A thumbnail is a small version of an image; when clicked, it typically leads to the full-size version of the image. "Thumbnail galleries" are web pages that contain some 10-20 thumbnails of pornographic photos or movies. Visiting these galleries is free: their purpose is advertising. The material comes from a commercial pornographic web site, to which several links are provided.

Thumbnail gallery pages (TGP's) are either run by the commercial sites themselves, or by third-parties ("affiliates") who are paid by those sites for web traffic or for subscriptions sold. This system of website content promotion is the main advertising vehicle for Internet pornography today.

A TGP site is a large, constantly updated and sometimes categorized list of links to thumbnail galleries. A TGP site that hosts links to movie galleries instead of, or in addition to, picture galleries is sometimes called a movie gallery post (MGP). Some TGPs give simple text links, others provide a thumbnail image for each gallery they link to. The TGP owner makes money by serving paid ads in addition to the gallery links. TGP owners are typically separate from the gallery owners and the subscription website owners.

Listing a gallery on a TGP is free; the TGPs usually provide simple submission mechanisms. Gallery owners face the task of having to submit their gallery to several hundred TGPs. They can buy so-called auto-submitter software which automates this process. TGP owners can sign up with these software makers for free so that they get more gallery submissions.

The large and well-established TGPs are among the most popular internet porn sites, and they wield considerable power over gallery creators: they dictate the precise format of galleries (such as: 10-20 thumbnails linking directly to full-size images, only 2-3 ads, no popup consoles) and won't list any non-conformant galleries. Some also charge gallery owners for prominent placement. Some TGPs present the galleries inside a frame, allowing the placement of additional advertisements or a link back to the TGP in a separate, always visible frame.

Before the advent of TGPs in the second half of the 1990s, free advertising porn galleries usually linked the images behind cute little icons and the surfer had no idea what was behind them before he clicked.

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