I also just wanted to mention that my main site has had 142,391 hits in the last 24 hours. Those 142,391 hits have resulted in 461,346 clicks, 332880 of those clicks have gone to the gallery intended (28% skim ratio).
I started this tgp in february. I think that 28% skim is a very healthy number and i have a lot of bookmarkers. I can't imagine starting a TGP from scratch (except for perhaps 404 traffic) and getting that amount of traffic with that level of prod in just 6 months. I have also generated 7 sales off hosted galleries in the last 24 hours.
So, to return to the point of the thread, skimming the hosted galleries (as well as submitted galleries) has given me what I need to grow my traffic, which has resulted in sales that benefit both myself and the sites I promote.
7 sales that i would have not generated if I had gone with strictly a hard link trade scenario.
I will say this, if I could get away with just doing hard link trading, I would love too. In fact I have a hard link only text tgp that is my pet project. The one i hope turns into a golden goose, but it's like watching grass grow. So i just let it sit, manage link exchanges, and watch it grow... slowly (i also use archived galleries from my main site so I don't have to waste time approving galleris for such a small site
).