The free traffic pool is shrinking every day and is almost at zero. Pretty soon you're going to have to pay for traffic in one way or another, be it paid listings or paid partner accounts.
I don't really see this as a bad thing. Its not that much different from when I started in this business.
While the bar for entry into this business has never been very high, its never been lower than it was in the past year.
When I first started in late 2000 there were MASSIVE AMOUNTS of FREE TRAFFIC available.
There was however, very little free content, most sponsors hated TGP's, said they were giving the store away, and they weren't about to give you free content to support what they saw as the problem.
Bannerless free hosting didn't exist. If you wanted free hosting you had to give up the header and footer of your page, and worry that the host wouldn't be there in 3 months.
If you went with paid hosting it would cost you between $3-$5 per gig.
So while I could submit a gallery to maybe the top 50 TGP's and get 150-200K uniques to that gallery, easily....it cost me at LEAST $20 in content and $50 in bandwidth for every picture gallery I submitted.
That's in the neighborhood of 2K a month in overhead to submit a gallery every day. People who were in the game back then can back me up on that.
To do 2 galleries a day would cost you 4K a month, and so on and so forth.
Over time the price of bandwidth dropped, sponsors started offering bannerless free hosting, and tons of new sites hit the scene, all offering free content for use on galleries. Now it didn't cost ANYTHING to get into the TGP gallery game.
Looking forward to where the TGP market is trending, with practically no free traffic, I see it like this.
2K a month will buy you partner accounts on every TGP that matters (and then some) You'll be able to submit probably 3-5 galleries per day, using your sponsor's content and free hosting.
So next year the average gallery guy will be no worse off than I was when I started in late 2000. The current trend is more of a "market correction" than the gloom and doom scenario alot of people are making it out to be.
I don't really see this as a bad thing. Its not that much different from when I started in this business.
While the bar for entry into this business has never been very high, its never been lower than it was in the past year.
When I first started in late 2000 there were MASSIVE AMOUNTS of FREE TRAFFIC available.
There was however, very little free content, most sponsors hated TGP's, said they were giving the store away, and they weren't about to give you free content to support what they saw as the problem.
Bannerless free hosting didn't exist. If you wanted free hosting you had to give up the header and footer of your page, and worry that the host wouldn't be there in 3 months.
If you went with paid hosting it would cost you between $3-$5 per gig.
So while I could submit a gallery to maybe the top 50 TGP's and get 150-200K uniques to that gallery, easily....it cost me at LEAST $20 in content and $50 in bandwidth for every picture gallery I submitted.
That's in the neighborhood of 2K a month in overhead to submit a gallery every day. People who were in the game back then can back me up on that.
To do 2 galleries a day would cost you 4K a month, and so on and so forth.
Over time the price of bandwidth dropped, sponsors started offering bannerless free hosting, and tons of new sites hit the scene, all offering free content for use on galleries. Now it didn't cost ANYTHING to get into the TGP gallery game.
Looking forward to where the TGP market is trending, with practically no free traffic, I see it like this.
2K a month will buy you partner accounts on every TGP that matters (and then some) You'll be able to submit probably 3-5 galleries per day, using your sponsor's content and free hosting.
So next year the average gallery guy will be no worse off than I was when I started in late 2000. The current trend is more of a "market correction" than the gloom and doom scenario alot of people are making it out to be.
years ago I remember I got a page listed no thehun's thumbs up, cost me over $1,200.00 and not one sale.
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