"The very first people to be affected will be the ultra newbies."

Change has certainly been sweeping through the ranks of the pay site owners. Visa has tightened up on their regulations and even more changes are in the wind that could make it even tougher for pay sites to survive.

On top of that it's only a matter of time before Mastercard follows in Visa's footsteps. If you are the sort of guy who just builds free sites and AVS sites or maybe even runs a small link list you may have been sitting back and feeling pretty smug as you saw all the pay site owners run around in ever decreasing circles while they tried to sort out the mess that the billing companies had dropped them in.

If you did then maybe your turn is coming. For the last year or so I have been hearing rumours that the major link lists are about to introduce paid listings and not just for top spots either. It seems that they are thinking of charging every webmaster who wants a spot on their list a fee per listing.

If they decide to go ahead with it I am sure that they will attempt to justify it as a move to improve things for all webmasters, charging a fee for submissions will increase the quality of the traffic that they send because the webmasters who submit crappy sites won't be prepared to pay the fee.

That may work but let's be honest here; the big lists feel that they can charge a listing fee simply because they have the traffic and webmasters need it. If you do TGP paid listings are nothing new and it started there with the big lists who had the traffic and realised that webmasters were prepared to pay for it.

Some justified their change to paid listings on the grounds of quality and a guaranteed listing while others simply said that if you want the top spots then it will cost dollars. When I was new in this industry I would have been horrified at that but these days I understand that traffic is a resource and if you want it you either have to work it up yourself or you have to pay for it.

Since then a lot of smaller TGPs have jumped on the same bandwagon and started charging for listings. They too have used the same reasoning to justify charging for spots but unfortunately for them, they don't command the same traffic numbers and so many gallery builders just move on to the next TGP.

So lets look at some of the potential situations that may arise if people like Tommy and Greenguy start charging for submissions.

The very first people to be affected will be the ultra newbies. We've all been there and know what it is like to start on a shoestring budget, will these guys be able to afford to submit sites to the big lists?

Then there are the guys who work right to the limit and submit as many sites as they can because they work on the basis that getting sign-ups is just a numbers game. At one time the rule of thumb was that a free site would give a webmaster a sign up per month. What if the link lists decide to charge a fee for each site that is listed and for each month that it is listed, will their numbers game remain economic in today's difficult times if they have to pay?

The big link lists could also have problems if their submitters decide that paid listings are not economic. Link lists rely on surfers to visit their sites to give them not only the traffic they could sell but also the sales revenue from advertising on their sites. If submitters fall away then the surfers won't be finding all those new and varied listings that they need to feed their hunger for porn so they too will go elsewhere and the big link lists will stop being big.

What about the smaller link lists? If the bigger lists introduce paid listings and webmasters stop submitting to them then they are going to come looking for smaller lists to submit to. Many smaller lists are already struggling and are weeks behind with their submissions. Will they be able to cope with even more submissions or will they simply close up because the effort involved is not worth the small return that they are getting from their list?

Of course you can go on and on with speculation and if it does come to pass then I think it will be a sign that this industry is maturing.

For too long people have flocked to the online adult industry thinking that normal business principles do not apply and that is a terrible mistake to make.

We continually hear that there is too much free porn out there but porn is not the only free thing that is out there. It takes a lot of very hard work to amass traffic and when effort is expended to obtain or make something then that thing begins to have a value; therefore traffic has a value and so it should be exchanged for something else of value. Perhaps if webmasters have to start paying for traffic we may see the decline in the amount of available free porn that we all wish for. Again, that is just more speculation, but if paid listings do come in, will your business model be able to cope with it?