I promote mostly jock, straight guys and occassionaly butch men type of sites. And this year I've been doing that mostly through free sites (not all niches on the same domain). The sites feature mostly static pictures but the links to a particular sponsor usually point directly to the corresponding promo video on the sponsor's site. (I haven't done video galleries too often). These type of sites have worked quite well for the past 4 years or so, especially when one takes into account how modest is the amount of work and devotion I invested in them. My traffic comes mostly from the usual gay link list sites and a little bit from SE.


Since I considered this business only as a part-time job, I didn't invest time and money in generating my own traffic (TGPs, network of several big sites, blogs etc.). "My" traffic is when I steadily make new sites, and this in turn makes visitors check them out on a more regular basis. As I said, this approach gave satisfactory results until recently - somewhere until the second week of July. Then it all kind of stopped. Now I see significantly less traffic, and signups have disappeared into thin air. Damn. Just when I was about to step up the production of such sites relying on the said model - and finally take up this as my primary job! Now I am not sure if the free sites model that relies on the LL traffic is still something one can count on? I guess I could make a blog and start with AVS sites again (though they're nowhere near the potential they had some 4 years ago IMO).

I am in a dilemma: whether present low sales can be attributed mostly to the summer slowdown, or my business model is outdated? I see there are more and more big gay free site networks (for the lack of a better name), which, I was told, generate a dizzying number of signups with major sponsors - even now during summer. Then, of course, I keep hearing that blogs are the way to go, and I am willing to start one or two. I am prepared to take this seriously but need to check once again if something really important has changed in the past 5 months. Somehow I feel something (bad ) has happened and since I haven't read the boards on a regular basis during this year I could have easily missed it. Does only blog traffic convert now? Or do only several big free site networks now attract most of the surfers that want free porn?

Any imput would be appreciated. Also I'd like to know if you are experiencing the summer slowdown.