I think it's a real good question. There's got to be some kind of steady growth curve across the industry... of course there are always more people getting on the internet every day -- but also there are more sites to choose from -- and less traffic coming from more greedy portals...
Personally I don't think it matters who you trade with. If you look at the top referrers of some big sites -- like Greenguy and Tommy's Bookmarks -- really their top referrer numbers haven't changed much in the last year. Maybe a lot of numbers have gone up overall because of blind linking techniques, but I think taking an already large and popular site like Freeones -- and doubling the traffic over a year -- that's not easy to do.
There seems to be a sort of max "trade" potential for any site -- there's many techniques -- but only so much attention you can get from a surfer to click links on just one domain. I won't comment on world-of-mouth traffic.
Paysites on the other hand seem to have more steady growth I think.
The biggest growth area seems to be these free movie sites... Triple growth for a free movies site though is a different ballgame though -- I've heard of guys that get up to 60K of trades in 48 hours -- then take sites to 200k/day in just a couple of months... on the other hand -- easy come easy go... most of those guys are on CJ trading scripts and all their content is non-licensed.
Anyway my site hasn't grown much in the last 3 years -- mostly because I'm a lazy bitch -- but I would like to point out that Freeones has some QUALITY traffic -- his surfers click like fucking madmen.
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