I started a funny pic pot related niche site and related and linked sister forum from 1999 until 2003 when I sold it. Pulled in 60K visits/day on average and made a nice little coin each month. It had about 190 pages with thumb galleries and I built/managed it all by hand with Komposer - including creating almost 100% of the funny pics in photoshop. Many #1 and top 10 google results for my keywords.
I'm just getting back into the interwebz biz and am trying my hand at porn, but I suppose admittedly when it comes to porn, I'm a fucking noob....so much has changed especially with SEO that it's a whole new world now and seemingly much more difficult. I understand the backbone of SEO, but back then, link trades were just to get more traffic, not (from my understanding) there to get "backlinks" which effect your page positioning as they do today. I also didn't
need a bunch of people's fucking blog posts or twitter feeds to effect my search ranking. Fuck, most of the trades were via 468x60 banners in a cgi topslist. No link trade script, skimming, or forcing of hits. No alexa or PR bravado. You just check out dudes site and if it was cool you traded with him. The more hits he sent me, the higher up the toplist his banner moved and the more hit he got from me. Simple.
Anyway, to test drive my new porn adventure, about a month or so ago I bought some domains and I got a simple little proggy called RSTGP to build galleries with (not doing that shit by hand ever again) and made xxxmonger.com. It's a basic MGP with thumbs that point to downloadable videos...albeit BS short 20 second sample clips.
Anyway, to the point of my post topic, It's an MGP and IMO not competitive at all-especially against the tubes. For one reason that I fully understood back then and I'm sure still applies today:
Surfers are fucking lazy.
To watch my type of MGP content, you have to click the thumb, goto the sponsor page click and download the .mpg vid to your HDD, open the vid with media player, close it and then when you're all done surfing -if you don't want your boss, wife, GF etc seeing your tracks - you have to go back to you DL folder, delete all the vids, then empty the fucking recycle bin. I'm not even going to bother counting all the clicks involved, but fuck all that. I look to my own surfing habits/laziness and can see that's BS. Why do all that when you can watch a tube with two click and a back button and block most of the pop-ups with adblock? Plus if there is a vid you
really like, there are plenty of rippers out there to DL the tube vid to your HDD.
Recently I discovered Pimroll's Hosted tubes. And created tubes for a few of the other domains I bought. XXXmonger will be getting converted as well. For a relative noob like me, their slick interface is allowing me to design a semi-custom site for FREE (and free hosting it) which would simply cost me a lot of money on proggy's, hosting and a steep learning curve from what I was used to doing.
Can someone explain to me (and I'm not being facetious here) why people seem to hate on tube sites so much? And these hosted tube sites in particular?....aside from the fact that they are a bit cloned. Is it that they came along with a better solution and more success than stand alone MGPs? Here and elsewhere I get the congruent sentiment that they basically came along and fucked-up everything for everyone. Can someone please explain some history of this to me?
Also another thing, with the ease of browse-ability of tubes, one thing that is puzzling me is the text link lists such as TheHun and Elephantlist....they seem to be doing just fine.(?) I surfed those sites for years before broad band and xhampster, etc, but in later years with higher speed broadband and streaming tube tech, how can a written link description compete with a visually thumbnailed tube...or even a TGP or MGP? WTF? They look like they are stuck in 1998 with GeoCities. Why aren't they dinosaured despite a loyal base of past bookmarkers? Their loyalty should not be out weighing their laziness. One thing I learned for certain is a surfers laziness should never be underestimated....leaving you is always just one click away.
Post broadband, I'm mostly a movie kinda-guy. But just guessing, I think a pure Picture TGP, might be a totally different animal and a niche in and of itself. In light of all the movie content out there, I think that some guys simply just want to look at nice still, un-moving
pictures-probably all niched-up shit too like chicks with dread-locked pussy hair and dirty toenails or some shit. Many of them probably have their own little private collections on their HDD's in a secret encrypted folder somewhere. I dunno, just guessing.
That's all that was on my mind for now I suppose. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments....I'm a fast learner.
Peace.
