Ah, the TGP. The bane of some. The savior of others. Are TGPs still relevant? Can a newbie webmaster still make money by submitting galleries or operating his/her own TGP? What the hell is a TGP anyway and where did they come from?

TGP = Thumbnail Gallery Post.

Back in the days of yore, bandwidth was expensive as hell and most surfers were connected to the Internet on 14.4K dial-up modems. One single 150k image took a long time to load and a page full of them took forever. Webmasters were lucky if a surfers were patient enough to let a site load. Much more lucky if those surfers stuck around to view the entire content of a site. Adult webmasters were faced with a dilemma: How to build pages that were fast-loading, yet still offered the content surfers craved? Thus was born the TGP.

A Thumbnail Gallery Post is a page of links. Those links lead to individual Thumbnail Gallery pages.

"What you must realize about Shemp and every other successful TGP webmaster is that they work their asses off. The life of a successful TGP webmaster is hard, as hard as any gallery builder's."

A Thumbnail Gallery is an HTML page where instead of full-sized pics; the gallery webmaster displays several images in a smaller, thumbnail format. Each thumbnail image is linked to a full sized image. When the surfer clicks the thumbnail, they are taken to the full-sized image. When displaying images in thumbnail format, a page loads faster. The surfer gets a preview of the images. The surfer only clicks on the images he/she wants to see. In order to see another full-size image the surfer must click back to the original gallery page. Each back-click forces the surfer to view the sponsor ads on the gallery page.

In order to view another gallery, the surfer must back-click to the originating TGP; thus re-viewing the TGP's sponsor ads. Bandwidth is saved. Surfers let pages load. Marketing is enhanced. Everybody is happy.

Needless to say, the TGP concept was revolutionary. Not only did it create a new revenue stream for webmasters; it made money for sponsors and created a group of powerful TGP site owners. Suddenly tens of thousands of webmasters were submitting gallery after gallery to TGP sites such as The Hun, Thumbzilla and Shemp. The TGP webmasters made money by garnering loyal surfers who visited TGP sites daily. The TGP webmaster would fly ads for their sponsors and the bookmarkers bought whatever those sponsor ads sold.

At first, paysite owners were hesitant to allow their precious content to be displayed for free. After a while they realized that they too could only profit from an army of commission-based webmasters, working tirelessly to hawk their products. Affiliate programs mushroomed. Lots of people got bloody rich.

Fast forward to today. It seems as if everyone and his dog has an affiliate program. There are TGP sites too numerous to mention. Every adult webmaster on the planet has played around with building and submitting galleries to those TGP sites. Even the surfers have caught on to the ever-flowing source of free imagery that is the TGP. Today, there are TGPs, Movie Galley Posts called MGPs, sites that feature one thumbnail from a gallery called Thumbnail TGPs and a few galleries that link some images and don't others known as TGP2s.

The questions before you: Are TGPs still going strong? Can a newbie adult webmaster create a TGP and expect to make money? Can a newbie gallery builder expect to make money by submitting to those TGPs?

To answer these questions, I went to one of the most respected and long-standing TGP site owners, the venerable Shemp. I asked him two questions. Here are his answers:

Titmowse Question #1: Are TGPs (in general) still making money for webmasters that run them?

Shemp's Answer: "TGPs really don't break down into any consistent pattern anymore and they haven't for a couple of years now. You have the two extremes: Sites that get huge traffic and massive bookmarkers - they don't rely on sponsor galleries to make money. They are able to sell banners and text links and top gallery spots. At the other end of the spectrum are the instant TGPs -just add a line or two of code to a page and bam- another TGP is created. In between those two are all the variations of the original TGP model.

The one thing that has really hurt TGP profitability is the oversaturation of them and the fact that with almost no effort, investment or dedication, another TGP can be online with one click of the mouse. Many TGPs now realize revenue by charging for reviews or listings that were once free. So a new stream of revenue has been developed."

Titmowse Question #2: Is there still room for a newbie in the TGP site owner biz?

Shemp's Answer: "As for making money through TGPs, don't expect much if you are putting no effort into it."

What you must realize about Shemp and every other successful TGP webmaster is that they work their asses off. They spend every single day reviewing submissions, updating their sites with new galleries and monitoring those submissions for cheaters. They get hundreds of submissions per day along with buttloads of spam and emails from loyal surfers.

The life of a successful TGP webmaster is hard, as hard as any gallery builder's. Profit requires constant vigilance, enormous amounts of traffic and good, quality galleries. Many of the top TGP webmasters won't accept submitted galleries without a partner account anymore. Quite of few of them have converted to accepting only paid gallery spots.

Can the newbie adult webmaster still open a TGP and make money? Yes. Can he/she make as much money as Shemp or The Hun? Probably not.

As Shemp noted, the market is definitely oversaturated with TGP and gallery makers. The newbie TGP webmaster must work harder and longer than the masters of old. The newbie gallery maker must create/submit new pages at least daily if not more. They'll have to garner partner accounts and possibly pay for paid listings. Add into this equation, the skills of effective marketing and you end up with an astounding effort on your part.

TGPs aren't dead. They've been assimilated by the borg that is the adult Internet. They are but a cog where once; they stood out among the rest. You can still make money, but like the saying goes, there's no such thing as easy money.