interesting...

nice to actually see stats and a humble post, makes for good reading

HAHAHAHAHA:)

Nice poll :)

i concur :thumbsup

I have been purchasing just about every spot they have for years... even before they became known as GTS. I do make great returns on my money but I own a paysite so it is a little easier for me.

Over the past year the thumbs I have been making suck so they are ranking low and I am still making money off of the spots. If I had someone to make me good thumbs I would make a killing.

I started submitting galleries back in 97. It was a very good way to make money back then. Things changed when tgp's starting selling spots to webmasters.

When tgp owners (not all of em but most) found that they could make more money and make it easier selling advertising to webmasters by selling gallery spots than they could by running good clean sites and pleasing surfers the conversions went to hell! I believe the focus went from reviewing galleries and finding unique creative galleries with quality content to wholesaling gallery spots the wealth shifted from submitters to site owners. Not that site owners were not making great money back in the day mind you they were! And I'm not taking a shot at tgp owners. It's still a tough ass business to be in and a few of em like Shemp do a fantastic job treating surfers and submitters right.

The second thing that killed conversions and profits for submitters was the advent and ready availability to tgps of sponsor hosted galleries. Tgps essentially went into competition with their submitters by using high quality free sponsor provided content.

The final blow to submitter profits came with the growth of movie posts and lower priced bandwidth for surfers and site owners. Combining the movies available on MGPs with the huge popularity of Tube sites meant more surfers can bust their nut for free than ever before.

Ok you can still make some bucks submitting sure but it's a "job" to do so and if you wanted a real job you probably wouldn't have got into the porn business in the first place! lol There's nothing wrong with hard work mind you but we're in this to have a "Business" rather than a "Job" most of us anyways.

So you would make a killing, but you haven't hire someone to make you good thumbs yet?

Drinkinghard , what's the chances of the upcoming new year
dropping the prices a little ? I think it's quite obvious that the majority
here don't make a profit out of their purchase . If program owners
are barely at the break-even point there is even less of a chance
for normal affiliates to make profit .

Why would they? They make money this way.

If I've learned anything from 6+ years in the adult biz, is that there's no easy answer to just 'pay someone' and make bank. Hard work is the only thing that has ever paid off for me in this business.

Good point. Most will never learn.:2 cents:

What he won't tell you is that he doesn't care about the majority here. He makes his real money by selling spots directly to the programs and/or site owners.
Affiliates are a hassle and make very little.

If it means pushing affiliates out of the industry entirely, he doesn't care. He just wants to keep making the money. :2 cents:

Anonymous polls on places like GFY should not be trusted.

Anybody who may have a bone to pick with DH or GTs can easily throw the vote.

I left out another reason for lower conversions on tgps over the recent years. That is the practice of skimming traffic! What surfer likes to click on a link expecting to see a gallery and instead be taken to some traffic trade partners site, over and over again? Skimming is a good technology misused.
It is used in my view to inflate sites traffic numbers with the goal of allowing the site to sell their ad space for more money.

If a surfer is freeloading and clicking too many galleries without going to a paysite and buying something and if you Must use skimming then why not send them to the paysite of your sites submitters? Or say "Hey surfer you've clicked on 10 galleries and not found what you like so why not try one of these sites here... " and let them pick from a list of trade partner or submitter sites rather than "tricking" them by blind linking them to a trade partner site? Why not say "Look buddy you've hit your limit of free porn samples today , come back tomorrow or buy a membership at one of these fine porn sites below..."? Because if you give away free porn with long videos and hardcore money shot clips why the fuck should surfers pay for anything?

I think you gotta follow the money. See who is making out with the current structure of the tgp business model. Unfortunately though the people making the most money by keeping things the way they are have no incentive to change things.

Hey Webgurl, we actually have made a lot of price adjustments in the last 3 months. We realize due to the advent of tube sites there have been some traffic fluxuations and there simply is not as much traffic on certain sites as there used to be. If you looked at our pricing list versus 3 months ago I think you would see some pretty decent reductions.

We're always open to suggestion so if you feel that one site you're buying on is simply not getting the ROI it used to be, we would like to hear about it.

Thanks for your feedback
DH

P.S. The best place to send further feedback would be [email protected] (he's our GM) and he handles all the pricing of our inventory.

Interesting results, I was gonna spend a good chunk with them, now I see this, Made me think twice

If theres a waiting list expect prices to continue to climb

Please do think twice, do your homework and research where you want to advertise. The advertisers that do best with us spend the time to check out the sites they're wanting to advertise on, seeing which sponsors are, and aren't being promoted there and why. Start out small, find out what works and expand on it.

Too many people figure since they're buying traffic, they don't have to do their homework and can rely blindly on my intuition of what will work where. As a sales rep, I can pull on past experiences as an affiliate, but in reality you know your sponsors better than I do, and your unique sales style. Putting your faith blindly in any "expert" in any industry is at best hit and miss.

I have been through a few people so far. I can't find anyone to make thumbs the way I did. Mine ranked ok but it is still not morth my time to go back to making my own.

I see your galleries everywhere jpv :) Gotta find a way to send you more traffic in 2008.. can't do it through paid spots since you have the same ones heh

I'm sure the spots are overpriced but we all know GFY polls don't mean shit. Everyone voted "Lost Money" just because this is GFY and we want to see people suffer. It's the spirit of the board.

So don't base your opinion off just the poll. Do it on the comments that back it up.

Yep I'm with you man. I started out submitting galleries. I thought about what I was doing and didn't like the fact that it was tedious and I had no control over if I received traffic or not.

I then bought a established TGP and built several others. Now I do a mix of TGP/Blog/and general SE sites. Much happier I went this route, especially now that everyone charges for partner accounts.

Burp :upsidedow

i was searching for traffic sources to spend money on and found this. anyone got any other experiences?

thanks.

Honestly, I've made money with some, lost money with some... shit happens.

didnt work for me personally

I have some great ad buys but if anyone asks...I lost my shirt lol

Honestly, I look at it this way. If this traffic was profitible, they'd be using it themselves. This traffic is good for one thing, getting a TGP/Tube site rolling or just inflating your stats.

Now I've only purchased a few times and it was to feed a new site I had. I wasn't concerned too much with the quality, just wanted to see how traffic reacted on the site. I guess my biggest disappointment was what they estimated for traffic, and what was actually delivered. It seems the numbers are all either inflated, or just haven't been updated in years. The common response seems to be "they must not have liked your thumb/ad". I have yet to find one person who has purchased from them that has said they received the estimated amount of traffic, or more. Everyone has less, everyone.

But I'm sure some people make money with it. I found that the traffic was so hit or miss, it was more of a pain tracking and trying to figure out what was working with the wild fluctuations you see. If any kind of traffic is what you want, go for it. If it's a good ROI you're looking for, there are TONS of better options out there.

The problems with the spots I bought that I didn't make money were simply that they were overpriced for the ammount of traffic they were sending.

I simply got less traffic then I expected on the spots where i didn't make money. The other ones were great.

It makes the whole thing a gamble when you're unable to know how much traffic you'll get, and sometimes when you find out wich ones are the good ones, you just have to keep them.