Thread: Shap & RedTube, your thoughts?

Originally Posted by Viper

I really don't understand why a bunch of the big programs don't get this or even care..

it really makes me consider the possibility that they're making enough $ from type-ins - for which they pay out nothing to any affiliate - that it's worth letting the thieves steal while giving a nice silent "fuck you" to their affiliates.

Originally Posted by AmateurFlix

To top it all of we have people running TGP's - as do I - who bitch about guys running CJ's like there's something inherently wrong with them. I've got news for you noobs, CJ's were a hell of a lot more effective means of marketing than your free sites are or ever will be. Take a minute and ask yourself, what is the more effective marketing strategy, jerking potential customers around from one site to the next until they HAVE to pay to see something, or providing them with free galleries and hoping they'll buy something? The ones that started giving the content away are the bad guys, not the ones that were preserving a marketplace. Just like you people that complain about tube sites now giving away too much content. By the same logic, people just like you are going to be calling YOU the bad guy 5 years from now for jerking people around to galleries with "tiny" 20 second clips instead of giving entire movies away for free.

The marketing of video as a promotional method was probably the dumbest fucking move this industry could have ever made.
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honest question, what would you feel the best kind of freesite be then?

Originally Posted by mechanicvirus

honest question, what would you feel the best kind of freesite be then?

honest answer: it all depends

for someone just starting out who has no traffic, it probably makes sense to do like everyone else does with thumb tgp's, just to get their foot in the door so to speak. that does not mean that continuing on that same path forever and just building more and more thumb tgp's is the wisest move for most people.

CJ's were more effective back when there weren't already 40,000 thumb tgp's giving away what CJ's only teased at. making a CJ today is probably pretty pointless for most people. I only mentioned that earlier to illustrate how self-defeating this industry can be. Most people's answer to gaining more sales is to give away more of what they're trying to sell. Think about that.

Personally I've built up a network of text tgp's & toplists (which give away no free content). I do still have some thumbs on one or two sites. I don't list very many movie galleries. The less you can give away and still keep the traffic flowing, the better.

Every once in a blue moon someone mentions TGP2 and gets laughed at, but it works. Problem is you have to make your own galleries for it since very few sponsors provide TGP2 style FHG's. You guys running arylia or something like nation-x's script where you make your own galleries automatically should try making galleries with 5 pics instead of 15 sometime. Add a little extra sales text. It really does help alot. I made a ton of sales that way. I don't like to host content on my sites due to the laws here so I no longer make my own galleries, but they often make better sales than FHG's.

Why do most programs offer FHG's with so many pics? Because that's the only type of galleries that TGP's used to accept back when they were accepting gallery submissions. Why did they ask for 15 pics from gallery submitters? Because they hoped to give away enough content on galleries to A) gather bookmarkers away from sites who were offering less at the time and B) help ensure that the gallery submitter wasn't going to make sales on the gallery, but instead on the main page banners that ran the TGP owner's linkcode, not the submitter's linkcodes.

Knowing a bit of history about the industry tells you that FHG's are based on a model specifically designed to avoid making sales. People do tweak them and improve them and make the best out of a bad situation, however the underlying premise remains: it's a format intended to make money for someone other than the person listing the fucking things. Except now the people who list them expect to make money from them, because they're no longer taking gallery submissions from other webmasters, but they're still created using the same rules and guidelines intended to make them a tool to generate traffic, not sales The more you learn about this industry, the more you'll be amazed that it somehow manages to chug on by considering the flood of incompetence surrounding it.

...

I also used to see fucking AWESOME conversions making galleries that used sorta-crumby screencaps for the full-sized pics. I did NOT use video at all, just the somewhat blurry somewhat pixelated screencaps showing just a little hardcore action and a lot of teaser from smaller unknown programs. If you try this with perfectgonzo or bangbros content etc, it ain't gonna work. People have already seen those vids or know where to find them. If they find a vidcap from a scene they haven't seen before, know there is a corresponding video but can't see it, they're alot more inclined to buy than they will be by giving them the lastest HD video clip Wowing them with high-resolution and great video is appropriate for art nude sites, maybe babe sites. Nobody needs to see someone's herpes outbreak in high-def video and screencaps help obscure that shit. People buy some erotica for quality, but when it comes to more typical porn it's the action that excites them.

People seem to continually not only head in the opposite direction of what is profitable, but use their failures to justify going even further in the same direction. The result is that people who have the most traffic also often have the shittiest sales methods, and noobs or even more experienced webmasters see their traffic #'s, do a little math, and think they're going to be millionaires if they have a 1M+ hit per day network. Well it just doesn't scale up like that for most people. Not anywhere near that.

I hate to use something as generic as "think out of the box" however you really need to if you want to get ahead at all. Doing what everyone else is doing so that you get a foothold is great. Doing what everyone else is doing and expecting to get ahead of them is just unrealistic.

I agree with you 100%, I started using 9-12 pictures per gallery instead of 15 I was using last year. I realize 12 is still a lot to give away but I guess it's the baby steps to less pictures, more selling that counts.

Originally Posted by mechanicvirus

I agree with you 100%, I started using 9-12 pictures per gallery instead of 15 I was using last year. I realize 12 is still a lot to give away but I guess it's the baby steps to less pictures, more selling that counts.

there's no magic #. the fact that you're trying something different than what everyone else is - and didn't decide 25 pics would be an improvement somehow - speaks volumes.

Originally Posted by Shap

I think part of the problem is that the majority of companies getting ripped off on content aren't the big boys in the industry. If you remove BangBros and Brazzers from the list of top programs the others are all companies that don't spend much on content.

It's all relative. You can argue about exposure and branding but you still want control over your output. You don't want to be overexposed to the point there's no reason to join.

yay long posts!

hang in there Shap, you are good guy in biz, with a great team, hard to make heads or tails of situations like this, but do the best to remain ethical, thumbs up mate.

Hmm good call on less pics, I've been thinking about that for a while. I recently started using short flash clips combined with 4 preview pics for some galleries... Not sure how that'll work, but hey its some variety

Originally Posted by arock

Hmm good call on less pics, I've been thinking about that for a while. I recently started using short flash clips combined with 4 preview pics for some galleries... Not sure how that'll work, but hey its some variety

I don't want people to take me as some kind of an expert on this, because I'm not, but any type of variety that's still worth looking at can't hurt imho...

Personally, I wish I could get away with only posting 6 image galleries and single 20 second clips. The problem for me is that everybody else is making 15-18 image galleries and posting 3+ minute Flash video clips, and (in my experience at least), I just can't get people to bookmark my site and keep coming back when they can just pop open redtube or boysfood.com or even a site like Juggworld or Pretty Hot Babes that ranks ahead of me for the search terms I'm targeting and get hundreds of clips vs. the six photo galleries per day that I post.