TGP2: Daring To Change!

When an idea gets around in an industry and enough people start to believe it, an idea -good or bad- takes on the appearance of accepted knowledge. For instance, there is the idea in the adult online industry that too much free smut is available to the general masses. While I know that currently, many adult webmasters make decent income solely from submitting galleries to TGPs, I still think the amount of free porn is hurting us all.

Then boom. The Internet exploded and surfers began scanning images out of their porno mags and capturing clips from their nasty video collections. Somebody decided to charge money for it and an industry was born. The industry started out by making free entry pages that would lead a surfer so far with some tantalizing pics. The method wasn't effective enough and webmasters started to try other marketing ploys.

The circle jerk, Top List, AVS and Thumbnail Gallery Post all came about rather quickly. The most successful of these was (arguably) the TGP.

TGPs were great for the surfer because they knew that the TGP site administrators would assure the galleries were safe for viewing. The TGP surfer knew there was free porn to be seen and they had found their source. TGPs caught on with users and webmasters alike. Sponsors liked the idea of tens of thousands of webmasters acting as a proxy sales force. So more TGPs were built and more webmasters turned to galleries as a form of income and more sponsors had more salesmen for their products. The surfers who had discovered TGPs became spoiled and wanted fresh images everyday which was good for the content providers and buyers.

The problem has become that the only way to get money from these savvy gallery finders is with masses of traffic. The only way to get the masses of traffic is to offer even more fresh samples, which floods the market with even more reasons for a surfer to keep their pockets closed. Here's where I'm going with this:

I'm a woman with no power tools and I can spend an hour or so at my favorite TGP and leave the site fully, orgasmically satisfied. I can get off easily on free porn from gallery sites and never feel the need to click a banner. I sincerely believe I am not alone. I think more surfers know where the free stuff is than Adult Internet professionals care to admit.

What the adult online industry fails to conceptualize is that Internet newbies are not going to be a growing market forever. The main part of the reason for the decline in desktop computers is that the people who are going to buy a computer already have one. According to Nielson Media Reports, the United States was to have 105 million television-equipped households by August of 2001. According to the CIA world book of facts, the United States has almost 150 million Internet users. True, the Internet use is tracked by user and not by machine. You and I know most families have more than one user per house. If you take out 50 million or even half of the users in that above number, you still have almost the same amount of capitalist US homes with Internet access you do with teevee.

While I see the computer replacing the television, I cannot in any way see more Americans owning more computers than they do TVs. There are countries where the technology is still not widespread, but they will catch up and their markets will taper off. Someday we are going to face a newbie-less market. Our only new customers will be the ones who come of age.

All of these newbies will become savvy and they will find the TGPs and they will get enough to spray their keyboards because enough is there. Say one TGP gives out 100 new galleries a day and those galleries have an average of 20 pictures per. That means, the surfer has the chance to view 2000 free images a day. Can one paysite provide 2000 fresh images a day?

This is great for the TGP owner because they usually make excellent money by selling non-adult related sponsor programs or from sign-ups through webmaster referral codes on their submit pages. They get bookmark traffic as much as any homepage or news portal. They've created quite a nice place for themselves where they get their content supplied by others plus masses of loyal traffic. The problem is the traffic from a TGP listed gallery has a sign-up ratio that averages 1:1000. That's a pretty crappy sales ratio for the gallery builder. When TGPs were new, everyone made good money but TGPs aren't new and neither are its surfers.

This is not an assault on TGPs or their owners. This is a warning that something's got to give. Gallery builders cannot continue operating at a loss. They are either going to flood the market with more galleries or they are going to stop submitting and quit. This will result in a lack of content for the TGP owner to offer their surfers. If the TGP owner loses traffic from lack of content, there will be less TGP sites in the future. The only logical way out of this impending mess is a new way of presenting galleries.

The disadvantage to this for the gallery builder is that their TGP2 galleries don't garner as many unique hits as a regular TGP gallery. They don't get those galleries listed as much because TGP owners and reviewers on the whole won't accept them. Why should an established TGP owner change their mode of business? This is the saddest dilemma for the TGP movement. They've come to relate traffic with sales and while that's true, the ratio from TGP2 galleries has to give them hope.

TGP2 furthers that hope by still working hard as a force to reckon with regular TGP. TGP2 has managed to build their own TGP2 portals. They've developed web rings and submission software. They've gotten the support of many paysite sponsors. TGP2 has it's own affiliate programs and even has free hosting companies. They have their own message boards and counters and a year past it's inception TGP2 is still making itself heard. There are more TGP2 top lists being built everyday and the general consensus from those who build galleries for is them is that sales are good. Even some of the mighty TGP owners are beginning to be swayed by the TGP2 movement. They know gallery builders are going to go where the better sales ratios are. Some are allowing TGP galleries onto their lists.

TGP2 is not dead. It may be having a harder struggle than TGP did. That's because the overflow of free images and video clips is already out there. TGP2 has a long and hard battle in front of them if they want to become the norm of Internet porn for the web savvy. From recent visits to TGP2 message boards and resource sites, I'd say the movement still has legs. Its survival depends on the drive of the forces behind it. At the moment, those forces are still fervently working to change the minds of TGP owners.

The question has to be, does the future of gallery building's profitability depend on TGP2? I think it does. 2000 free images a day is too much for an individual surfer. The fact that so much of that imagery is the good, hardcore stuff we used to have to pay for at the newsstand doesn't help the sales of any builder or sponsor. Builders are making too little money for too little work and will either give up or turn to TGP2. Sponsors will affiliate with the builders who turn to TGP2. Where does that leave the TGP owner?