I did tgps and galleries for a while, I was into the more blind/traffic trading tgps and those are shit, nothing but a mess, at least for me anyways, lots of stress, lots of things to worry about like trade scripts and all that bullshit. My gallery posting income just kept going downhill and going downhill. The demise of my gallery income lead to me starting up with free sites. And for me personally I feel like I have found my calling in this biz with free sites
You want to know what sucks major balls? Having a tgp that is getting over 350k hits a day and making like 50$/day. TGP traffic is a VERY fickle beast. Put a couple ads up and your click ratio to trades goes down 40% and your site traffic falls into the shitter. I have been running sites where the slightest little change would totally fuck everything up. Oh and dont get me started on the thumbnail tgps, I have tried doing those at least 5 or 6 times and have failed miserably every single time. I dont know how many times I have heard, read, talked to someone, or personally had one of those thumbnail tgps that listed all hosted galleries with fancy rotating software, had over 100k/day in traffic and couldnt make at least 1 sale a day. And like I said if you do have 100k/day on one of those sites you better not even think about trying put any ads up because if you do the clicks go right into the shitter and your 100k site drops to 35k and all you end up sending that fucking ad that destroyed your traffic is maybe 100 or 200 hits a day and your lucky to get a sign up a month off it.
I am in the process of launching my first link list right now, yeah its alot more work to get a link list going than a tgp, but its just time consuming stuff that I dont really mind doing. Right now it has a small amount of traffic that I am sending thru it myself and got a couple good link trades going on it the last day or so and I have made 2 sign ups this week off this little brand new site that just has a trickle of traffic. And am sending more traffic to sponors everyday than I did with a 30-40k/day bs tgp. When I want to put in some more paysite links I dont have my head spinning with worries about oh shit how bad is this gonna fuck up my click %. I dont have to look at a trade script every few hours to make sure someone aint fucking with me.
I guess after rambling on and rambling on I'll get on with my point pertaining to the topic
From my personal experiences I would think that mixing traffic wouldnt be good at all for the linklist. The second one of those fickle tgp surfer bastards goes to a free site they are gonna be like WTF is this shit I dont see pictures and close the site. I personally think that TGP traffic is nothing but pollution in the link list/free site pool. I know there there are a few link lists sending traffic to TGPs because they might send the TGP 300-500 hits and get something ridiculous like 15-20k back. That TGP aint doing that because he's opening up a charity, he's doing that because the average TGP he trades with might have a click productivity of 300-400% and that might be a stretch. Well I can pretty much guarantee that link list has a click productivity of over 4000 to 6000% on the TGP.
I know back when I ran some huge bs tgps, I dont think I ever traded with a pure linklist, but if you could score a trade with one of the top super quality sites that was the whole key to growing your traffic. I know at one point I was sending Dr. Bizzaro something like 25-30k/day to get 5 or 6k back, but his 5 or 6k he was sending me was clicking around so much it was allowing me to send 80-90k/day to my other trades. His traffic had a hits out to trade productivity of over 1300% thats not counting the hits which was 2 out of 3 to galleries.
I guess there are a few rare exceptions of TGPs being real sites (like Dr Bizzaro) and not just traffic swaps, but there are not too many of them. The vast majority of the time tgp=circle jerk bullshit and linklist="real traffic"
Just so that its official: I HATE TGPs hahaha