We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2008 web awards…
And also provide more information about the awards and the concept behind them, for all of you that have been emailing me and asking 
EGPA would like to thank all of you that submitted sites and took the time to vote, the response from website owners and the general public was much better than we had anticipated.
See the results and read more at http://egpawebawards.com/
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I’m sorry but I’m slightly fed up with these so called “Web Awards”. Looking through the nominations you published here:
http://egpawebawards.com/?page_id=10
A lot of the most popular sites online today are not on the list. Why?
So what exactly are you awarding??
I think you need to rethink your “reward”. It doesnât represent any reality I’m aware of.
And donât take it personally, Iâm just pissed off with awards that fails to mention all the major and most popular sites out there with people who have worked so hard! If you really want to have a real award, then start listing ALL the major sites that deserves to be mentioned, together with a real vote by real people. Or dont bother at all.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
All the sites are nominated by webmasters / general public and voted on, If its not on the list then nobody put it forward lol
I can send you the list of IP address if you think that I have falsified any of this or made the list myself.
I actually thought it made a nice change to see some other less well known sites there it gives the small webmaster a chance in this business instead of the already well known sites having all the pie 
Because almost everyone works so damn hard at this game not just the big guys.
Besides it was an idea that appears to have taken off and will be better organized next time round, And as soon as the trophy’s arrive I will send you a picture as proof
Oh and I forgot to mention we are already a well established awards company with plenty of big names winning awards and attending actual awards events http://www.europeangaypornawards.com/
Plenty of photographic evidence there to prove we are not fake.
That really is voted on by the general public also, but you will just have to take my word on that…
I think you need to rethink your “reward”. It doesnât represent any reality I’m aware of.
I think I just answered that for you Sir.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
Andy failed to mention, that the awards are publicly nominated and voted on, if the "major " sites are not listed then they were not nominated. EGPA did not just run around and grab random website titles.
They nominations were posted twice on this forum:
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I just wanted to say as as former Marketing Manager for EGPA I have heard all the complaints regarding both awards shows, from it favors European Companies, there are to many American Companies and now the fairness of the process and the EGPA itself is being questioned.
I assure you EGPA is very receptive of suggestions, so if there is anything you think could be done to make it better, suggest away. I am very sure the folks at EGPA will take it under consideration.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
So how many people voted in total?
Please explain how you can give out awards to “the best sites” when very few sites are represented. With what authority do you say this is the best review site, best ethnic site… etc. When actually your nominations do not include the majority of well known, popular or larger sites for each category? How can that be fair?
Its rude and offensive.
I’m quite honestly fed up with all these nonsense awards, where the selection process are so random that it represent nothing like reality.
20 million people yearly enjoy gaydemon, but it still fails to even register in your nominations. I guess you must have a much bigger audience who seem to be nothing like a normal gay porn surfer since he doesnt know about any of the major sites. I might sound very full of myself but if a major site like gaydemon isnt even represented amongst your Link list category, well then something isnt quite right OR fair.
Your award is just too random.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
How can it be a fair process if you are asking people to nominate their own sites?
I would never want to nominate my own site, how sad would that be?
Do you think thats how a “normal” award works?
[quote=barnkin;25942]Andy failed to mention, that the awards are publicly nominated and voted on, if the "major " sites are not listed then they were not nominated. EGPA did not just run around and grab random website titles.
They nominations were posted twice on this forum:
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
Actually, nominating one’s own film or company is pretty standard. That is exactly how the Academy Awards work. Also every national and international award I have won in my day job was the result of submitting an entry and being judged/voted upon. It is pretty standard procedure.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
gaydemon :
Your not kidding you got out of bed the wrong side this morning my friend
(This is my 3rd attempt to write this response because you keep changing your posts lol)
Please do make a constructive suggestion then on how you would personally run a “fair” web awards?
I am sorry that Gaydemon never wins any awards as you say, but myself personally I could not add your forum to the list as that would amount to me tampering with entry’s, Maybe now somebody will add it to next years list for you.
AlexManifestMan :
Thank you Sir for clarifying that detail for our learned friend it is appreciated.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
You totally avoided all my previous questions.
What I am saying is, if you are awarding the best gay porn sites, then would it not make sense to actually have more of them nominated? Clearly relying on people to submit their own sites doesnt work.
If your nominations in the different categories clearly is such a misrepresentation of what sites actually are out there, should you not rethink how you select the sites? Let alone claim the winners to be “The best sites”.
Its no small claim with “Award for Best Gay Porn Sites”, but with what authority? You dont even seem to have a single corperate sponsor.
How do you have to backup your right to award the best gay porn sites?
[B]Why are you an authority on whats best in gay porn?
[/B]How many people voted?
How many people visit your pages?
How many people know about your award?
Where do you advertise the award?
All these things are important to think about BEFORE you start an award, you dont just put up a page and hope for the best! Its just too random.
What about a panel of judges that pick sites, maybe made up by people in the industry that others trust or respect.
(by the way, I wasnt talking about the forum when I said gaydemon. I’m surprised you dont know about my main site).
[quote=Andyr;25952]gaydemon :
Your not kidding you got out of bed the wrong side this morning my friend
(This is my 3rd attempt to write this response because you keep changing your posts lol)
Please do make a constructive suggestion then on how you would personally run a “fair” web awards?
I am sorry that Gaydemon never wins any awards as you say, but myself personally I could not add your forum to the list as that would amount to me tampering with entry’s, Maybe now somebody will add it to next years list for you.
AlexManifestMan :
Thank you Sir for clarifying that detail for our learned friend it is appreciated.[/quote]
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
Do you think the nominated sites in each category are a fair representation of what sites are out there?
Would you say that the nomination process has been successfull if most of the major and popular sites are not on there?
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
Why are you an authority on whats best in gay porn? : I am not the public is.
How many people voted? : More than enough.
How many people visit your pages? : Well you for one visited 14 times today at last count.
How many people know about your award? : How long is a piece of string?
Where do you advertise the award? : The nominees advertise the awards, and also our other websites.
What about a panel of judges that pick sites, maybe made up by people in the industry that others trust or respect.
Then it would not be a publicly nominated award, Thats the whole point.
Its no small claim with “Award for Best Gay Porn Sites”, but with what authority? You dont even seem to have a single corperate sponsor.
We do! EGPA Ltd. Yes our company is paying for it.
(by the way, I wasnt talking about the forum when I said gaydemon. I’m surprised you dont know about my main site).
Sorry, where do you advertise that? lol
Most of the answers to your questions are on the actual front page.
I can arrange to send you a special award courtesy of EGPA if you want one so badly Sir.
I must thank you by the way for providing myself with some entertainment it is the best laugh I have had on a forum in a long time 
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I think the EGPA is to new at this point to have any real standing in the online Gay community, and online Gay porn community. Their site says they just launched EGPA earlier this year and “we really had no idea how the idea would develop”.
“…we never did secure the sponsorship that wouldâve transformed this idea into something bigger and better”
“It had been our intention â up until quite recently in fact â to host some sort of âeventâ at the time of Venus Berlin to announce our winners.”
They are also having difficulty getting published.
“Due to situations beyond our control, we didn’t get published last month.”
And their main Gay DVD Chat forum has only 4 posts since June.
I don’t know much about them at all. I’ve never heard of them before today and they seem like they have many great new projects going on.
As someone new looking at their sites, the information they provide, and lack of posts on their Gay DVD chat board, seems to lack participation from anyone who might have voted, which begs the question: How many people voted? Why so very little participation on your sites?
If you have integrity in the European Gay Porn industry then why did you not have enough sponsorship to host your awards event at Venus Berlin, and instead will only have a stall there? Venus Berlin has the sponsorship to hold their event.
Those are just my questions as someone just introduced to who EGPA is. I have an open mind as I am just learning of them.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I’m certainly not an authority on whats best, why would I be? The important thing is, I’m not the one running an award.
The answers are so unprofessional that it surprises me.
I mean what sort of answers is “more than enough”, and “you visited 14 times”…
Its extremly important how many people vote even more important how many people visit your site.
For example, Compete.com says you have about 400 visitors a month:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/egpawebawards.com+gaydemon.com+justusboys.com/?metric=uv
How can you be an authority and hand out “best web site awards” with so little visitors… thats hardly going to give an accurate view. Ok Compete is not totally reliable, they are about 60-70% off… so maybe you have 1200 visitors a month… Thats nothing, definitly not enough to base an award on.
And no thank you, i dont want an award. I rather buy my own.
[quote=Andyr;25964]Why are you an authority on whats best in gay porn? : I am not the public is.
How many people voted? : More than enough.
How many people visit your pages? : Well you for one visited 14 times today at last count.
How many people know about your award? : How long is a piece of string?
Where do you advertise the award? : The nominees advertise the awards, and also our other websites.
Then it would not be a publicly nominated award, Thats the whole point.
We do! EGPA Ltd. Yes our company is paying for it.
Sorry, where do you advertise that? lol
Most of the answers to your questions are on the actual front page.
I can arrange to send you a special award courtesy of EGPA if you want one so badly Sir.
I must thank you by the way for providing myself with some entertainment it is the best laugh I have had on a forum in a long time [/quote]
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I’m sorry I really don’t mean to be such a bitch.
You’re a new site and company, maybe in time you can develop a way of nominating sites better as well as having the visitors / votes to support it.
The way you present your company and awards makes it sound so official, proper and very big. Which it isnt just yet.
You might not be aware of it, but the last Cybersocket awards was something of a shambles and because of that, its so important that you can prove your statistics, visitor numbers, nomination process and voting. And of course how its done. I.E. your Authority as “the european gay porn awards”.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
I, for one, applaud the idea of additional award ceremonies and programs. I think the effort you’re putting toward launching a new awards program is admirable, and the criticism you’re getting is probably a little harsh. Everyone has to start somewhere, and, as Squirt points out, you’re just getting started, which is understandable. But a little humility would probably be helpful.
I don’t know if you’re aware of the history, but as Bjorn said, the last Cybersocket awards were a mess, and the Cybersocket awards are also pretty widely known to be rigged; if you go back over the years and correlate the winners to who advertises in Cybersocket (or who is friends with Morgan and Tim), there is a very high correlation (it’s not 100% though; they have to put a few non-advertisers in to make it look as though it isn’t completely rigged, and the non-advertisers are always quick to point this out.) And Cybersocket isn’t the only awards program in this industry that’s alleged to be skewed in favor of advertisers.
So people are understandably skeptical. And then, when you’re asked a direct question, such as “how many people voted” and give an answer such as “enough”, it doesn’t exactly ooze credibility.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying “Hey, this was the first year of our awards, we posted information about it all over the web, and we got a couple hundred votes, but we’re doing our best to establish this, and hope and expect it will grow, with more votes and visibility next year.”
An awards program that’s truly objective and independent, doesn’t favor any program or person, and is widely voted on by other webmasters and surfers would be a great thing. I hope your program can eventually reach that point.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
[QUOTE=gaydemon;25971]I’m sorry I really don’t mean to be such a bitch.
You’re a new site and company, maybe in time you can develop a way of nominating sites better as well as having the visitors / votes to support it.
The way you present your company and awards makes it sound so official, proper and very big. Which it isnt just yet.
You might not be aware of it, but the last Cybersocket awards was something of a shambles and because of that, its so important that you can prove your statistics, visitor numbers, nomination process and voting. And of course how its done. I.E. your Authority as “the european gay porn awards”.[/QUOTE]
Apology accepted Sir no hard feelings. And thank you for taking the time to expand upon the reasoning behind your questions.
I also apologize for my un-professionalism in relation to said questions.
I have contacted our managing director Marc Cram and he will be creating a membership on this forum and will be able to answer all of your questions in a professional manner and provide further information on our new web awards and also our European gay porn awards.
EDIT :
gaybucks_chip : Thank you for your support and advice.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
My name is Marc Cram, and I am the CEO of EGPA Ltd - the company that organised the EGPA Web Awards.
Firstly, something about EGPA itself for those of you out there who may not have heard of us. Although these are our first Web Awards, we have already organised awards for studio productions for the past two years. In 2007 we held the first European Gay Porn Awards in Amsterdam; earlier this year we convened in Berlin. Please feel free to visit our sites and look at all the photos - we are a genuine organisation, established essentially to combat the awards that so regularly dominate our industry which are basically only awarded on the basis of advertising revenue. Up until this point all our awards have been distributed purely on public votes; and whilst that may not be a perfect system (and we wouldn’t for one moment claim that it is), we do genuinely believe that it engages the wider public and opens the award process up to a level beyond the usual industry clique. To date, it’s a sentiment that seems to have registered a chord with gay guys across the world and (in particular) within Europe; and we are pleased to announce that the 3rd European Gay Porn Awards will take place in Amsterdam on 16th May, 2009.
With reference to the Web Awards, we established these earlier this year in a bid to recognise the fact that not all the best porn is produced by the studios - that a huge proportion of the industry is now web-based and isn’t “traditional” in its content or approach. We will be the first to admit that this has been very much an experiment; but we decided to maintain the idea of a public vote because it reflected our continued belief in the democratic process. We tried to contact as many people as possible - including those thousands of individuals who had previously voted for our studio awards - inviting them to make their nominations. Some websites were nominated by webmasters; some by owners; some by ordinary members of the public. Who nominated them exactly didn’t really matter in our opinion; but we would like to point out that in our studio awards it is the studios themselves that make all the nominations for their own films and productions. Working on this process, we would norminally expect webmasters to nominate their own sites - though on this occasion we chose to open the process up in a bid to encourage publicity. Indeed, self-nomination seems normal procedure within mainstream circles and we ourselves do not have any issue with it. What’s more, it is our intention to continue this process in future.
Given the fact that this is the first year of our Web Awards, and (perhaps more importantly) the state of the world economy at present, which is obviously taking its toll on the industry as a whole, we are genuinely pleased with the way things have turned out. True, we have not as yet secured a sponsor, but these are still very early days and we feel confident that they will follow. Besides, our intention this year was simply to establish the idea of the Web Awards within the minds of gay guys across the world who surf the net. After all, our ultimate aim is to not to have these awards as a stand-alone concept, but rather to merge them with the studio awards to produce an awards show that reflects the whole industry. Indeed, it is our intention that in either 2009 or 2010 the European Gay Porn Awards will be a single show for both studio and web-based materials, celebrated as an annual one-off occasion and including not only those within the industry but also those whose purchases make it all possible, i.e. the gay public. However, we would like to take this opportunity to point out that this is a purely organic process and one that will develop and evolve in time. We never for one moment assumed that this year’s Web Awards would be faultless or beyond criticism or suggestions for improvement. Rather it is but the first step in the development of something that we feel the European side of the industry badly needs: a fully democratic awards scheme that reflects the views and opinions of ordinary guys rather than just those who run the industry.
I am genuinely sorry to hear of your personal concerns, Bjorn, and I am sorry to hear that you feel as though you have been cheated in some way - because, believe me, that isn’t the case at all. Indeed, I would like to question how on earth you think it would profit us to deliberately offend or snub a site as important and influential as GayDemon? However, we would like to point out (one more time) that all our awards are the result of a public vote and that they are not based on the returns of some advertising arrangement or sponsorship deal. You cannot buy our awards, it’s as simple as that - never have done, nor ever will do. To some extent this makes things harder for us, but we think that our ultimate survival will depend upon our credibility and that, of course, depends upon us being totally and utterly independent. Above all, we want our awards to be something that are held in esteem and that are worth winning - not just something that someone has picked up for the highest bid. Unfortunately, this will not be achieved overnight; but rather will take time (possibly years) to achieve. We trust that we will enjoy your interest and support in achieving this objective.
Kindest regards,
Marc.
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
Nice post, that still doesn’t answer some of the important questions raised in earlier posts.
How many votes were cast?
How many nominations were submitted in total?
Was the voting done to insure one could only vote once, twice, a hundred times?
Advertising for the awards was done how, where, etc?
Be nice to know if the winners got 100 votes or a 1000 and if they were from multiple votes or what. whistle
Re: EGPA 2008 Web Awards winners announced !!!
i doubt he’s talking about this board - he’s probably talking about gaydemon.com, which is not only his site but one of the oldest, most updated and best known gay directories on the web.