Question: Gallery TGP Skim - Why can't people actually get the galleries they click?
 

I've been poking around a lot of Gallery TGPs and so called fake TGPs lately and I've noticed that an aweful lot of people have their skim turned up so high that I can't ever get to the cool gallery that should go with the cool thumb I clicked on. I've been routed through twelve levels of partner TGPs just following the same thumbnail and NEVER actually getting to the matching gallery. To be honest, as a producer of original content, I'm not really sure I'm totally comfortable with people using our promotional tools to simply boost their traffic trade numbers without really sending a reasonable percentage of love our way. It seems to me that the surfer wanted to see that gallery, not a string of totally unrelated partner TGPs. It seems like that couldn't really be good for sales anyway.

What are your thoughts?

ForrestBlack-

I think seeing traffic numbers gets new TGP owners harder than seeing numbers on the checks...

welcome to the world of cj.

I think people want to have big sites quickly.

I'm used to a little skim, but lately I've seen a lot of Thumb TGPs where MOST if not ALL of the thumbs redirect. That seems kinda flawed to me.

Forrest Black-

ya but you get to brag about how much traffic you have then....

:1orglaugh maybe someone experienced should tell the baby TGPs that bragging don't put gas in the tank

Try thehun

because you don't understand the difference between worthless impressions and real traffic...

thehun has always been awesome to us over at Spooky Cash

But you kinda invented the TGP thing, so you don't have to stoop to the levels some people seem to think they do.

Much love and respect to you

The folks that know what they are doing, well, they know what they are doing. The larger established sites don't pull that sort of thing. It's just something I've noticed with a lot of the newer thumb sites, particularly the 'fake' thumb TGPs. The larger programs put hosted galleries and such out there as promotional tools for partners to use for fairly simple sales, but some people seem to abuse that content just to pump up their traffic trade stats. If a site were using a major sponsor's banner to sent clicks to a site that didn't belong to that sponsor, it would be a big problem, but I guess some folks think it's perfectly ok to use that sponsor's content to send the click to someone else instead. Sure, some skim might be acceptable, but if there is slim to no chance a sponsor will see any traffic from a thumb they provided as a sales tool, somehow that seems a little odd. But mostly, I just wanted to see what other folks thought about it.


Oh, and I also wanted to mention that it's not like a big SpookyCash issue, it really is just something I've noticed a lot lately. I click on something cool I want to see, and lately odds are good that I won't get to see it.

I'll never skim because to me it seems dishonest, surfers know if you're fucking them.

BMF

I bought a 400 dollar program to handle trades and turned it off yesterday.

1. scamers signup to to take my good SE traffic and hit them with some dialer or trojan software.

2. Nobody can send enough real clicks back to make it worth it to jack my traffic around.

3. I dont know wtf i am doing :1orglaugh

Yeah it totally annoys me when that happens. If I click a thumb why can't I see the gallery? From a surfer's perspective, fuck that. That is the exact reason why that traffic is garbage.

And I swear the last two tgp's I clicked on from this board my homepage was hijacked within 2-3 clicks and I was infected with spyware.

i agree.

ive clicked my own galleries over and over on some tgps that have snagged my links from lets say Shemp or PK, and it will be my thumb I cropped but exactly, I have to click it 10 times to even hit the gallery.

sucks but what can you do.

fair use covers thumbs so technically no own owns thumbs anyway.

sucks all around though.

sites like shemp spend quality time getting good galleries and sites come along and spider the links and simply skim you 90% using your own thumb.

I've actually considered marketing a script/program to bypass the skim-trade scripts.. but I know the backlash would kill me :) Course I might be rich.. hmmm... dead.. or rich.. hmmm.... :winkwink:

yeah right

I usually don't skim on my sites. I have found that this makes me way more money than skimming like crazy.
I only skim when I start new sites and want to make them grow, and in that case I usually skim very low (near 75% or more to galleries). After all the surfer comes to see porn and signup for my sponsor. If I jerk him to my trade he could signup there, so I lose that money. Skimming is a good idea and I love the whole traffic trading idea, but I remember about a year or two ago there was always a gold rule on almost all TGPs (No less than 60% to galleries). Now this rule appears to be gone. A 10% to galleries and 90% to trades site is just a CJ site witouh a popup, so it burns bandwidth like crazy, has 200k visitors per day and makes 2 sales per day if there is any luck. I doubt on a thumb TGP those sales even give enough to pay the hosting bill. This is probably because lots of people think that $500 per month is a complete success. I personally think that $500 per month is just the hosting bill (at least my bill), so after these $500 there must be at least $750 more to make it rentable as a part time job and fun. Of course I don't look at how much traffic I have, I prefer to look at the hits to my sponsors. A surfer is productive if he buys on your site.

Now all of you will jump on my head with a question like "If you promote a trade script in your sig why are you posting this here?". Well, it's not a problem in the script or the idea, the problem is how do you use it. The tech is there, the tools are there, the dicision on how to use them is yours. You can make bank with less traffic and less skim to your trades or you can make nothing with only skim to your trades and nothing to real content.

I certainly agree with your perspective, and like I said, I'm use to a little skim. To me, the trade scripts are great for some stuff, and I actually do click on things like the 'hard' links to other similar TGPs. Having scripts to keep track of trades like that makes all the sense in the world. So, no, I'm not jumping on your head at all. Pretty much any promotional tool in this business can be overused by some folks, and that leads to problems.

I really hate that...I'm not a tgp webmaster, so I don't understand the logic behind it, but when I see partners of my sites that run tgps , go to their site and click a thumb of my own or from one of the other sites I run, it really seems kinda shitty to me that my image goes to something other than my gallery.

:(

So I click just to see how many clicks before it goes to my gallery...sometimes 8 or more

I don't understand the logic to this.....someones copyrighted image , licensed to you to promote their site and is being used to promote another tgp?

:helpme

Ivy

I am so there with you on that. I have to have like nine different spyware killers, just because I've been looking around TGPs. It's like they are handing out plague blankets at the strip club. :feels-hot

Okay disclaimer first: I'm not an intellectual property attorney, but my father is, so . . .

As I understand it certain use of other people's intellectual property is considered fair use. For example, if High Society did a write-up on Blue Blood, they could use a couple of full size photos from the magazine to illustrate the page in their magazine and that would be considered fair use. If some random AVS site scanned a few pix out of the magazine and resold them with no journalistic intent, then that is not considered fair use.

Thumbs are, as I understand it, considered fair use for linking to larger pictures/galleries/pages from another site when the site with the thumbs could perhaps not fall under fair use provisions in order to show the larger picture.

However, using a thumb of a photo belonging to someone else to link to something totally unrelated is not legally fair use. But I can't see anyone enforcing that, so it is more an issue of what the industry feels are appropriate standards for level of skim.

...and then we see you crying on the board about how you can't make any money off your 50k TGP.

...and they never come back. Who would bookmark a 70% skim site? I want the gallery described, not another TGP!:BangBang: