How important are hosted galleries for you?

[inthecrack]

If you found the perfect affiliate program with great payouts, awesome content, and great content available for you to make your own promotional galleries but it had no hosted galleries would you pass it over and send your traffic elsewhere or would you take the time to put together your galleries and promote it?

[Michaelious]

Is that for ppl who work in the industry or users?

[Toni]

Most webamsters don't use the fhg's....

[Toni]

the webamsters should be webmasters ;-)

[Broda]

Originally Posted by Toni

Most webamsters don't use the fhg's....

Really? Then why make them?

Or maybe you mean webhamsters

[Toni]

Not every webmaster runs tgp or mgp
maybe every webhamster does

[inthecrack]

Originally Posted by Broda

Really? Then why make them?

I'm having doubt whether they're really worth it. With the low quality traffic coming from TGPs and the amount of bandwidth they chew up it almost seems like they don't even pay for themselves.

[jayeff]

Originally Posted by inthecrack

If you found the perfect affiliate program with great payouts, awesome content, and great content available for you to make your own promotional galleries but it had no hosted galleries would you pass it over and send your traffic elsewhere or would you take the time to put together your galleries and promote it?

That is taking hypothetical situations too far and any direct, simple answer would be as misleading as the question itself. IMO the appeal of hosted galleries is very high, but their actual value is low because so many are half-assed.

1. FHGs should have been a huge timesaver for TGP owners, but many sponsors offer their lists in such akward formats they wipe out much of that potential.
2. FHGs should have done away with the need to constantly check for cheats and broken links, but many sponsors have proved no more reliable at keeping their galleries online than individual submitters.
3. Most FHGs, even from sponsors who otherwise run them well, are designed less to sell than to promote branding. Sales are inevitably lower as a result.
4. Some sponsors have exactly the same approach to FHGs as to free content: the quality is dreadful and it is over-used. They produce galleries which would be rejected if submitted normally.
5. Between the sponsors who provide no descriptions and those who use protection such that scripts cannot scan galleries to create thumbs, a lot of FHGs miss out on text TGPs, thumb-preview TGPs or both. Movie galleries in particular are often designed in a way which makes them unusable by thumb-preview sites.

In short, you end up with almost as much work as before and with only a fraction of the additional income that you anticipated. I used to hope that FHGs would be improved, but they have been around too long now for that to be realistic any more. Although it is a lot of work, the results and the traffic control benefits make producing your own galleries a much better proposition.

[inthecrack]

Thanks for the input guys. Anybody else?

I wonder what % of current affiliates I'd be cutting off if I eliminated hosted galleries.

[tony286]

this has been a insiteful thread

[teg0]

I don't use them. I like to make them myself that way if vistors recognize the content, atleast the site wont look the same as all the others. My hits convert better on my own galleries rather than the few hosted ones I link to on various sites of mine

[Dagwolf]

Originally Posted by Broda

Really? Then why make them?

Or maybe you mean webhamsters

Webhamsters!!!!!