess they just wanted to give Bobby something to do.

4) Make the URL of the gallery static.
Some sponsors have really nice FHGs, that convert great. But, they use some kind of linking format that makes it almost impossible to submit the FHG into your own admin script. Why? Because the gallery link is actually a re-direct. So, your TGP admin script cannot find any content (even if you have an admin account that is allowed to break your submit rules, it needs to find the content).

5) Don't re-direct traffic or pop consoles on a FHG
This is pretty simple. I'm all for doing this on the tour - I have no problem with that. But, a gallery link is different. You either do it right, or you don't. Guys that don't, tend to pull this stuff. Not everyone has scripts that easily allow you to disable/delete a sponsor's galleries from their rotation. I know it's hard to break old habits, but this is a horse of a different color. I'm sure you can find extremly affordable hosting for your FHGs - and if they are done right, you won't even dream of messing with them. A good gallery design should more than pay for any bandwidth bills from non-converting foreign freeloaders.

6) Grab some domains to use for your FHG project
If you have your program on abcefg.com, it would be a really smart move NOT to put the FHGs on abcdefg.com/fgh/. Domains are really cheap, and so is hosting. Even a small time operator can afford to break this up. It's also a safeguard, too. Imagine your FHG project is SO successful that your server is overloaded - you wouldn't want your tour to crawl in real slow, would you? It's never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket, anyway. There are plenty of hosting companies out there. You might even wind up with a new coffee mug, or pen!

Now, I'm sure there will be those who read this and say "fuck this lazy bastard! I offer a FHG and this ungrateful shithead bitches and moans?" Sorry if you think that way. I'm really not looking to burn anyone, and I haven't mentioned any program in this post. I'm just giving you a friendly suggestion. Because in 6-12 months, you can pretty much forget about getting a significant amount of TGP traffic from anyone but TGP owners. It's taken longer than I thought, but TGP is going the way of TGP2 - in the sense that more and more of the gallery spots belong to the TGP owner. There are already several TGP admin scripts available for purchase that have rotation features for FHGs built into them, as well as several other scripts that can handle the rotation of FHGs, and then insert them into your TGP pages for you. That guy in your program, the one that does good off TGP listings? Pretty soon, he's either buying spots, shut out, or only listed by newbies, or a handful of sites. You better plan on going right to the traffic source. And when you do, please do it right.

tootie

Thank you, Steve! I have a few free hosted galleries for my BYOT affiliates myself and I greatly appreciate your input. I'll keep these points in mind when making the galleries.

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doober

alot of great tips for program owners there
way to go

Steve

tootie, you are only the second BYOT program I have seen with some hosted galleries. I'll be making use of these. BYOT sites convert great. Nice job, just slap some more pics into those templates to add more galleries

widget

well said

BlackCrayon

i don't like hosted galleries, surfers don't like them too much either. you fill your tgp with hosted galleries, watch it slowly die.

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Steve

Keep telling yourself that, while I see more and more spots go to the owners of 200k+/day sites (and the owners open more and more). I never said a TGP would be 100% FHG, I said it will get to the point where you'll have to either be among a few submit partners, or pay for the spots (and guess what, plenty of people will).

q00p

well said steve!

Also, providing FHG in text file format would make it easier to load into TGP software.. Some sponsors do this, but very few.

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Bigjohn

Very good points Steve.

I've signed for several sponsors that I don't use because their affiliate program pages are too damn confusing and hard to navigate.

seven

Think exactly what his point is.. you fill your tgp with crappy hosted galleries you won't get many bookmarks but use some high quality hosted galleries.. different story

well said, steve

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Toy Rev
Rouge Web Design

Steve

well, it would be a nice feature, but honestly, you can just highlight the URL list, and COPY/PASTE into a txt file on your own. I dont know how easy it would be for the sponsor doing this to be able to change the dlineator, either. Some scripts want a pipe |, some want a comma ,

webgurl

Awesome thread !!
I always come in contact with sooo many programs i see with the crappiest hosted galleries their just awful quality , thumbnail sizing, poor choice of content , stupid descriptions and more issues.... On top of it all there might be only like 10 altogether to choose from ! If the sponsors are gonna make only a few like 10 its okay as long as they are 10 quality ones .
Don't get me wrong its an awesome feature to have not every affilate has them but if u are going to have them they should be half ass okay atleast or else don't make them at all its just a waste of bandwidth .....

I would luvvvv to post some of the nasty hosted galleries i have seen but i don't want to disrespect them on a board hehehe
Anyways .... You are sooooo Right !!

BlackCrayon

i don't disagree that is where tgps seem to be heading. im just saying i think its shitty that it is heading that way. once tgps start doing that, they kinda stop being what they were originally intended to be, so much for diversity. most hosted galleries are crap that look nice but don't tell you dick about the site. i just remember a time before hosted galleries, and a time when conversions on tgps were actually good.

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you don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day..

RaGe

Actually I disagree.. most big TGPs are headed towards paid listings. Yeah, we all list a few sponsor hosted galleries but the majority of the spots are paid for. And those are all unique galleries built by several different people..

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BlackCrayon

i wouldn't mind paying for spots as long as i'd make around double what i paid for the spot.

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you don't know you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day..

Steve

Believe me BlackCrayon, I understand. I didn't like it when it became the norm in TGP2 (not that they were hosted galleries, just that you needed to pump a lot of your own links in the updates to get money - or you had to own a TGP2 site to count of good traffic).

There is always going to be sites that list submitted pages. But the competition is already fierce for those spots - in a little while, it will be even harder to get listed.

It also depends on the type of TGP. A multi page archive type site can still afford to add a ton of new submits. A single page site? I'd expect the owner to take more and more of the spots. If you post 300 links/day, you can have 200 for yourself, easy. 10-25 paid spots, and that leaves 75. Oh yeah, forgot blind links for trades....

Nobody Specific

We have decent free hosted galleries that seem to be converting for us. We add new ones every week. And no, Bobby from the mailroom is not designing them.

You can use the link generator to get the codes, the page that lists them all, or the new text file download that lists them all for you. Click my sig and come take a look.

evildick

I had that pet peeve myself. Especially with some of the sponsors that use MPA2 and have those pages with the screen shots of the galleries, and they only list like 9 galleries on each page.

My site sort of alleviates that problem by listing all the galleries a sponsor offers on one page instead of on 50 or so pages (or however they have them split up.)

Check it out:

http://sponsorhostedgalleries.com

Steve

LukeM - just signed up , figured I'd see what you offer. just waiting on my account to be approved (expect to see a LOT more of this from now on, too)

evildick - cool site you have there. I bookmarked it. I'm sure you'll be referring me to a couple of new sponsors.

Nobody Specific

Just approved your account Steve. Take a look and let me know what you think!

Phoenix

Steve...Feel free to hit me up on ICQ # 163879276


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all good points btw...I am sure everyone strives to have quality galleries which are easily usable by their affiliates

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Marina

Excellent post!

I have been so disappointed in alot of sponsor galleries too... amazing they make nice cash but can't afford a good designer!

And the ones that do movie galleries *cringe* They must have never seen a real movie gallery cause those most of those movie guys who have thier own archives make the most kick ass screen caps! Sometimes their screencaps look better than thumbnails I have seen on tgp galleries!

I guess the sponsor or their gallery makers don't realize that if a movie surfer see's dark, blurry thumbs that they will NOT join cause they want GOOD movies... and your caps are a reflection of your movies.

Jman69

oxcash comes to mind

Steve

fucking a - that's why you always hear guys talking up Deluxe Pass and shit like that - they clean up.

Eve

amen brutha

Matt_WildCash

Steve good input thanks. We are doing these for our program now, building towards offering what you said.

$5 submissions

What I don't like are SHGs that are laid out without any thought to how well the SHG converts.

Also, SHGs that appear to be updated weekly but actually are rehashes (with differing colors) of other prior galleries are a no go. What if you list both at the same time because of your database link rotator. Makes for a pissed off surfer.

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Steve

Driven - hope this was of some help

$5 - Yeah, that kinda falls into what I mentioned earlier. But I have no problem with a template being repeated - as long as the content is swapped. Hell, I run templates into the ground, if they sell.

And your first point brings us back to having FHGs that actually sell your site. Slapping 10-15 pics up with a banner doesn't really prequalify the surfer. It just gives me another URL to link.

$5 submissions

Good points, steve. Also, I had an earlier thread re additional services that SHGs should pursue. If a sponsor actually paid attention to conversions, content quality, and tools that help the webmaster, they will OWN the SHG space. I haven't seen one yet that hit all these points.

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$5 submissions

In addition to the fine suggestions above.

Sponsors should traffic test the Galleries. Some galleries convert TGPs well, others convert SE and AVS well, so on and so forth. Perhaps, track galleries to traffic source and offer the ones that convert the best tailored to the traffic the affiliate produces.

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Steve

I might have someone for you pretty soon. They are testing their new FHGs out with some serious traffic. I'm waiting for a list of URLs myself.

jayeff

Only problem with this thread is that if memory serves, it's the third on this topic in as many months and I haven't seen anyone paying much attention to the issue yet.

After actually looking at his galleries to see if they are ever going to sell anything, every sponsor should run through what an affiliate has to do to use the galleries. While they are doing that, they shouldn't forget that 99.9% of the time the affiliate will need to check every gallery to grab a thumbnail or write a description: sometimes even to get the category right...

If that doesn't send them back to the drawing board, next think about 200+ sponsors having upwards of 30,000 galleries between them. The way most are set up now, you are looking at a week's work to sort them out and set up the ones you want: 3 days just to do a half-assed job with generic descriptions or quick and nasty thumbs.

And it doesn't stop there. Last time I checked, about 300 galleries disappeared during a month without a notice going out about a single one. 700 new galleries were added that month, of which I got emails about maybe one quarter. Fact is that if I weren't using one of the summary web sites, I wouldn't even know most of this stuff was going on.

Last but not least, what with cookies and other odd things in the way these galleries are set up, if an affiliate does try to speed things up with a link checker or a rotator that checks for the galleries, about one-third come up 404 in response to software checks.

There's a ton of money being spent on hosted galleries and they should be great for everyone involved. But as things are, they are a pain in the ass and realize only a fraction of their real potential.

Babaganoosh

This has got to be one of the best threads in months.

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gin

why even have sponsor hosted gallery? i think if i ever did that instead of 30$ a sign up you would get 15$ a sign up.. host a few people right now for galleries and the bw and all the damn support and questions they have (i want php setup i want this setup i want that setup blah blah) isn't worth their 1 sign up a day

Steve

If you set up FHGs correctly, you wouldn't be wasting time with the guys who currently bust your balls. You'd have the people they get their traffic from linking directly to the URLs.

jayeff

No-one here is trying to convince you to run hosted galleries. We are saying that if you are going to run them, it make sense for sponsors and affiliates to get them right.

Marina

I hate when sponsors use content from 4 years ago! I just think wow I have that cd which is up on shelf collecting dust!

james_clickmemedia

Good valid points and I don't think you are asking too much..
We have hundreds of exclusive hosted galleries for our black paysites..

Example of some that were added today :

http://galleries.clickmemedia.com/ga...html?refer=gfy
http://galleries.clickmemedia.com/ga...html?refer=gfy

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Jer

Good post.

CDSmith

YES.

7) Rotating content on your FHG daily? Make sure the content matches the CATEGORY. If you're going to have a fetish category, don't put a softcore model posing in there.


Excellent post. Now we just need to make sure that a few program admins see it.

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perfectodollars-gabrio

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basschick

great topic!

you know what i hate? a series of script-generated galleries that mostly have generic text and one banner, never the best one. topbucks offers this but there are many others. all the text on these galleries is niche-free and totally unappealing. sometimes it's not even relevant.

don't these sponsors want to make sales? there aren't even any popups on the galleries, and no one makes a dime on bad galleries.

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FiReC

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ezmoves14

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