Patti and Michael made some good points earlier in this thread that actually are a big part of why we select what shows to attend and what we do when there.

Quite frankly, the utility of these "larger" shows diminishes for us more and more every year.

How it usually plays out is I go to a show, meet a lot of these straight program staffers/managers/owners, and they hit me up for traffic trades, exit console trades, banner trades, such and such and such.

Well... we don't do any of that. We don't do the inter-paysite traffic trading. We don't have consoles. We don't have other sites' banners on ours.

And it always reminds me of just how different our model is to that of so many others when I have - and try to find a way out of - these conversations. When I tell people we don't do any of the above, they look at me with stunned faces and can't imagine just how it is we manage to scrape by hehe.

As Patti and Michael have mentioned before, we're about appealing to the consumer and generating traffic and interest that way. Not generating traffic and interest by working out deals with a ton of other webmasters to send us their traffic.

Truthfully, at the gay-oriented shows there are just far more people who have businesses and outlooks similar to ours and with whom we could actually get a lot done with. They can actually offer us qualified traffic, as opposed to just random link trades and the like. They're more often in line with the consumer-appeal, retention model. As opposed to just the console trade, any-and-all-traffic-from-wherever model.