Just thought I'd add a couple things.. first, the idea of selling skimmed gallery spots seems strange by itself but that's just how it works in thumb tgp. I could remove skims to the paid spots which make up for the vast majority of my gallery spots and in the short run, you would get more hits. But after a short period, since I'm sending about 10 to 15 percent of the hits to my trades as I used to, my overall traffic goes down quickly and you are receiving a lot less hits to your galleries.
I'm thinking more hits over the long term is better than a short burst in the short run. No skimming works a lot better on TEXT tgp's. When you add text links to other TGPs on a thumb site, the thumbs are a lot more noticable. But on a text site you can make them stand out more than the simple text gallery listings. Making text stand out more than a picture isn't easy.
Next, once Paypal closed my account I didn't have much choice but to sign on with GTS. I tried using epassporte but hardly anybody uses them it seems, the sales went way down with the same price. The service has been very good with GTS. There was a slight price increase but it was still in line with other TGPs out there, I still felt you were getting a lot of traffic for the money, and fairly good quality traffic at that. I could have gotten my own merchant account but that meant I had to get a new system programmed and also watch out for fraud a lot more. GTS was the better solution.
Anyways, I'm not about to say that you will always profit from buying a link on my site no matter what sponsor you use, what your galleries look like, etc.. you won't.. but as a few people said, as long as you choose your sponsors well that is related to my traffic (teen, lesbian, hardcore, etc) and it's not over-saturated you should do just fine.
Hope that clears it up
