# A B C D E F G H I J k L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Use this Jargon Dictionary as a tool to find the meanings of words or terms that relate to Sponsors or their programs. Even the most veteran webmasters eventually find a term or abbreviation for something which they don't understand.

Examples of Usage
Searching using the letter links will result in terms or words that begin with that letter.

You might have heard about adult webmasters saying that they took a 'screen grab'. This means that they took a snapshot of what was on their computer screen. It's a bit like getting a camera and taking a photo of your screen - and is helpful when you are making custom adverts for your websites. You might be making an advert and want to include the sponsor's logo, for example. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take a screen grab of one of the tour pages, and then use a graphics program to further chop out the part you want. Another common use is to take a screen grab of the whole screen and shrink that down - much like you would with a picture to create a thumbnail. This gives the surfers an 'at-a-glance' view of what they'll get on the tour. Snagit - http://www.snagit.com/ is a good screen grabbing tool. You can also make screen grabs by simply pressing the 'Print Screen' key on your keyboard. This will capture whatever is on screen and copy it to the computer's memory. You can then paste this into a graphics editor.

A script is a computer program. It's a set of commands and instructions which stay on your webspace, and can be run to add special features to webpages. You are limited as to what you can do on a webpage with HTML (the building blocks of webpages) and it has very simple commands. A script can step in and do all kinds of amazing things on your webpages. Example uses for scripts for adult webmasters are: updating areas of a website automatically, tracking important information about where surfers came from, running your own search engine, and MUCH more... Scripts are a series of commands, written in a computer programming language, stored as a regular text file (Although the bit after the . is not .txt - it's .cgi / .php or something similar...). The two major programming languages for web scripts today are PHP and PERL (<- Often called a 'cgi script'). While few adult webmasters learn how to program, just about every one of us has to install some kind of script at one time or another. There are many pre-made, useful scripts available for free on the Internet. And special ones can be bought or custom-designed by a programmer for a fee.

Search engines (SE's for short) are internet based tools which help surfers find pages that might be of interest to them. If you imagine that you had 10 bits of information, each written on it's own piece of paper. It would be pretty easy for you to find the bit of info you were looking for at any time. Well what about if you had 1000 pieces of paper? It would take some time to hunt out the thing you needed. Search engines do a similar job on the Internet. They collect thousands of websites and store them in what's called an 'index'. Then, they provide surfers with a way to search through all of that information. This is done by typing in words that are related to the desired subject: eg. "free nude pictures". The search only takes a matter of seconds, even if the surfer is on a slow connection. Surfers that come to sites from a search engine are said to be the easiest people to sell something to. Getting websites and pages listed in the SE's to the adult webmaster can mean a lot of traffic, and a lot of sales! Google is currently the largest search engine out there, and is a massive source of income for many adult webmasters.

A sponsor is someone who will pay you in one way or another for sending surfers to them. They are companies who have some kind of adult product that requires exposure. Signing up at one sponsor generally means that you'll get a number of different products to promote. Once you become an affiliate (by filling out an online form) you can start earning money by promoting their products. Sponsor programs come in all shapes and sizes. The way in which you can earn commission varies greatly from one to the next. Payouts in the adult web are generally very high, with some sponsors paying as much as $70 for every sale one of your surfers makes. Other common ways you can earn money on the adult web are getting X cents for every surfer you send, systems where you'll be paid a percentage of all sales (initial and on-going), and 'for free' programs. Adult sponsors are constantly competing for YOUR traffic. Many offer incentives and bonuses for you to join them.

A surfer trap is something that anyone can make - with no graphics skills at all - and make good money from it. Instead of sending the surfer directly from an advert to a sponsor, some webmasters prefer to send these potential customers into their surfer trap. The surfer trap uses full page ads (FPAs) which are linked together in such a way that they offer the surfer choices and links - all of which either go to sponsors or MORE FPAs. When the surfer presses 'NEXT' - or 'No Thanks...' - they get to see another advert. At no time is the surfer given any free content because from this stage - it's all about SELLING. There will likely be a table of links at the base of each FPA, which link to other FPAs - either in a related niche or offering something completely different. The overall idea is to keep the surfer moving around a bunch of adverts until he or she finally gives in and visits a paysite. There's nowhere for the surfer to go - other than either deeper into the trap OR off to a sponsor. Either way, it's a win-win situation for the adult webmaster.

A spider is part of a search engine. It's a bit like electricity because, although you can't see it, it does exist. At least it does in cyberspace! Spiders are software programs which roam around the internet gathering information. Imagine the Internet is a city filled with homes and buildings (websites). The spider could be a person going from building to building making a report on what's in each one. Most search engines send out several spiders that work as a team: They visit websites, find out what they're about, look for any changes and follow links that they find on those websites to others. Web spiders are fast critters too - they can visit several million webpages in a single week! Once the spider has found a webpage - it relays the info back to HQ at the search engine. Another piece of software processes what the spider found, and decides what to do with it. Whenever a spider visits your website it leaves a special mark which appears in your 'referrer logs'

S.S.I stands for 'Server Side Include'. As usual, that doesn't make it any easier to understand! The easiest way to describe SSI is this: Imagine if you had 1000 webpages. On every webpage you wanted to have an advert showing for one of your sponsors. Now, let's say that this advert needed changing. Man - that's a LOT of work. Can you imagine opening 1000 webpages, altering that darn advert on each page, and then uploading them? That would be a lot of work... Enter the magic of SSI. If you had crafted those 1000 pages using SSI, all you would have to do would be to alter ONE page. Then the ad would be updated on all of the rest of the pages. SSI is a way to display one bit of information accross an infinite amount of pages and, when you want to update that information, keep the editing required down to only ONE file.

Short for 'statistics'. When adult webmasters talk about their 'stats' - it can be in connection with one of a number of things. Stats are numbers stored by a computer program on the Internet. They might be your sign-up ratio, or to do with the number of surfers who have visited your page. Stats can count overall numbers of sales & visitors, or give you more advanced information. Some can tell you which page the surfer who bought something came from, or how your visitors are finding you. These two bits of information allow you to see where your efforts are working, and highlight areas that need improvement. Adult webmasters can get into 'stats' to varying depths, but they form an important part of most people's work on the Internet. To 'check stats' generally means 'to see how many sales you have had'. Eg. "I'm going to check my stats".

This term "virtual hosting" doesn't tell us much about what this could mean. But it's actually something quite simple. Virtual hosting could also be called "regular" hosting. Web servers (the place where websites live) are basically just computers which hold the files users access over the Internet. You have to rent some webspace on one of these web servers before anyone can see your websites. With virtual hosting, the webserver is split up and shared between many different individuals and companies, and their websites. Each uses a portion of the webserver's hard disk, memory, and computer processor. Virtual / shared hosting is how most webmasters start out, and prices start from as little as $5 per month. See also (Dedicated Hosting).

SPAM is unsolicited promotion, meaning an advertisement sent to someone who did not request any advertising be sent to them for that person.