The mega Straight sponsor TopBucks has just announced the addition of two new promotional tools - downloadable Flash Movies and Free Sites. Currently, the new tools are available for one of the TopBucks gay niche properties. A TopBucks representative told me they are working on adding these new tools for all of the gay and straight sites.

For the moment, webmasters can grab 8 free sites and 10 Flash videos for promoting Hot Muscle Dudes. The videos average 3.5mb in size, and content for the free sites include 1 video or 9 photos that have not been optimized to save on bandwidth. And webmasters will need to add their referral ID to the links.

I’m actually a bit surprised TopBucks didn’t go ahead and host these new promotional tools, like so many of the gay sponsors are doing.

In typical fashion, TopBucks misses the mark with their gay niche content. I guess webmasters that are good at packaging can sell over weight balding middle aged men, and Rod Stewart look alike drug addicts, to the gay muscle boy consumer.

This week the popular gay Asian porn sponsor zBUCKz announced their newest affiliate promotional tool, Gay Asian Porn Kings. According to the sponsor, affiliates can promote the leak free hosted blog with assurance they will be compensated for all sales.

zBUCKz Co-Founder DannyZ says, “We believe in compensating our affiliate partners for all of their traffic by providing them with the best leak free promotional tools and site tours that convert. This philosophy was carried through in the design of Gay Asian Porn Kings.”

The gay adult industry is short on good quality affiliate promotional RSS feeds, and the guys at zBUCKz hope to fill some of that gap by delivering key word rich RSS feeds generated by the new blog. The sponsor boasts special attention was given to each post so it integrates well on affiliate webmasters’ blogs, using RSS.

“We are raising the bar,” says DannyZ. “By incorporating high quality 2 minute Flash video clips, enticing text, and signature photos of our exclusive models this dynamic new promotional tool will convert webmaster’s traffic,” DannyZ adds. “And we are updating at least 4 times per week!”

Professional gay porn blogger and zBUCKz Affiliate Manager Nemo says, “We have designed the blog to be sticky, by giving it an erotic eye catching design that will entice surfers to bookmark and return.”

The new blog promotes all five of the zBUCKz gay Asian properties. These sites include Gay Asian Amateurs, Japan Boyz, Asian Boykakke, the Gay Asian Network, and the all exclusive adult cartoon site Gay Asian Anime.

Earlier this week Falcon Studios announced, to affiliate webmasters, the addition of their new “Official” Falcon Studios Blog. The new blog (blog.falconstudios.com) is integrated into the existing Falcon properties, and offered as a separate stand alone promotional tool.

Unfortunately this is more of a traffic leak than a true hosted blog. Affiliate IDs do not get passed to each link in the blog. Instead, Falcon has elected to write a 24 hour cookie. The problem with this approach is it completely cuts webmasters out of return (bookmarked) traffic.

Worse, the new blog links to properties outside the Falcon Studios affiliate program. As of this writing there is an article, with link, about the Tim and Roma Show, and blogroll links to the Tim and Roma blog and the Gay Porn Blog. Perhaps I’m alone in this thinking, but why would an affiliate webmaster want to send free traffic to any of these properties?

Webmasters wanting examples of true leak free hosted blogs should visit the Flirt 4 Free and Randy Blue blogs.

Gunz Blazing has announced they will be paying affiliate webmasters 50% commissions on all DVD sales at their Gay DVD video store. This special promotion will last until the 15th of October.

Gunz Blazing states, “No catches, conditions or gimmicks and we DO NOT subtract transaction fees from commissions.” Well, what about no traffic leaks?

In my opinion, the sponsor can afford to take a negative loss on sales during this period for what they gain on the back end. With a mailing list sign up, offering a “Gay DVD Give-Away Every Day” and prominent link to the Chris Ward Porn Blog, they stand to gain a lot from your traffic, and you will never get it back. Once they have your surfers locked into the blog or signed up to their mailing list you can kiss good by any future DVD sales or pay site membership joins, from those surfers. In fact, no other affiliate webmaster will have a shot at them either.

While Gunz Blazing has done a great job removing the traffic leaks from their V2 pay sites, they still can’t let go and give affiliates a fair shake with the DVD stores. This sponsor needs to understand that you are not in the business of giving your traffic away for free.

Controversy stirs in the gay adult webmaster community over the recent revelation Mancheck has pulled a fast one with webmaster traffic. At an undetermined point in the past, Mancheck added a text link in the lower right hand corner of the script participating webmasters use to generate sign ups.

The link, reading “Naked men and Gay pron Center”, is void of the participating webmaster’s referral ID, and delivers surfers to the Mancheck home page. It is blatantly obvious Mancheck’s intent with this link is to make sales without having to compensate the webmasters.

Assuming it does not violate Mancheck’s Terms of Service, any webmaster wishing to remove the link will have to modify the script on every one of their participating Mancheck web sites. For many webmasters, this represents days, even weeks, of work.

The controversy does not end with the realization Mancheck is siphoning off participating webmaster traffic. By adding this link to their script, Mancheck is using webmasters to bump up their Google page rank, and its working! Moreover, the language used in the link has raised some eyebrows.

The key word “pron” is often used to circumvent filtering software and services attempting to block or monitor access to on-line “porn” content. It is reasonable to assume that when someone does a search on Google for “gay pron” the intent is, in most cases, to get around some form of filtered access to the Internet. It is open to everyone’s interpretation as to why Mancheck decided to use “pron” in the text link. Whatever their goal, Mancheck used unsuspecting webmaster’s properties to achieve it.

As of this writing, Mancheck enjoys the number one spot on Google for key word searches “gay pron”, “gay pron bears “, “gay pron men”, “free gay pron”, “free gay pron videos”, “free gay pron movies”, to name a few. And they hover in the top 5 for many other variations, such as free gay pron bears”.

A representative from Helix Cash, has informed me they were not aware of the issue [see original post], and all traffic leaks have been removed from Mankind Video and their other sites. Actually, one site still has a leak, but Helix Cash states they are in the process of removing it.

Thsi week CzechBoys announced the launch of their new site tour, and claim it is the largest multi-language tour in the history of the gay adult on-line industry. The new tour also features video previews of their vast collection of exclusive videos. Several hundred previews are currently on-line for prospective members to watch, with plans to have previews of their complete collection by year’s end.

CzechBoyBucks, the CzechBoys affiliate program, has also re-launched and is now offering free video hosted galleries and monthly affiliate cash bonuses. The free video galleries will roll out along with the new tour videos. CzechBoyBucks expects to have available over 1000 free video galleries by the end of the year.

CzechBoys claims they are the European leader in on-line gay erotica, since 1999, and publisher of the Internet’s only gay erotic daily magazine, yet they still seem to think it is appropriate to use multiple processors, with out cascading billing. This practice of siphoning off webmaster traffic, without paying for it, suggests a reluctance to let go of old school Eastern Block mentality.

Everyone knows European on-line consumers prefer debit card transactions. A multi-lingual tour and an alternate processor to except Euro debit cards? Dig through all the hype, and guess what jumps out?

Graphic designer ‘Saxx’ has just launched Gay Porn Design to showcase his growing adult portfolio and design skills.

With a B.A. in Graphic Design, and over 5 years experience designing for a top advertising agency, Saxx started building his adult portfolio by freelancing for several well known on-line companies. Now Saxx feels he is ready to forge ahead with his new ’boutique design’ company.

“My goal is to fill at least some of the gap in this industry for quality Graphic Designers with a gay eye”, Saxx explains. “I’m fully equipped to deliver stunning Flash designs, high converting tours in new wider screen formats, and eye catching promotional materials that deliver the gay adult consumer.”

Having freelanced for such online adult companies as zBUCKz, Keith Manheim Productions, XXXHostit.com and others, Saxx is looking to expand his client base, and develop long-term business relationships.

I am personally delighted to see Saxx going forward with his new company. I’ve been encouraging him to do this for the past year. I have no doubt his new clients will be very satisfied.

For more details, and contact information, visit GayPornDesign.com.

The evolution continues at HunkMoney with their release of embeddable flash videos. The sponsor has 65 video clips already on-line and will be adding hundreds more over the next couple of weeks.

These vides are ideal for embedding in your blogs or for use as free bonus videos in your AVS and free sites. You can also use them in your hub pages, directories, TGP sites or anywhere that you want to give your surfers high-quality, in-line flash videos.

The video links are pre-coded to include the affiliate’s NATS linking code. HunkMoney currently has the new Flash videos for promoting 5 of their gay porn site, including ThugVids, Orgy Studs, EU Twinks, and Young Hot Latinos.

This week the straight military boy porn site Buzz West announced they have removed DRM protection from their inventory of 130 exclusive videos.

“Although we will loose the added protection DRM we wanted to offer our loyal members a way to save the files and allow Mac users full access to our collection of naked military guys,” says Buzz West. Now customers can download the videos
and enjoy them forever, without DRM.

Buzz West has also announced a new price structure he promises will put more money in the affiliate webmaster’s pocket with every sign up. Unfortunately he’s reaching into the webmaster’s other pocket by using their hard earned traffic to populate his mailing list for free. With plans to release a new DVD series in the next few months that mailing list will be a powerful marketing tool. Affiliate webmasters will, of course, be cut out of any DVD or membership sales Buzz generates from the mailing list they helped populate for him.