Gallery Submitters - Your days are numbered
 

The free traffic pool is shrinking every day and is almost at zero. Pretty soon you're going to have to pay for traffic in one way or another, be it paid listings or paid partner accounts.

I don't really see this as a bad thing. Its not that much different from when I started in this business.

While the bar for entry into this business has never been very high, its never been lower than it was in the past year.
When I first started in late 2000 there were MASSIVE AMOUNTS of FREE TRAFFIC available.
There was however, very little free content, most sponsors hated TGP's, said they were giving the store away, and they weren't about to give you free content to support what they saw as the problem.
Bannerless free hosting didn't exist. If you wanted free hosting you had to give up the header and footer of your page, and worry that the host wouldn't be there in 3 months.
If you went with paid hosting it would cost you between $3-$5 per gig.

So while I could submit a gallery to maybe the top 50 TGP's and get 150-200K uniques to that gallery, easily....it cost me at LEAST $20 in content and $50 in bandwidth for every picture gallery I submitted.
That's in the neighborhood of 2K a month in overhead to submit a gallery every day. People who were in the game back then can back me up on that.
To do 2 galleries a day would cost you 4K a month, and so on and so forth.

Over time the price of bandwidth dropped, sponsors started offering bannerless free hosting, and tons of new sites hit the scene, all offering free content for use on galleries. Now it didn't cost ANYTHING to get into the TGP gallery game.

Looking forward to where the TGP market is trending, with practically no free traffic, I see it like this.
2K a month will buy you partner accounts on every TGP that matters (and then some) You'll be able to submit probably 3-5 galleries per day, using your sponsor's content and free hosting.
So next year the average gallery guy will be no worse off than I was when I started in late 2000. The current trend is more of a "market correction" than the gloom and doom scenario alot of people are making it out to be.

:2 cents:

Nah don't start this bullshit.

For everyone who charges for a partner account, there will always be 100 sites who don't.

Yeah but does the collective traffic of those 100 sites add up to the traffic of the 1 who does charge? Probably not.

I'm talking about traffic sent out to galleries, not how high you can spin the reels on your sextracker counter. The 2nd generation CJ's don't count in this equation.

There will always be residual free traffic. A small tgp cannot charge webmasters. 1000 small tgps produces a nice amount of free traffic. Besides, you mention the end for Gallery Submitters, not free tgp/mgp traffic -- and serious submitters all pay for traffic. Gallery submitters have a long lifespan.

Yeah unless you have partner accounts, your not going to get enough traffic :Oh crap

Don't be sure it won't affect your business. Staying on top all the time is not that simple. PPC model proved that.

Ok well maybe I erred in calling them "gallery submitters"

I'm referring to the guy who gets bannerless free hosting, free content, and probably even a free copy of an autosubmitter and then sends out 5 galleries a day.

There are alot of those guys out there.

There will always be free ways to get traffic to a gallery period

Great post Lenny.

I hope you have your flame retardant suit on the haters have already started.

People don't want to hear the truth they would just rather build their tgp's with comus, ttt, and remote thumbs and have no sponsor links and wonder why they are not making any cash. <-- hosting companies love this philosiphy though they make bank with that kind of business plan.

As others stated there will always be sites with free open submissions, True it's getting tougher for the honest guys to get traffic because alot need partner accounts and that might take a year of submitting to show that your not a scamming asshole

:1orglaugh years ago I remember I got a page listed no thehun's thumbs up, cost me over $1,200.00 and not one sale.
I finally quit buying B/W :Oh crap and my site didn't come back up for 3 days. I had B/W but was still getting CPU hits or some shit. :1orglaugh

Interesting way of putting things.

When I started submitting galleries a month and a half ago the first thing I did was buy a couple partner accounts. Its a cost of doing business. I'm still learning tons and still hunting for those traffic sources, free and paid, but its all working out.

Yeah but what is that traffic worth?

The 80/20 rule applies to TGP's just like anything else.
20% of the TGP's control 80% of the TGP traffic.
Its those TGP's that will be charging you in some form or fashion to have a gallery listed.

You may be able to get traffic from the other sites, but I seriously doubt it will be enough traffic to make a living from. IMHO it probably won't even be worth the time spent building and submitting the gallery.

I'm not hating dude, I just don't agree. I do, however, agree that it's a pretty crumby way to make money!

Here's why I think there will be free tgp traffic (for as long as tgps are a popular business model).

1. That 1000 or 2000 tgps with only a few K traffic cannot charge traffic. Submit to enough daily and you'll get accepted on enough to get some free traffic.

2. It's in the best interest of the business entities who sell autosubmitters to webmasters to fill their lists with free-submission tgps/mgps. They get more sales this way by appealing to a wider demographic of the market.

Anyway, no worries, opinions are like assholes - we all have one! :)

lol this is exactly what will happend next.. like a ball rolling.

Good post Lenny - Another factor that I see on my board... TGP's have stopped submissions cuz of the mass amount of cheaters. It's not cuz they don't want to take subs for free, they are just tired of the BS. So on that note most have went straight partner accts only and some charge a very small fee per month to keep it clean on the main and the archives.

Ill create tgps and take free submits to prove you wrong :P

I agree 100%, the cheaters ruined it for everyone. Spamming out 10 russian submitter galleries a day behind proxies and then redirecting to a dialer as soon as the traffic started coming in. Those guys can :321GFY

So TGP's started the partner account deal so they could only deal with trusted submitters.
Then a couple of the big boys (marks and sublime directory) started demanding a link at the top of your page to one of their paysites in order to get listed.
The thing evolved to a point where paid partner accounts are a staple of a big TGP owner's income.

Which is fine, traffic is a commodity that has value.

:1orglaugh

Oh there will always be places to submit to. The problem is how much traffic will you get and what will the quality of that traffic be?
My guess is not very much and not very good, respectively.

I doubt anyone will be able to make a living without paying for traffic in the not too distant future. Although we'll still have plenty of "hobbyists"

Where the fuck do you get the nerve to start a business related thread on GFY? How dare you Lenny!

I hope you're right .. just means much more sales .. for the the ones that keep submitting .. and don't mind investing because they know how to make sales through their galleries.

There's no money in TGP...

Paid traffic is easier and more convientent to get your hands on, but free traffic converts better.

I am a gallery submitter and I really agree with what you have said in this thread. I think you hit the nail on the head. I dont see it as gloom and doom either, the market is correcting itself and spitting out the part-timers.


As per your last post, I would love to know your opinion on the tgp's that charge for a partner account or listing and then still demand a recip link.

I dont agree with that, If I buy that real estate, why do I have to give you a link.

Of course their response will be that I am buying an opportunity to submit. But the fact is that I want the listing, submitting is just the process.

I dont count my ROI on the number of submits I got from a partner account.

I heard you could make $25 sending TGP traffic to 12clicks though?

Recips don't really bother me. I don't think anybody clicks on them, I think they're just trying to increase their google PR for the most part.

Let's just hope it gets rid of the part-timers and hobby webmasters. And the scammers and people without a couple bucks to invest. After all, this is a serious business, even though its just fun and games for some. :)

:helpme :helpme

Go buy the top spot on the hun. See how much traffic and how many sales you get.

Take that same gallery and go out and get the same amount of free traffic. Then come back and tell me the results.

It pays to be on top, getting in front of the surfer first GREATLY increases your odds of making a sale.

:2 cents:

hey can we get rid of the free hosted bloggers too while we're at it? puhleeeze!!!:1orglaugh

Nice thread. Lenny2 shows that when a person is flexible, they can achieve.

TGPs charging for partner accounts are going to suffer the same fate as those that switched entirely to hosted galleries - short term increase in income but their traffic and ultimately overall income will suffer in the long run. Surfers aren't stupid; they like fresh content and a variety of content. The TGP that only lists hosted galleries and/or submissions from paid partners will appeal to surfers as much as PPC search engines do. There's a reason why the Hun is still #1 . . .

great post lenny!!!!

I'm a bit in the middle of everything with my opinion here, as it looks ATM it's still possible to make a living with just gallery submitting, but I agree that autosubmitting 5 galleries a day isn't the way to do it, you'd still have to work hard, make great galleries and built relationships to gain partner accounts. But it was like that since ever, the only thing that has changed is that you now have the opinion to just go ahead and buy your way into the gallery submitting biz with spots/partner accounts.

So IMHO that made it only easier for those people that have some $$$ to invest, and made the entire thing a bit harder for complete newbies.

But in the end I still see gallery submitting as one of the best chances for a newbie to start, you have next to no upfront costs, and you can and have to learn a lot when you want to make money. So there's next to no risk, and when you've mastered to make a living with gallery submitting you've learned a lot which makes your future live as an adult webmaster a lot easier, and future investments a lot more secure.

There's a difference between paid partner accounts and listing all hosted galleries.

A paid partner account doesn't guarantee you'll get listed, so the TGP owner will still be able to pick the cleanest galleries and the freshest content.

Plus what does it do to your traffic if you have an open submit form and your bookmarkers click galleries that redirect to dialers and spyware?

Because we all know that cheaters don't buy partner accounts . . .

I don't see the logic in limiting your base of submitters from around 500+ to 50 just for a couple grand/month. You would think that for a TGP of any size the option of having a 900%+ greater pool of submissions to choose from would be worth much more than 2K/month.

i think a onetime fee for MOST of these tgps that switched to paid accounts would be the answer rather then month to month bs. big or small, id rather pay that then $50/month hoping to get a listing. with 15-30 new listings per day, i know im already behind the owners friends and long time submitters so with a stroke of luck i might get 1 listing per month

I'm not sure. I get listed daily at a couple of the biggest sites with my purchased account and I haven't been submitting long at all. Of course, I do use my own content and a unique sponsor.

believe it or not, some do, but they don't keep them long. :1orglaugh

Sure, but you're thinking about what's best for you, and not where things are actually going.

Right, wrong, or otherwise, what I'm talking about is where things are going, not where I think they should be going.

:2 cents: