Traffic is King. Content is King. You know you've heard both. Talk about mixed messages! Is it any wonder why this business is so confusing to newbies?
In the adult Internet, used to be that Content was the only King. There were a whole lot fewer competitors back in the day. As long as one had the Content, the Traffic would follow. Then the waters got choppy with niche markets and with other webmasters, hungry for surfer meat.
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"Traffic is King. Content is King. You know you've heard both. Talk about mixed messages! Is it any wonder why this business is so confusing..." |
In the past surfers used to be more susceptible to cyberporn sales pitches. They were more willing to sign up for free trials or AVS IDs. Your visitors didn't have pop-up blockers installed and dialer software didn't scare the shit out of them. Traffic was easy in days of old. The one thing, the main thing, that set a webmaster apart from another was the quality of the Content. Content was indeed, the only King.
During the Eden of the adult Internet, both Content and Traffic were expensive for webmasters. Today we have bargain basement Content for $5.00 a set. This was most absolutely not the case in the mid-to late nineties. In 1998, those fifty static images would have cost you at least $50.00, if not $100.00. The cost alone prevented many TGP submitters from using paid Content in their galleries. Not to speak of the fact that the number of Content producers has risen ten-fold since the days when the web was new.
As mentioned, Traffic was also a costly proposition for the small adult webmaster, during the late twentieth century. Hosting and bandwidth fees were insane in the bad way. Merely registering a domain cost one roughly $70.00 per year. Believe it or not, there was a brief period when many webmasters made money using free adult hosting for their TGP galleries. The quick ones did it
with sponsor Content. That's how rare the Content was versus the Traffic. Anyone serving any kind of interesting, semi-exclusive porn was sure to garner the hits.
Things are much different now.
Cost plays into it but so does the surfing public. Before Thumbnail Gallery sites came along, porn webmasters used to post full-size images on their main pages. Either that, or they posted graphic icons, linked to full-size images. Way back then, most people were on dialup connections. Full-size images took forever to load and cute, little stars gave no clue as to the porn lurking on the other side of a click. Could be hot. Could be repulsive. With the concept of smaller, thumbnailed preview images, pages loaded faster and there were no surprises. This made TGP sites ridiculously popular and at the same time, more and more users were adopting the Internet. This was when Traffic began it's rise to the throne, and it's risen ever since.
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Now, most surfers access the web with broadband. Text-based TGPs are still popular but today only webmasters using paid hosting and purchased content get listed. The average webmaster can receive a 100,000 hits a day and wish for more because he now serves under the whims of his new King, Traffic. Traffic is fickle and cruel. Surfers think nothing of sucking our samples and gorging on our servers, without so much as a dime in return. For every 199 surfers, the two hundredth might click your sponsor banner. Even then, there's a less than
50% chance that surfer will buy a membership.
King Traffic demands that we throw away gigs of storage, bandwidth and time for a lousy 1:200 ratio. There's no way out of his Kingdom. We are his desperate servants, bound to him and his damned audience.
There is however, another, more benevolent King. He has softened with time and is more accessible than ever. He has gotten richer with his gifts and the selection is vast. While this other, kinder King will not free you from the rule of Traffic, King Content will reward with you advantages in the harsh land of hits and bytes.
If you're gong to build a gallery, instead of paying $5.00 for a set of 50 boring pics, why not opt for a set that costs more but looks better? If you're going to build a paysite, do you shop for quantity over quality? Come now, haven't you seen that same voyeur feed on ten other paysites? Do you really need all those cheap text stories and lame filler galleries? Perhaps there's no
amount of Traffic that can save you from the crime of mediocrity.
The sad fact is, we all must serve King Traffic. We need Traffic and we need a lot if it. Many of us forget our lesser but better King: Content. When you pay more for good Content, you improve your chances at making money. All those surfers, sent by Traffic, want something worth paying for. They are King Traffic. They don't care about sales ratios. They want to see the true King. The real King. They want hot, exciting sex. They want Content.