I'll keep that in mind

xxxonfire is only about 160k, but I've never really worked it, I rarely look for trades, and spend less than an hour a week on it.

My prod has been kind of crappy, but I put that down to the fact that I have 1000 sites sending skimmed traffic to me and I deliberately loaded my site with awful galleries. I wanted to see what happens with and without prod booster.

Without prod booster my site ran at 80% prod.
With it, it ran at 150% prod.
Both way below the network standard of 250%, but a marked improvement.

Now I've got marley cleaning up the content, prod is increasing and we'll probably be over 200k by the end of the week. She's also going over all the trades to make sure we niche target all the landing pages we can.

I have about 20k spare right now that I could send to trades, I just need to go trade hunting, but we figured we'd get the content cleaned up first.

The driving force behind xxxonfire is about 90k in bookmarkers and comus free skim traffic.

If you ever want to trade, just go here : http://www.annasdungeon.com/cgi-bin/ucj/webmaster.cgi

This has been an awesome thread. It confirms much of what I've been learning about trading. Does anyone know UCJ well enough to comment on Ratio trading? When to use it? How to determine which trades would benefit from using it? etc.? When to turn it off and put trades back on normal, etc.

I may be teaching you to suck eggs with this first bit. If so I apologize, but usually if I take something for granted, I get caught out.

UCJ has three types of trade:

• Ratio (which in other scripts is known as uniques), ie if you set a trade on 1.2, you will try to send back 120 hits for every 100 you receive.
  
• Capped (which in other scripts is known as productivity), ie if you set a trade on 1.2 and the productivity is 1.4, you will try to send back 100x1.2x1.4 for every 100 hits you receive.
  
• Normal is the same as capped (ie productivity trading), except that if you have spare traffic, your trades can receive back extra. This is the default in some scripts like X3 (using the logic that traffic sent to exout is largely wasted) and unavailable in other scripts. UCJ lets you choose.
  

You will get a variety of opinion about ratio trading. The obvious uses are if you want to encourage a trade with someone who has low productivity (who would otherwise get back fewer hits than he sends), or if you want to restrict the returns to someone who has very high productivity. Both of those extremes usually set off alarm bells with me and with few exceptions I would likely kill such trades rather than switch them to ratio.

IMO the best use for ratio is if you are trading like Tony/sixzeroes does: not as a one-off for specific trades, but if it is your overall strategy.

It can work for any size of site, but it is especially good for small sites. The stats for smaller trades and/or low traffic sites are going to fluctuate wildly, so although the logic of returning more traffic to trades with high quality traffic may seem to hold true, the actual results are going to be all over the place. If you can establish a level of return which represents a fair average for a trade, then using ratio will keep your trades more consistent.

That hints at the other virtue of ratio trading: it gives you more control. There are many trades which will not send back any more whether you return at 1.2 or 1.4, so you are better off sending at the lower level and having some spare traffic for someone else.

The danger of ratio trading is also that it gives you more control. A lot of newbies take their trading scripts, over-force, play with all the settings, and all the other no-nos. If they stay in business, after a while they normally settle back to the defaults or something close. Trade script algorithms are very primitive, but UCJ has one of the better ones and left to its own devices works fairly well. But if you start using capped or ratio and don't get the numbers right, there is an excellent chance you will screw things up very badly indeed.

The simple way to use ratio is to see exactly how much traffic you are sending back to trades in relation to the amount coming in from them and put everyone on that ratio. That's obviously not a very sensible thing to do unless all your trades are of similar quality (the number of clicks incoming traffic generates relative to the number of clicks you send out to earn that traffic). But as soon as you increase the return to someone, unless you reduce the return to someone else, the script is going to have to short-change someone: and it may not be the trade you want. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that once you start lifting a half dozen trades above the baseline ratio, you have to do some fairly tricky math to figure out how many trades to cut back, and by how much, in order to keep everything balanced.

The answer is experience. Just as we don't consciously do the math for distances and vehicle speeds before deciding if it is safe to cross the road, an experienced trader can tweak his settings, knowing instinctively they will work. But it isn't magic: your script can only send out the hits that are available, so the sums have to add up one way or another.

This next is slightly off (your) topic, but something was implied in Tony's post that it is obvious many traders don't get: namely that if you want to be able to force traffic without haphazardly screwing up your other trades, you actually need some spare traffic.

If your settings - whether you are using normal, capped or ratio - are already committing all your outgoing traffic, you don't have any spare traffic. In fact, if you run down your trades, calculating how much traffic you should be returning to them (multiply incoming by return ratio, and by productivity if necessary), you may already be over-committed. If so, your script is already making decisions about who gets less than they should and if you throw in a force, you skew things even further.

Apart from building trades using forces, think about adding new trades. If you are fully committed, where are the 250 hits a day you want to send Mr New Trade to come from? 9 times out of 10, he won't get his 250 and a few others will lose whatever he does get. You end up with an extra trade, but unless his returns or productivity are exceptional, you aren't any better off because you will have lost incoming from someone else.

If you want the exercise to work, you need to decide who can safely get back a bit less and "cut out" the number of hits you want for the new trade. Ratio is good for that because the results don't fluctuate with changing productivity levels, so you have a better idea of what will happen if you change the figures.

If you want to be spared the constant calculations, do what Tony does and use base ratios which always leave you a defined amount of traffic to play with...

Johhn,

Thanks. That was helpful. I need to get out my calculator a little more often and figure out my exact situation. I do like Tony's method of using base ratios. So, I have started there. I just know I can't keep my biggest trades returning at a decent ratio unless I use UCJ's ratio setting.

The real problem I have is that I am behind on a couple of my largest trades and I am attempting to use the ratio setting in order to catch back up. I am even using UCJ's events to send extra traffic. But no matter how hard I try I can't catch up. That to me means I don't have enough extra traffic to supply those big trades, I think. So unless I'm missing something I need to purchase some. Which I've done. I hope that helps. I just want to get things stable so my return ratios are above 110% or better then my TGP will be a lot more stable and will grow. I am managing to keep productivity over 200% but getting to 300% is tough. I don't know how people do that.

Anyway I think based on my experience and what you've contributed I will use ratio trading sparingly and only with my biggest trades and most productive. I'll use the normal setting for most others and the capped setting for those which I am sending too much to. I've defined too much as 170% unless the have a productivity of over 250%.

Thanks for your input.

Very quick reply MIG.. I'm on my way out. Tead back to that earlier math post I did. If your productivity is down where you said, you have an overall problem. But more to the point, 170% as "too much" is way too much: I douvt you can go more than 120-130 even to these trades.

Tot up the whole theoretical committment on your site against a normal day's trade to see exactly how much your numbers say you should be sending out if you met your target ratios...

just share my expirence here, no expert...
I am running about 15 sites, grouped into 3 different niches: interracial, cumshot/facial and movie sites. each has about 5 sites in the ring. I take special care of each top site of the niche and feed others from the 3. My theory is build similar sites and make it a network (or ring, whatever you call it), with same thumbs displayed on these sites, if surfer clicks on the thumb and gets to my other sites and sees the same thumb there, he might possibly click it again to try his luck, it's either he gets the gal eventually or he clicks madly to get the gal which benifits my prod on other sites.

so the plot here is, the surfer reaches the gal and hopefully i can get a sale from it (i am using hosted gals and my own gals); if not, trade it out to my other sites to make more clicks; either way, I win. With Comus, I've been able to maintain all of my sites at 220% overall prod, some are 450%. Thanks to Comus and especially Tony!


Interesting thing I've noticed is that my biggest site doesn't generate the most sales, on the contrary, it's those small niched sites that are making profit for me. However, I have to maintain to keep my big sites that are able to feed to their satelite sites.

Building a site is easy, to keeping it at a high traffic level is somewhat need a lot of time and research. I've learned a lot thanks to this thread and I wish I had 48 hrs a day, so that i am able to do marketing as well as traffic search. Tony might need 72 hrs/day...lol

anyways, there was much I wanna say, but that's it for now...I am feeling lucky to find this thread.

cheers
codraw 14200200

Marley and I put some effort into our trades.

xxxonfire is around 300k clicks, but only 150% prod overall, its actually a very tough site to get the prod up because it is non niche and gets a lot of traffic from blind random sources.

I'm considering running an experiment on it, and switching to no blind trades, and niche targetted or top list only only trading. That should take my site back to about 60k, but it should start to attract bookmarkers, and we can see how it plays out, whether all the feeds that it gets will actually allow it to grow still.

Only problem is I need to notify 100 trades that I'm changing the system.

xxxonice is around 60k clicks at 330% bookmarker prod / 150%

changing to 100% skim will kill your site
skim like 80-85% if you want a lot of bookmarks
that way u have a lot of incoming traffic that are potential bookmarks and at the same time you dont jerk them around too much

Actually I'm interested in killing it a little, remember I have a unique site, it gets 60k+ and growing of skim traffic from the free Comus scripts, and it has 30k+ of bookmarkers.

Thats free traffic I dont need to return.

If instead if I ran on a hard coded top list, which is currently sending out about 5% of my total traffic, and might send more if I incorporate it more aggressively. Possibly even 10% - 15% of total traffic might be encouraged to leave the site via hardcoded links.

It would be an interesting experiment, what happens when a safe zone is placed in the skim trade circles, and fed from an external source to keep it alive?

We know it will shrink, but how much?
And could it actually grow, once it meets it's new equilibrium?

This thread really is a "plethura" of knowlegde. For a newbie like myself who is about to take the plunge into the world of traffic trading...this stuff is priceless! It really is good to see some Vets sharing their knowlegde.
And speaking of bookmarks...I just did!
It may take awhile for my alcohol and THC soaked brain to absorb all this...but I'll give it a try!!
Cheers,
SS

To sleep? You wake me up! Thanks Jayeff for your time writing such valuable info. My site is 2 weeks old and you gave me priceless data that now I have to read carefully and learn from. I really appreciate it.

Charliot you will find that Jayeffs posts allways will have a great input on the matter, i really like how the guy thinks his way thru the matter