TGP WEBMASTERS -- anyone interested in forming a gallery reviewing co-op?
 

If you want bookmarkers, it helps to have high-quality galleries. But the vast majority of galleries are crap, so it requires a large investment of time to find the good ones. And that's time which could otherwise be spent submitting your own galleries, tuning traffic trades, or (heaven forbid!) having a social life.

Of course, most of the big TGPs have their own reviewers who work in exchange for traffic or cash. But that's not a viable option for most of the smaller players. So most of the smaller guys are left with a choice between investing hours daily reviewing galleries, or being lazy and using crap galleries.

But maybe there's an alternative? I wondered if anyone might be interest in forming a gallery reviewing co-op? I'm basically talking about a private TGP where *approved* webmasters can use the links in exchange for contributing to the co-op. Webmasters from smaller TGPs would earn access by becoming a reviewer and medium/large TGPs (eg 20k+ uniques daily) would earn access by sending a shit-load of traffic to the galleries, thereby attracting quality submitters. Last but not least, we'd need a small management team and they'd get access too.

So basically I envisaged having one reviewer per category, plus a management team of say five people, plus a maximum of say 20 medium/large TGPs (note: I propose restricting the number of medium/large TGPs to reduce the risk of saturation and to encourage them to sign-up now rather than waiting).

The backend could be as simple as using an off-the-shelf TGP script which is password protected. Registered webmasters would be able to login daily and grab pre-reviewed links. Or if a competent programmer wanted to help (HINT! HINT!), we might also be able to modify the script so that it could distribute links directly to your TGP submission form or via e-mail.

OK, that's probably enough information to give you an idea of my concept. There's obviously a lot of details to thrash-out, but first I'd like to know if there's sufficient interest to proceed. So if you're interested, please post to this thread indicating whether you'd like to be a reviewer, manager, or traffic cow and maybe explaining why you'd be a perfect candidate. If there's enough in-principle interest we can begin discussing the details.

Groove, whats your ICQ?

Groove,

I like your idea, i am currently a reviewer but wouldn't mind doing some management ( a guy has gotto move up hehe ) send me an email at [email protected]

See ya.

It's 11041152 . But I only have it on when I'm planning to talk to someone, it seems to make my PC unstable. It's on now if you want to talk :)

Join Thumblords this solves both problems you get your galleries posted on heaps of tgp's and get a cool revied gallery pool and free updateing list

would be great to submit once, run on many - with regard to smaller tgps

It's much easier to just take listings from other TGP's.

...you know they've already been reviewed.

I hope you're joking :uhoh

I believe he his. I called him stupid in another thread, but now I think is just being funny....

sounds like an interesting idea to me...

Groove, I've added you to my ICQ list, guess I'll wait until you're online to chat...

It doesn't cost alot for a TGP reviewer. One of our freaks gets his done for $15-$20/day.

I just had a chat with kad (an Aussie PHP/Perl programmer) and he said that he'd be able to write some code to automate the transfer of the reviewed links to participating webmasters. I suspect we'd use AutoGallery SQL or similar and add a hack which would automatically submit the approved galleries directly to the participants' submission form and/or send the links by e-mail.

Sure, but even at $15/20 that's $500/month and there won't be too many small TGPs willing to pay that. Plus I'd question the quality of the galleries you're gonna end-up with if someone is only spending an hour or so reviewing them.

And of course one of the primary advantages of the co-op concept has is that it would generate a large amount of traffic for the galleries and should therefore attract quality hand submitters who would not be interested in posting to smaller sites.

BUMP :Graucho Shit this thread got buried quickly! Trust me to try start a biz related thread in the middle of a war :winkwink:

Does anyone else want to express some interest or make some comments? Quite a few people have contact me by ICQ, but that won't keep this thread alive while the armchair generals are busy posting 100 threads a minute. So please if you're interested, post to this thread!

Basically what I'm talking about here is an opportunity to get a daily supply of HIGH QUALITY galleries without having to devote the time to review them all yourself. I would've thought there'd be plenty of people interested in that?

hook us up with your ICQ

Cool Idea Groove..hit me up on the Q ..49409205

I'm totally into this idea. I could easily do the code for it. But submitting via forms is a bad idea. That would take a lot of customization for every form. Instead, the members should just get a flat file via email daily, which they can import into their DB themselves. That's much easier for everybody involved. There'd definitely have to be a erasonable membership fee to make sure that the good galleries only in the hands of the webmasters who are serious to pay a fee. I'm not only interested in being a member, but I'm also willing to do the code (could do it in a few hours, easily).

Actually, it IS pretty easy to do.

Sounds like a good idea in more ways than one. I'm game for coding, submitting, managing, or what not.

:)

OK, to get this rolling, I'm suggesting $100-$200/month per webmaster. Any more and you cut out the little guys, and any less, and everybody and their brother will have the same galleries. Anybody know what reviewers are paid? Since everybody would be benefitting, I say that it should be $0 profit to the organizer(s) (if any), with all of the money being pooled to pay the reviewers. The actual code to do it would be neglible (I'd do it for free).

--bump--

Again, anybody know how or how much reviewers are paid? Per gallery? Per hour? Per day?

I used to pay per hour. $9.75/hour.

I let them submit their own galleries as well.

That's dirt cheap. $10/hour can get you a LOT of galleries reviewed, especially when splitting the cost 10? 20? ways. But I was thinking, like, someone mentioned earlier, wouldn't this be easily ripped off? I mean, galleries can easily be taken from other TGP's.
Another thought... what about recips?

I'm not sure that charging is necessarily necessary or benefitial. The way I see it, the small guys do the reviewing in exchange for access to the galleries. And the larger guys get free access because without some serious traffic we're not going to attract the quality and quantity of gallery submissions required.

What's the advantage of charging?

Submitting my own galleries is good, tuning traffic trades is fine, but what is having a social life ? Do I need to go AFC for that ? Does this mean I will need to leave the building or go out in the daylight ? Can I bring a laptop? There wont be women there will their ? I havent seen a real one in years. :1orglaugh

If you don't charge, let's say you get 1000 small TGP owners doing reviewing... That's 1000 TGP's out there with the exact same galleries... what's the competitive advantage to that? If everybody's got the same shit, then there's no way to compete. Any jerkoff could review a few galleries, then get access to tons and tons of great galleries.

That makes no sense because plenty of people build galleries daily and submit to the same TGPs (could be 100's) meaning if it is accepted on all the TGPs then they all have the same gallery on it.


Groove, i am very interested in this idea. I'll add you to my ICQ list or if we can't get in touch that way, email me mrteen at mrteen.net :thumbsup

Of course yes, the galleries can be stolen from the particating TGPs. But that's a scenario faced by ALL TGPs. And if you get caught stealing from the co-op you're gonna have a substantial number of TGP webmaster gunning for ya :ak47:

I see two options:

1) Low-tech - no recips.

2) High-tech - require submitters to add some code which rotates recips from the co-op members according to how much traffic they send to the galleries.

That's funny. A monkey can review galleries and people are willing to pay $10.00/hour to work from anywhere you want in the world just looking at porn all day!

Some people are working at mcdonald's for 6.50/hour and busting their ass over greasy ovens...

Little do they know!:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

As mentioned in my original post, my proposal is that there be one reviewer per category. When the categories are filled we will not accept any additional reviewers. Of course new positions will continue to become available as we kick people to the kerb for being unreliable or approving shitty galleries.

I also suggested that the medium/large TGPs be restricted to say 20 participants. So all-up we might have 20-30 reviewers from small sites using the galleries, plus 20 medium/large TGPs.

OK, I guess that makes sense. Now, would it be best just to use an existing TGP, since it'll have the DB all set up already? I'd be willing to host it and do the tiny bit of code that'd be needed. I get thousands of galleries a day already, and have a blacklist around 6K domains right now. All that it would take would be one extra field in the gallery table (approved/rejected/pending), plus one tiny table with the logins. Then, an email could be sent out to the participating members every xx hours with the galleries, which the webmasters can do what they want with (I'd just to a flat file import).

It seems we won't have any trouble getting the programming done :) I've presently had offers from kad, NineNine, Briscoe and someone via ICQ who mentioned her husband (mystery girl, I assume you know who you are, please approve my request to add you to my ICQ list as I presently have no record of our messages and can not remember your nick). As long as he still wants the gig I think it's fair to give the job to kad as he raised his hand first. A million thanks to you other guys! I've been amazed by the generous responses from the GFY programmers! Of course, you might be able to give kad a hand if he needs it :)

Well, let's get workin' on this... Groove, are you gonna keep an email list of interested webmasters and let everybody know when this is ready to go? And when is kad gonna have the coding done?

Actually I'd prefer to start from scratch. I want the submitters to be submitting to the co-op not to a TGP.

Well, that should be easy enough... what's one more database table? It's just that it's gonna take a while to start getting the submissions into the system, while an existing TGP that's already getting submissions is already going.

--bump--

Well my initial intention in starting this thread was simply to gauge if there was enough interest to proceed. The response seems to have been pretty good so far, so let's assume that it is worth running with :)

Anyone who's interested in participating please send an e-mail to:

groove [a] carnalia.com

stating what role you'd be interested in playing and why you'd be a suitable candidate. If you want to do reviews, please provide 10 URLs of galleries that you think are SERIOUSLY HOT in a specific niche that you're interested in. If you own a medium/large TGP (20k+/day) please state your URL and traffic numbers (ideally verified by a counter or server stats).

Please bear in mind that there will only be a limited number of places available in the co-op and those places will go to the people who are most successful in arguing that they're worthy of a place. So clearly the more persuasive and detailed your e-mail is, the better your chances of making the cut :)

Once I have a list of people who will be involved, we can start delegating tasks and get the show on the road. In the interim, does anyone have any more comments regarding the form that the co-op should take? Does the format outlined in my original post seem appropriate?

Interface-wise, I think that a really simple form should be set up for the reviews that pulls up their categories and lets them do a simple approve/reject for each gallery that goes directly to the DB. Also, the actual resulting galleries should probably just be sent out in an agreed upon format. I'd think that something like a comma-delimited file with URL, # of pics (or movies), and description that everybody can use. (Just set up a daily job that emails to the members)
There needs to be some kind of requirements to review and approve, say 10 galleries a day per category, with leeway for x days per month or year off for vacations, illness, etc. But after that level, that person should get bumped for someone else (if there is someone else) waiting to jump in.
Also, should all TGP owners involved be required to either link to the co-op in their webmaster section?

Good suggestion :)

Yes, this is what I had in mind. Anyone have any comments re what would be the most useful format for the files? And should it be an attachment?

I'd also like to explore the viability of having our system submit directly to the submission forms of the most popular TGP scripts. This feature would make the co-op an extremely automated system. If someone wanted support for a less popular script we could perhaps make the necessary modifications for a fee to be paid to the programmer.

Agreed.

Sound good to me.

Agreed. How about a requirement to review no less than 300 days PA and a requirement that you be prepared to spend at least 65 days covering for reviewers on leave?

It should be the responsibility of the reviewer to find their own replacement and anyone who misses more than 3-days a year without arranging a replacement should get the boot.

Yes I had the same thought. I was thinking about requiring participants to add a prominant link to their submission thankyou page.

BTW, I'm prepared to chip-in an Auto Gallery SQL script (unless the authors of one of the more advanced scripts would like to donate a copy?), a domain name and the hosting :)