This isn't a valid analogy. Skimming redirects surfers to trades (other magazines), not other paysites (phone sex numbers).

You know what a thumbnail is and I know what a thumbnail is - does the Ninth Circut court know - well thats another question, however in the terms of this discussion, is a generally accepted thumbnail of a copyrighted image theft - the court says no with no mention of what the purpose of the thumbnail should be.

the reward is the 70%sh of the clicks going to the sponsor gallery. without the skimming that traffic would be much smaller if any traffic at all.

hence the definition of thumbnail is needed.

I mean, all legal matters implies loads of paperwork, definitions, precedents, reasons, plaintiffs, etc. Be sure that a 100 words paragraph simply represents what the court stated for this case, nothing else. Let's say I sue somebody over the illegal use of my megatronblastdicker. The least the court will do is to find out what the fuck is a megatronblastdicker and define it with all precision :)

it's the difference between:

100% of 10,000 clicks

or

70% of 100,000 clicks

skimming seems to benefit both the sponsor and the tgp owner. (in theory)

OK, in that scenario I will oppose this:

I'm curious: for the surfer who gets "jerked," does it count him as a click as soon as he is jerked? Or does he actually have to click something on the page he is jerked to for it to count? What are the odds of him clicking on the new TGP he's been redirected to?

In other words, is he still useful traffic to the receiving TGP? Or is it just a way to inflate numbers?

Honesty counts, people.

fascinating.

i hate the GG&J message board. Green Guy comes across as a real fucking idiot who thinks he knows all their is to know about the industry.

yes, the traffic is useful. the surfer doesn't have to click something to be counted, but his clicks are counted to track the productivity of the trade.

what would inflating numbers do if the traffic was useless?
i wouldn't brag about having 400K hits a day to my TGP if none of them clicked links.

TGP surfers are conditioned to expect jerks. Many of them just close the trade and click on exactly the same thumb again to get the gallery.

So basically if I come to your house and steal a third of your goods that's fine?

Or someone steals a third of my content, he's not stealing?

It seems doing things wrong by half or a third is acceptable by some people. Well it's not by me.

Maybe if I signed up to a site, stayed 3 months and only charged back the last month that would be acceptable to?

The whole thing rests on where the traffic is sent and who ultimately benefits from it. Does it go to another TGP page that is trading hits back or does it go somewhere for the benfit of the TGP page owner?

just to make it clear, I'm undecided on this matter, just questions, quite logical ones. But the most important: let's say tomorrow all sponsors decide to avoid the use of their content to make thumbs for galleries (just in case, since we're all so "legal" try to find one that allows cropping and altering of copyright, or use in another domain than the ones permitted by them). Does it means all TGP will disappear? Or simply that they'll need to get legit and buy the content they use or at least get a written permission to use it?

aw, btw, you're putting in jeopardy the sponsor since some content producers will consider that the sponsor is giving content fro promotion whic he is not allowed to :(

could be. could be not

After reading some of the thread it seems the hits are being redirected to a very unfriendly place.

He warns you need a good anti virus program if you click on the links.

Many people benefit from it.

A lot of TGPs would have little traffic if it weren't for trades/skims like that.

So if that third click didn't go elsewhere, chances are there wouldn't have been 2 other clicks to go to the sponsor.

TGPs generate their traffic through skims. They send the traffic to sponsors. The sponsors can't make money without traffic. The TGPs can't send traffic without skims.

You figure out who the winner is here. IMO, it's a win-win situation all around.

then again, we'll never know if that's true or not as he had the site deleted.

maybe he lied? maybe the pop-ups were from another site or some spyware on his PC? maybe his copy of norton was tweaked a little too high?

I am not personally attacking or insulting anyone here. I'm sorry if I came across that way. I am simply asking for information, so I can form an educated opinion.

:ugone2far :ugone2far :ugone2far :ugone2far

Not all providers allow content to be used in hosted galleries.
As far as thumbs go, I remember reading somewhere that they were not under copyright....I can be 100% wrong though.

iwantchicks.. I honestly do not believe you have a clue.. your posts just prove it..

First off I've read the sponsor in question's site twice, and he doesn't even have a TOS posted.. so how in the hell can he claim any one is breaking any rules when none are posted? Did you even bother to look at the sponsor's page? I bet you didn't.

second off if you don't understand how traffic trades benefit the sponsors and you really believe 99% of TGP's trade 99% of their traffic then it's not worth arguing with you about.. as you just don't understand the concept and how things really work.

I will give you a quick example... I sign up for a new trade.. I send him 1000 hits in 24 hours he in return sends me 1000 hits that produce even a modest 1,500 clicks. Well that's an extra 500 clicks to galleries or trades that I didn't have yesterday. However to be honest most trades get better productivity than that.. so a simple 1000 hits can easily turn into 2k or 3k clicks to galleries or trades.. with even 40% to trades, that is still and extra 700 out of 1000 going to galleries.. How is this bad for the sponsor or the gallery submitter?

how long do you think it would take a site with only hard links to gain a extra 700 clicks in a day? I'd say pretty damn hard. On top of this 99% of the sponser are clearly "A" OK with TGP's the send traffic that also do traffic skiming..

Remember even a crappy 50% to galleries is more than 0% if the TGP didn't use the galleries.


harvey

he was installing toolbars not virus, I'm not a fan of it, and I'm against it but if that was the norm on his site that's his right and it seems his trades are OK with it. BTW your Idea about buying some content and using those thumbs for trades would never work.. as the surfers would easily figure that one out..

Allow me to disagree, at least to some extent. Let's say that instead of existing 1 mil TGP there were only 1000 because the other wouldn't be able to survive. That means 1000 times less free porn and a heavily targeted traffic, skyrocketing ratios for TGP owners and sponsors with a minimum effort. Furthermore, TGP owners would be able to sell almost any spot for (say) 200 dollars and yet it would be profitable for sponsors (not to mention TGP owners). So, how this (hypothetical) situation compares with your scenario? This is a win win situation, the one you're mentioning is just the way things are right now. Status quo, if you like :)

One other aspect of skimmed trading that hasn't been touched on here is that modern scripts only trade unique surfers.

That means if I send a surfer to a trade, I will get back a completely different surfer in return. The result? A much greater number of eyes available to view the galleries.


To bring up another analogy...

Imagine you're on a street with a lot of strip clubs. You enter one and you find yourself in a hallway with a number of doors. A doorman welcomes you. Each door has a photo on it. You choose a door you like, enter the room, get a lapdance, then return to the hallway. You do this a couple of times, but as you go to open the next door the doorman steps in front of you and gently guides you to a another club on the street. You then have the option to return to the previous club and try the same door again (he won't stop you this time), or perhaps some of the photos in the new club might catch your eye, so you try them instead.

The doorman in the new club has already greeted you and sees which doorman delivered you. He makes a note in his book to return someone else to that club.

The end result? More people pass through each club, and ultimately more people pass through each door for a paid lapdance.

It sounds to me like everyone is biting the hand that feeds. The TGP is jerking around its surfers and then expects them to ultimately pay someone money.

And as has been stated, the surfer doesn't even have to click on the "jerked" site to count as a hit. So he isn't really traffic at all. He's just inflating the "hits" to that site.

I'm curious (again). A 500k TGP that does skim trades vs a 100k TGP that doesn't: who has more productive traffic (ie: traffic leading to sales off galleries of their own tgp)?

What a riduculous statement.

Do you think the guy who's ready to spend money wants to be messed around by being sent in circles? NO, he wants to use TGPs as a guide to the next site he signs up to. He wants to click a link and see what has aroused his curiosity.

This method of trading traffic is annoying to the serious porn consumer and an aid to the free surfer. Problem here is too many people think like free surfers and not enough think like porn buyers.

Since the sites are different sizes, is it really productivity that matters? The important thing is how many sales each generates.

I have found that (VERY roughly) a non skim TGP will make about 4-5 times as much as a skimmed TGP of the same size (where size is the number surfers loading the TGP page).

To balance that out, the skimming TGP could easily be 4-5 times the size of the non skimmed TGP. It's the same amount of sales at the end of the day.

All tgps used to get either submissions or build their own galleries, most still do and yes that includes buying content. The sponsors seen a way to try and break into this market by appealing to the basic needs of any business man - cheap labour (the free hosted gallery) and high profit (no expenses and all the signups). Many tgp's dont bother too much with free hosted galleries as they tend to be seen everywhere and aren't really the best galleries out there. But implying that tgps who use free hosted galleries in some way are not legit is, I think, a disservice to most tgp owners.

when the surfer gets sent to a traffic trade the number of links on that tgp that they click counts as as something called productivity. the more productive your surfers on another tgp(ie the more links they click) the more traffic gets sent back to your site from the other tgp, which allows you to send more traffic to galleries and trades. thus allowing you to get more traffic from other tgp's.

so if you trade with a shitty tgp and surfers don't click anything on their site, chances are you won't get much traffic back because the script should kick in and say your traffic is shit so i'm not sending him shit.

you know, i think i could have made that sentence longer

that's where productivity comes in.. if a trade sends you 100 hit's but those 100 hit's produce 50 clicks then it's a bad trade and you dump him.. In return most of my trades produce double the amount of clicks vs hit's sent.. meaning that 100 hits turns into 200-300 clicks to galleries which in turn 30% of the clicks are sent to trades to further grow my trades which sends more traffic to the galleries.

Are you serious?
I have started 2 sites at the same time.
one skims one doesn't skim

the one that does skim gets only 14,000 daily hits.. but I send 15,000 to my trades and 19,000 to galleries daily.

So.. we can gather that the person coming to my site likes the site since he's clicking multiple times. Also 90% of my SE hits come in by searching my domain name.. so they must not be all that disappointed.

Now, another site I started at the same time doesn't skim. It's now 1200/day (and I feed traffic to it from my skimming site) and it sends out 400 hits to trades and 2000 hits to galleries.

As a sponsor.. would you prefere 2000 hits to your galleries, or the use of your thumb and 19,000 hits?


Don't you people (sponsors) know how tgp's work? If you don't.. why on hell do you offer fhg's? Shouldn't you probably look into it first? Next thing I know you suspend an affiliate for using your precious bandwidth and converting only at 1:500

Do you either surf for porn or run a tgp?
No? Why do you argue? It's like me arguing with you on how to shoot content.

Yes, it's status quo. But it's still win-win.

The situation you describe is ideal, but unlikely anytime soon. And so we must accept the status quo.

Elli, it would depend on the percentage of skim. And a 100K TGP without skim is very rare these days with the exception of an elite few.

A TGP getting 100K hits a day without doing blind trades/skimming is a TGP that really knows what it's doing. It would take a hell of a lot of work to build a 100K TGP without blind trades and without purchasing bulk traffic. And a 100K TGP not skimming won't stay at 100K for long if it's only using sponsor hosted galleries.

This is it exactly - this is a very informative thread, so is the one on green guys. So many people who have been in this industry for a long time have really no clue how a major part of it works.

We have to live and work in the world the way it is, not the way we would like it to be. Any sponsor who offers free hosted galleries will have one of his pics thumbnailed and linked through a traffic tradnig script - thats not something that might happen - that is something that 100% will happen. To be a sponsor and not know this is amazing.

Well I certainly have got myself an edumacation tonight! I'll suspend judgement until I go and mull it over for a while. Thanks for the info, guys.

To quote shemp:

N00b : "Should I start a TGP"
Mr. Shemp : "Yes if it says 1998 on your calendar"

Old-skool elite people who've updated their sites for a half a decade and have been here since the beginning can afford NOT to skim. They are big already. Now, a new guy with 100 hits/day from search engines can't expect to grow a non-skimming tgp in a month or 2 (the maximum attention span a newb has).. so skimming comes to play. Anyone with a bit of talent can grow a skimming tgp to 100k's of visitors per day.. and become a 'big fish' and make decent money. :)

well, I'm a believer in going to the best, not what is commonly achieved by majority :)

Anyway, very interesting thread, will check it again tomorrow (well, later since it's "the next day" here), now I go to sleep :)

let's use TGF's numbers and say that a skim TGP sends approx. 10 times as much traffic to a link than a no-skim TGP does.

i have my skim TGP. 25% of my clicks are skimmed. i get 4000 clicks on a gallery link. 1000 are skimmed to another TGP and 3000 are sent to your gallery.

i have my no-skim TGP. i get 400 clicks on a gallery link. all 400 go to the gallery.

3000 > 400.

even if my skim TGP gets 5 times as many hits as the no-skim, 1500 > 400.

we're talking 4-8 times the traffic here, and to get it, all you have to do is let the TGP owner use your thumb and allow some of the people clicking on your thumb to be skimmed instead.

of course, these numbers are hypothetical, but not far off. the fact still remains that a skim TGP has the potential to send a lot more traffic to a sponsor than a no-skim TGP does.

and more traffic = more money.

..not to forget that most sites have sponsor banners/ads on the TGP page itself. Usually a sponsor also used in the galleries.
Would you rather have 1000 impressions or 10000? :)

The argument for using others ppl content for skimming under the pretext that it generates more sales for everyone seems false to me. Why would it?

Traffictrading cant produce more surfers with CCs through some black magic process. It's the same surfers. Just that the same surfers hits more sites during his online time.

The ultimate easy example:

site A, no skim/trade: 1k hits, 5 sales a day.
site B, no skim/trade: 1k hits, 5 sales a day.

Now they start trading through skimming with eachother.

Why would the total amount of sales (10) go up? It's just inbreeding of the same surfers? This example should be valid in a bigger context as well.

You might say, "cause he sees something on site B that site A didn't have".

Ok, but this shouldn't make the global amount of sales go up either, cause if the surfer doesn't like A he'll close it and go back to google and hit up another pornsite. (fallback "trading" through google). Now im open for arguments against this theory.

...On the other hand I can see one good thing with skimming. More skim is less easy free porn.

what people mean by sales go up through skimming is that traffic goes up meaning more hits to galleries and thus more sales. its not that it increases the amount of sales exracted from tgp surfers, but it gives you a bigger piece of the pie than you might otherwise see by not skimming to get more traffic to your sites.