"Their surfers are educated in the ways of free porn. Their competitors are innumerable and the days of money falling from the sky are long gone."

Back in 1995, I got my first computer and went online. Once I figured out how to use a search engine, I went on the hunt for this Internet porn I'd heard so much about.

Luckily I found a wonderful place named Persian Kitty. I spent many hours on my 14.4K modem visiting her new listings where I would find sites with free images. In those early days, the free images were hidden behind cute little icons and every picture would be a suprise. Then things started to get ugly. The new sites and even the ones I'd been to before started to spawn what seemed like hundreds of pop-up consoles.

Later, when I gave up trying to make non-adult webpages and started to make porn ones, I learned those endless windows were the result of a tactic adult webmasters used called circle jerking. I chose to be a more righteous adult webmaster and shunned the concept of making money by trapping a surfer in such an endless maze of consoles and windows, they signed up for a site membership just to make the madness stop.

Just the same, I was getting nowhere with my little collection of free images hidden behind tiny icons. A sage and wise webmaster told me I should make thumbnail gallery pages and submit them to special sites called TGPs or Thumbnail Gallery Posts. Unfortunately, I was stubborn and clung to my outmoded version of an adult site. When I finally did catch on, I began to convert all my hard effort into real, live cash.

That was four years ago. A lot has changed since then. Nowadays, there's tens of thousands of gallery-making webmasters and it almost seems like there's just as many TGPs.

My wonderful employer wants me to write an article about how to build a TGP site and frankly, my heart's not in it. I browse the adult webmaster message boards and read topics like: "How much traffic should a TGP get before they make a profit?" The replies are less than encouraging.

In fact, the majority of the respondents wonder why the inquisitor would want to start a TGP in the first place. They claim that there's no money in TGP sites anymore because there are so many of them. They talk about how a TGP should get at least 250K surfers a day before it would even begin to turn a profit. Others claim that the problem is with general-purpose TGPs and the money is in building a niche-based TGP. Then there are those who talk of the merits of TGP2. Still others are playing around with the idea of charging surfers a small fee to access their list of free gallery links.

In fact, there are all kinds of ideas flying around the adult Internet on how to add life to a market that is over-populated with suppliers.

How do TGPs Make Money?

Most of the time they fly the banners of non-porn sponsors on their sites which brings in some dollars. They also sell the top spots on their link lists to gallery builders willing to pay. They post affiliate links on their 404 pages and some have gone as far as to promote controversial dialer programs. They sell their exit traffic, offer privacy protection software and pepper their link lists with their own galleries.

Even with all this diversification, TGP owners have gotten so desperate to keep their surfers happy, they've started to apply submission rules so severe that gallery builders are beginning to consider a listing a waste of effort and bandwidth.

Regardless of my gloom and doom, it is possible for a new TGP owner to make money. They just have to try harder and market better than all the other TGP sites. The new TGP needs to specialize with niche listings such as fetish or centerfold galleries.

They need to invest in professional site management software. The new TGP owner has to shell out bucks for search engine placement and ad spots on adult webmaster resource sites. The TGP owner of today has to work far harder and market much more aggressively than the ones of the past.

I will not go as far as to say the TGP is dying a slow death but running, maintaining and making cash from one is by no means easy money or even good money. Their surfers are educated in the ways of free porn. Their competitors are innumerable and the days of money falling from the sky are long gone. If ever such a time existed.