The free content myth
 

Gallery submitters and TGP owners are getting to be so anti free content it's silly. I could understand banning free content from some of the major programs because there are literally 50-100 people a day sending you galleries with that content, but when it comes to smaller programs, not accepting the galleries becomes silly.

Let's run through some numbers. Say you run a small affiliate program, with maybe 1,000 affiliates. Out of those 1,000, let's say 10% actively send traffic and sign-ups each week. Out of that 100, maybe 10 are gallery builders.

So you commission some exclusive content for your pay site and offer it to you affiliates. About 10 people have that content.

Now say you go to the average content provider that sells gallery sets. The same cheap sets are almost always available at several different content providers. My guess would be that a couple hundred people own the license to sets like these.

So free exclusive content from a small paysite would actually be less overexposed than paid content from most gallery content providers.

The numbers above are just an example, not the numbers for my own program...I'm not going to talk about those in public. ;)

Hmm, interesting view

Now when I got into this business, I used free content to build AVS sites (TGP didn't exist yet). Combined with free hosting my profit margin was 100%. In every thread where a newbie asks for help, I see a bunch of people jump in and tell them that they need to go buy some content first. I especially notice the content providers saying this, telling them that free content is a bad thing and won't convert. I think this is actually bad for the paid content business. Content theft has gone up a lot in the last couple years because gallery builders that used to use free content now steal it instead because they believe they can't convert with free content provided by sponsors. Or they steal content because their galleries have been rejected by TGP owners for "over-used" content. I've been told my 1 hour old exclusive sets were "over-used" before because they had my URL watermarked on them so they looked like free content. I was the only person in the world with that set.

I don't blame content providers for drumming up business, I just don't agree that free content is such a bad thing. I've paid thousands of dollars for exclusive sets that only my afiliates can use and I don't have enough affiliates for that content to be as over-exposed as any set from a major content provider such as Matrix Content. You just need to do your homework and find smaller affiliate programs that offer free content that you aren't seeing all over the place yet. Or be first in line to grab new sets from the bigger programs like Lightspeed Cash.

the only ones who would argue with this are webmasters who dont have exclsuive stuff

Sure, in small programs that have free content, only 10 out of 1000 webmasters are gallery builders. :1orglaugh