GayGeek

Each time a website is reviewed, the reviewer rates it on seven scales. Each rating is a number between 1 and 7 where 7 is best.

The scales are...

Ease of use

How easy the site is to use. A high score is an website that is easy and intuitive to use. A low score is a site that is confusing, awkward, and difficult to navigate.

Download speed

The speed of the website. A high score reflects a fast website. A low score is slow and sluggish. Reviewers with 56k connections will often give websites lower ratings than their cablemodem peers. This reflects the need for webmasters to design sites that meet the needs of low-bandwidth users.

Speed may vary depending depending on your location. American users might find an Australian website to run slowly, for example, while Australian users find the site to be highly responsive.

Erotic quality of adult content

The level of eroticism in the site's pornographic content. A high score is a site with very hot content. A low score refers to content that is dull, unimaginative, poorly directed, faked, and/or generally unerotic in nature. We encourage our reviewers to put aside their personal tastes when evaluating erotic quality of other websites. Sites typically score high in this category, as low-rated sites tend to go out of business.

Pay-per-view sites are not rated on erotic content, as they often contain such large volumes of content that the rating would be meaningless. (How can you give a single rating to a website with 10,000 different porn movies?).

Technical quality of adult content

The technical rating of the site's pornographic content. A high score is a site with clear, crisp, and well-shot photographs and video. A low score refers to content that is poorly focused, cropped, edited, lit, and the like.

Visual quality of site

The visual appeal of the site. A high score is a site that is visually appealing to the eye. A low score refers to a design that is either dull and drab or overly complex and distracting.

Level of advertising

The amount of advertising on the site. A high score refers to little or not advertising. A low score refers to sites that are filled with advertising. Sites listed on GayGeek tend to do well in this category as they often do not sell advertising.

Amount of adult content

The amount of pornographic content. A high score refers to a large or mega-sized adult website with enough content to entertain a new user for weeks or months. A low score refers to a site with limited content, either because it does not routinely add new content or because it is a new website.

Overall rating

The overall quality of the website. A high score refers to a fast and well-designed site with lots of great content with little or no advertising. A low score reflects a site that is poorly designed and slow with little or no content and lots of advertising. Site that would receive a particularly low score are rarely selected for review.

The weighting process

When customers decide whether to join a website, they do not consider all of the above factors equally. Site users, for example, might consider the erotic quality of the pornographic content to be more important than, say, the speed of the site.

To take this into account, we weight the seven scores when computing the overall rating for a site. So while a regular average of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 would be 4, the weighted average might be greater or less than that amount.

Precisely how each factor is weighted is a business secret. We can tell you that the factors are weighted based on the preferences of Internet users. The initial weights used on this site are based on surveys of 220 users of www.aaronlawrence.com. It is our intention to survey our users in the future to allow you to determine how the scores should be weighted.

Converting to letter grades

Initially, we let our numeric reviews stand for themselves. Users found them difficult to interpret, so we shifted to a letter grading scale. In this scale...

A+ is excellent. Awesome. Everything a website should strive for.

F is a complete and total failure. A joke of a website that users should avoid.

Between them are degrees. From good to bad, these are: A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, and D-.

Generally speaking, you will want to join websites that are some sort of A or B. Websites in the C's may appeal to some, but usually only if you have a specific reason in mind. D's are pretty bad sites, and require careful thought before joining.

Approximately two-thirds of all sites we have reviewed fall in the A's and B's. The reason for this is threefold. First, we often decide that a site will not review well and focus on another site instead. Second, quality sites often seek us out to review them. Finally, sites that scorew low tend not to do well financially and close sooner than high-scoring websites. So while the bulk of our reviews are fairly good in nature, that doesn't mean that we are skewing our reviews to impress our readers.

Regarding the actual conversion from numeric scores to letter grades, we use the following system:

Spread = the score of highest reviewed site minus the score of the lowest reviewed site.

Letter width = Spread / 13

F = anything below (lowest website score + letter width)

D- = anything below (lowest website score + 2 * letter width) that is not an F.

D = anything below (lowest website score + 3 * letter width) that is not a D- or an F.

And so forth, all the way up to A+.

Our review grades are also translated to scores this way. The grading system was made based on website grades and not review grades (so that one particularly high or low review doesn't throw off the whole scale). As a result, from time to time you may notice a average or two that doesn't seem quite right. If it's way off, it may be a bug and should be brought to our attention. If it's just slightly odd (An A+ and two A-'s resulting in an A+ website, for example), it's a product of the mathmatical limitations of presenting to you an alphabetical rating system.