Content Scoring: Selecting Content in a World Filled with Content Providers

TiBo of PSI Site Design

Selecting content to license is probably the second most important skill for a webmaster (with getting traffic being the first). Selecting the right content for the right page or website and getting it at the right price has a huge impact on your business. Many webmasters learn this skill over time through experience and networking or find that they just instantly have a knack for it. Others constantly find themselves buying content and then see better content available elsewhere at lower cost. Finding content is important enough that everyone should be window shopping and doing price comparisons rather than just jumping at the first thing that looks good, but some still have trouble deciding even after looking around. That's where a system for content scoring can really come in handy. I've made my own content scoring system which has really served me well and I like to keep it as simple as possible so I've gone with

Content Score = Cost * Quality * Provider Cost - Cost per Picture

With content cost you need to find some way to compare apples to apples. With pictures it's pretty easy, you just divide the package price by the number of pictures and that gives you the price per picture. For example if someone is charging $45.00 for 100 pictures then 45 / 100 = 45 cents per picture. You can find bargain content as low as 4 cents a picture sometimes and high end content can be as much as 2 dollars per picture to license. If you buy videos instead of stills you might want to use a unit of measure like total seconds of video or if you buy stories you might want to get a sense of the word count in the stories if that's possible.

Quality Ranking

With your quality ranking you want to pick a number from 0 to 1 with 0 being the best possible quality and 1 being the lowest quality. The reason why it seems "backwards" is that since it's a given that you want the lowest possible cost, the easiest way to make a rating system that makes sense is to give the highest quality and best providers the lowest scores and when you multiply that all together whoever's lowest will be your "winner". If that doesn't make sense, just trust me, it will all work out in the end.

Cost is a concrete value, you can usually know exactly what the cost per item will be. With quality things get more subjective. One person's idea of quality will not be the same as another's. You are the person that knows your own websites best so you are the only person who knows what determines quality. You might have some ethnic sites and so the best quality might be the pictures with the most exotic looking women or you might have an amateur site and the highest quality will be the pictures that look more like they were just shot in somebody's kitchen with poor lighting. Just remember that what you determine to be great quality will get a low score like .1 or .2 and low quality will get a high score like .8 or .9.

Provider Ranking

This is another number from 0 to 1 with 1 being the worst and 0 being the best. It is important to have a provider ranking because it helps to keep you from getting ripped off. There are a number of things you want to take into account with your provider ranking. When you are just starting as a webmaster you will have to judge providers based on what you've heard about them from other people, how good their website makes you feel about buying from them, how easy it is to buy and get content and things like that. After you've bought from a provider a few times you can get a better sense of their score. Some providers will give you content and there may be annoying things like all of the pictures being out of sequence or worse yet they will have the exact same picture with different file names so you're really not getting as many pictures as you thought. You will find that as you buy more content, you will tend to keep going back to providers that have treated you well and steer clear of providers that try to rip you off, so this part of the content scoring just helps you with that.

Tie it all together

So using this system you have a way of quantifying which provider has the lowest cost, the best quality and the best service. You might find one provider that has pictures at 25 cents per image and they pictures are great quality so you give them a .2 but you've never heard of them and don't know about their service, but their site makes them seem friendly and fair so you give them a middle of the road provider ranking of .5. Another provider has similar pics they are .33 per image the quality is iffy and gets a .4 but it's a provider that's been good for you in the past so their provider score is .2.

Provider 1 = .25 * .2 * .5 = .025
Provider 2 = .33 * .4 * .2 = .0264

so in this case the lower score is provider 1 so you give the new guy a try.

Final Analysis

Depending on what you're looking for, your scoring will vary, but for me personally I've found that when I'm looking for high-end paysite quality stills and videos I often wind up with matrixcontent.com and gstringphotos.com and when I'm looking for low cost high volume pics I generally go with xphotography.com or pixmasters.com. I don't have any affiliation with any of those providers and none of them have ever given me anything other than good content so that is my completely objective opinion resulting from my content scoring in the past.

TiBo has been working in the adult industry for years now and is known for his former Traffic University and his PSI Site Design company.