My Spanking Toplist
It’s been seven years since I set up my spanking toplist and at least five years since toplists were web-fashionable. And for most of those years, I have to confess that I neglected mine; cheating used to be a big problem, especially folks who use robots and proxies to send a ton of fake clicks, in order to steal the top spots. And for awhile there, it was just too much effort to stay ahead of the cheaters. I thought I had them licked for awhile, but they evolved faster than me, and so for awhile, I confess that I just gave up.
But the basic idea of a toplist for small spanking blogs and websites is still as sensible as it was in 2004 when I set up Spanking You. If you’re not familiar with the concept, how it works is, you sign up, provide a banner, put up a link to the toplist somewhere on your site where it will send at least a few clicks of traffic to the toplist, and your site gets listed on the toplist. How high you get listed depends on how much traffic you send, but as long as you send more than a few clicks a month, you stay on the list. And because visitors to the list tend to visit more than one site on the list, everybody gets more traffic than they send.
Is it big numbers? No, it’s not. Send 40 hits, you might get 80 back, or 60, or 120. Even if you only get 30, though, here’s the thing; the folks you send were done with your page, and the folks you get back were new visitors, so you’re still ahead of the game. At the end of the day, it’s just a way for small websites in a little niche like ours to spread some visitors around.
As I mentioned earlier, when toplists were fashionable, there were a lot of professional cheaters, which took a lot of the fun out of it … they would always send tons of fake traffic to steal all the premium spots at the top of the list. But these days, with toplists being small beer in the web ecosystem, there doesn’t seem to be as much cheating effort being put into them. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been pruning and weeding at Spanking You, deleting and banning many old cheating accounts, removing inactive accounts and dead URLs, killing broken banners, and just generally renovating. So, even though toplists aren’t cool any more, if you have a spanking site, it might be worth your time to have a look at this one. It’s much smaller than it used to be, but a lot cleaner and small-site friendly, too.
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