Don't get me wrong WarpHead... if I could have just ONE pop-up on my gallery pages, I'd be there submitting bannerless textless galleris at the front of the queue, crack of dawn 6am every morning.
What this whole thing comes down to, is that tgp owners want all the money for themselves. They want people to GIVE them content, but they don't want any ads. They want the ad exposure all for themselves - that is why people like AL4A don't post free hosts. They want bookmarkers for more ad exposure. That in itself is quite clever of them - they get free content, and the Lion's share of ad exposure. But otherwise, the majority of tgp owners are a lot stupider than they think they are.
As a great man once said, "the smartest people in this biz are those who get all of the money, and have none of the content". It seems a trend that TGP owners think they have all the traffic because they're smart. Not true. Let's say that they never had their sites, and started up as a newbie tomorrow. Oh yeah... I can imagine them doing 600k within a week with an ultra clean site. No chance.
I remember that someone once posted on the PC Board after they had mailed one of the tgp owners - I'm not going to say the name - but it was either a guy from Thumbzilla, or someone from Hardcore Junky. They were asking why their gallery wasn't listed, and how they could improve it. Basically, the response was "fuck off I don't want to know". That is the kind of thing that makes tgp owners look very very stupid. The guy behind the mail could have been anyone, a sponsor, or one of their main or biggest link trades. However the tgp owner didn't regard them as important. That's a typical tgp owner's self opinion that they are, in fact, "God-like". The only reason that they are in the position that they are in, is simply because they are that little bit older and have been around longer. With the same attitudes, they wouldn't survive 3 months in the biz if they were to start as a newbie today. Their "we were here first so fuck off" attitude is laughable.
There are, however, a handful of tgp and link list owners that I do admire, and that are smart people. Hun... JJJ... TinyTeenGalleries.com... Easy Pic... Bizzaro and a few others.
But the rest can go fuck themselves.