DING DING DING

Not to mention there would probably be 2-3 times more $ to make since all those guys who are used to surfing for free porn would suddenly have to pull out their CC's (not all but a good enough %)

I agree wholeheartedly with you man.

I thought adult was bad, but it's nothing like mainstream. The bar to get into this "business" needs to be raised. When you have a bunch of beer money barons, college kids, and fry cook asshats trying to "get into da biz" with no money, and no longer term concern other than getting paid. You are going to have issues.

That is where the industry (online as a whole) is right now. Essentially you the fry cooks running the asylum.

Sad but true.

Actually, I tried to tell all the programs I did business with that they should NOT give out content and hosted galleries to everybody. They should only have given it to trusted and proven people.
But instead the free hosted tools are available for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who joins the affiliate program.
Now we have thousands of what I call "Fake" tgps that DO give away all the content without any returns.
Maybe that is where the real problem is at. Programs offering 5% for life to get other "webmasters" to sign up underneath them and then putting big "webmasters" links on the tour pages with promises of making HUGE $$$$'s It didn't take long for everybody to suddenly be an affiliate...as is witnessed right here on GFY many times.
Hell, I've seen surfers join an affiliate program just so they could go right past the tgp/advertiser and just download all the free content to their hard drive.
Maybe that would be a possible solution. A more careful screening of affiliates. For instance we have thousands of affiliates at IOCash. About 10 actually send traffic. :( 98% of them haven't even logged in in the past 3 years or more. Ridiculous.
There is...and always has been a handful of people who can really work traffic. No reason for everybody else to get hosted galleries.
Remember my earlier post when I talked about that little Boobster.Net blog site?
Well, he has NEVER used any of our hosted tools. Matter of fact, he BOUGHT himself a membership to claudia-marie.com downloaded a few pics for his blog and made his own materials by using his imagination.
Now THAT is a real affiliate.
Get rid of all the surfer/fake affiliates who don't even own a site...and you instantly cut out a ton of that shit.
Then carefully go through the stats and keep the other affiliates that don't have sites but yet still make a lot of signups.
I just thought about this a minute ago.
Could you imagine any other business handing out the keys to the shop to anybody who wanted them?
Hell, if you want to own a franchise you have to meet certain financial and other related qualifications. But yet here I am letting any person that wants to become an affiliate become one.
That's bad business.
This has been a great discussion. Has me thinking. Are we sure this is GFY? LOL!

http://www.theboxset.com/images/revi...KES_BACK-9.jpg

No! Thats impossible!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You mean when I was running a BBS all I could do is fog up my monochrome monitor?

LOL I hardly ever post here because I seem to never be able to get a serious discussion going. I appreciate all your input.

I honestly think that if you completely got rid of the TGPs most people who are experienced marketers in this industry would not only survive but prosper from the change. Most of them were clever to begin with and would learn to generate traffic through other means. TGPs and free content are by far not the only means of advertising on the internet. Just my 2 cents.

Bingo :thumbsup
that's "the biggest part" of the problem imo.

nick, i list free porn to make money...the free porn is supplied by the affiliate programs and trust me, i never twisted anyones arm for them to supply it..
...in the old days when webmasters had to actually buy content, there was a lot less of it around and also a lot less webmasters... because it actually cost a few bucks upfront, to get into the business....

free hosting, free content, free domains, free scripts, free advice, free traffic....and for 9 years every new webmaster wanted to be theHUN ....thats what has fucked up the business...

I'm glad we agree.

I peronally have not seen any major porn site owners complaining about free porn or loss of sales. If you have please educate me and name a few.

Hang the bastards

maybe so, but many years ago way less surfers knew where to get free porn so even though there was a lot of it available they still paid since they had no idea about the free shit. Now way more surfers know where to get the free porn so that is what's fucking sales and now we introduce tube sites with full length videos and they get a lot of press.. Newspapers, tv etc so even more people find out about this and there goes more sales.

Someone in this thread mentioned BBS's. They offered free porn, so did news groups, you could get a lot of free porn on MIRC etc.. The free porn is not the real problem. The real problem is that more people know where to get it now. Sure, if we take away all the free porn sales would increase, but not as much as you think because they would still find it on other places. Torrent, p2p software, chat rooms where they can swap pics/vids, friends who have access to some pay sites etc..

There's no way in hell to get rid of free porn. It has always been here even before tgps, mgps and link lists. BUT tgps, mgps and link lists never gave away FULL length videos and this is why tube sites, if they continue, will kill sales even more. You may think that they don't affect sales, but they do.

Just imagine, instead of 1000 TGPs/MGPs we replace them with 1000 tube sites all with full length videos. Where do you think all the surfers will go for their porn? Do you actually think that even the ones willing t pay will actually pay when they see that they can get the same content on a tube site for free?

Sure, you'll say that there are some that want specific content and they will buy a membership to a site that has his content. True, but what if they find out that there's a tube site that has this content for free? Well, they will charge back to be an asshole and go to the tube site and get the shit for free. Seeing as they all use stolen content it's safe to say that they will eventually have all the shit that surfers are looking for.

Not saying that you're wrong.. Hell, I could be wrong. Who knows, but this is just the way that I see it.

every post in this thread assumes that those giving out mass amounts of free porn are doing so to sell memberships to porn sites.

someone, many many years ago, figured out that free porn brings traffic and people other than porn companies buy traffic, especially in those volumes.

Its funny how angry everyone gets about free porn, when what they're really angry about is that someone is eating into their overinflated profit margins and taking a piece of their pie!

Interesting perspective...

I unlike many others can take on a fairly large share of free content on the net. I know when I refurbished my content site one night after being fed up with customer demands I figured I would just give my content away with no strings attached instead of selling it. I figured I could make up my money in referrals and advertising which I more than did. Though at that time most sponsors and there was not a lot did not have free content and if they did even the big boys (BA aside) had maybe 2-4 fifteen picture sets for webmasters to share. As you could imagine nobody would list these galleries or free sites people submitted since it was the same old content they had seen a few hundred times. So naturally affiliates had to actually purchase content to promote sites and there was a good chance that any particular model you purchased would never be in the site anyways. So in a way I helped open up Pandora's box. Yet if it was not me it would of been others and others very soon.

Since besides BA other sites were starting to really go exclusive and they realized that purchased material just could not be used to well and then others would buy any sets you would buy just so that they could at very least have the content you were hawking.

Promotional items aside though we had honest TGP's, Top lists, Free Sites, and then of course Circle Jerks. Rarely if ever was a TGP also a CJ. Even back then though people would proclaim TGP traffic was garbage traffic and freeloaders as they converted at like 1:1000 or worse while a free site would often convert at 1:50 to 1:100. Then CJ's were primarily used to abuse PPC sponsors. Honest to gawd you would have to make about thirty clicks to even find a damn picture of a naked chick, usually you would give up and click a banner or accidentally click the wrong text link and end up at a paysite.

Very rarely though did people ogle over the number of daily visitors. Sure there was some rivalries between assorted large TGP and Link List sites but it was nothing more really than a board ego boost. All the affiliates cared about was getting listed, paying for the content they had purchased and often paying for our outlandos bandwidth charges or if you were new making enough off of your free hosted sites without loosing most of your traffic to your host.

As others have also stated the barrier of entry into this business was to low and growing even lower. Early on you were lucky to get under 8.00 a gig, 70.00 domain names, and 1-3 bucks each per picture. So one gallery could be 45.00 plus the domain and bandwidth in the red from the second you put it up. Yet every Christmas we would see a new flock of webmasters who got their x-mass PC and was ready to become a porn mogul.

We all have plenty of mistakes as an industry yet our largest is the amount of material we give out and host for free, and of course out of program owners greed who want as many affiliates as they can get and keep recruiting anyone who will click some links. Since the only barrier now is a couple hundred dollar PC or even less if you use an older one.

Thank you ASM, very interesting post, great read :)

There is no money in Free Porn.

In my case back then there was a shit load of money in free porn, however it was short sighted.

Think for a second I made roughly 10 times more giving it away than I ever did selling it.

Im a member of a pay site and have been for years. And as an adult webmaster, have access to TONS of free porn. Ask yourself why then, would I join a pay site?
Also, why are some pay sites so extremly succesfull, and others convert shitty?
My opinion, as webmasters, or any buisness operator, our success lies in
developing a way to make customers feel welcome, gain our trust, percieve they are getting a bargain, and return over and over again. If other folks cant cut it, tough shit. (and I aint sayin I make a decent living at this either)
But thats the nature of buisness. As with all cycles, when enough folks fold up shop, they'll be plenty of customers for those that were able to hang.