Grunt salary is 300$ - 350$ but you need to pay taxes (which add 300 more). After that you have to pay the fixed expenses (150 USD at least) so you get very close to 1000$. Add my profit and you see that such a worker needs to do a lot of things to earn his money for a living.

If the salaries have been lower then I would made the things even cheaper ;).

Egomancer

Probably not, I have a very well established clientbase, and 95% of my work comes from repeat customers, with a smattering of smaller orders coming in from new ones.

rigth on the money... :thumbsup

the thing that gets me when someone wants us to make a stie, mainstream or not, they say we want it to look like this this and this. we try to explain what they not want to use this this and this, and they demand it. They pay the price, and then balme us because things dont sell.

What you do, in those cases, is get them to assume all responsibility for failure, if you go on creating it like they want.

Absolutely, I fully agree. It should be more of a corroboration if they want something that will REALLY work well, especially if they have someone who has experience in marketing. The guys who produce do so for a reason.

This where sorry to say, some people don't quite fully understand the bulk FHG market.
Please don't get this wrong. I counseled many clients on this and I won't spill the secrets behind FHG's.

The design of an FHG is to do a number of things and it depends upon the priorities the sponsor sets with their order.

Of course designed to sell is a priority. But most people thing an FHG's first priority is to sell to the surfers. Not 100% of the time.

Often its first priority is to sell the webmasters on using them. This is why so many people demand that the gallery be "pretty" rather than effective.

The surfer 99.9% of the time doesn't care how pretty your graphics are. They don't care if you spent 15 minutes, or 15 hours putting it together. They just want to see tits and ass.

So in essence branding rarely is ever negative because of design. This is why people were so willing to buy memberships to sites that looked like horrible geocities designs for so long.

Now, sure if you have some bad engrish on there. Or someone just fucks it up so badly I'm sure it can have a negative effect. But in general, a gallery that follows simple layout rules will have as much of an effect in branding as a pretty gallery if the branding is done right..and it's just so simple to do it correctly.

Let me qualify once again my statements in this thread are solely based upon my experience as a bulk gallery maker.

For those who do more than just bang out galleries, your experiences of course vary and my comments don't necessarily apply to you.

LOL touché

This sector of the porn industry started out very easily, most people were amazed there was even porn on the Internet.

What was available was pretty poor, look at some of my posts from 2001 about the standard of content. Everything was about traffic and the scramble to get it.

Today many are realising that traffic is not enough, you have to convert it. Design and content does the converting. So some sites are realising that while it's important to keep the traffic flow up converting it is even more important. Simply because by having good conversions you keep getting good traffic.

So more and more sponsors are looking for better designs and content.

The fly in the ointment is many still think they should pay the same momeny to a professional with talent as they pay to a monkey with a keyboard or camera.

But natural selection will get rid of these people, becasue the hardest person to fool these days is the guy with a credit card and $30 to spend on porn.

:2 cents: :2 cents:

It always kills me when I see 'designers' here offering work for super cheap. Doing so just causes a never ending spiral of cheapness. Diminishing returns if you will. And they are only hurting themselves. We have standard packages, and the bare minimum is $500, and thats for a simple logo. We usually have plenty of work too.

It always makes me happy when a customer likes the work so much that they overpay. Its happened a couple of times now, where we've gotten another 50% of the job as a tip. Treat your customers with respect, charge what your time is worth, and work well and efficiently and you won't have problems. Pricing yourselves into obscurity in the negative sense is just bad business.

As for me, I'll do the design that cost $100 but I won't spend much time on it. Moreover, it's gonna be very simple design. If you pay me at least $500, I'll make good effort making really good design that cost $500. Simple truth!

Simple law of supply and demand and different levels on the buyer market. I'm not worried about the guys charging $100 for a design. If they were any good they'd get swamped before they knew what hit them, meaning they'd start raising prices fairly fast.

The simple fact that they have to put the low price in their board advertisments asking for work tells me the exact opposite. If they actually knew how to sell themselves, then they'd know how to create selling designs too. But they don't know either. Whenever their designs actually convert it's because of either luck, the client doing a lot of good pre-selling, or both. But it's definitely not due to their skills at creating well-converting designs.

It just seems like designers could make so much more money as affiliates promoting programs than they could designing for the programs. Couldn't these gallery submitters that make "quality galleries" make so much more than $35/gallery just by submitting the galleries themselves? Especially if they use the template more than once.

It seems that every affiliate program bends over backwards to provide you with everything you need...content, hosting. Why can't you make more money submitting galleries, yourself than buidling them for the program?

Or if you don't like the work of submitting galleries, outsource that?

It sometimes seems like there are people competing to be bottom feeders.

Do you always get the same cut of steak at the local meat shop for $15 as you do for $7.95?

Its called motivation. Obviously if you're not motivated enough to pay a designer what they're worth - why should someone be motivated to hand you their best product?

Although I always turn out good quality for paying customers, I'll go the extra mile for someone who acknowledges that.

yea its poeple who dont know that what u pay is what u get alway get sucked in to the prices

Very appropo summation. :thumbsup

And that's exactly the case, for many. Few actually know how to sell. :winkwink: