TGP's are a tougher game these days as well.
I remember back in '99 when a good Hun listing and a couple Buffet family listings were good for 30-40 joins, now it's tougher...more people who have no clue how to make money from the traffic degarding the overall quality.
The way we used to make money on TGPs: submit a nice series gallery, use highly descriptive text links and never show hardcore...
now we have guys giving away movies...
For anyone having problems with TGP's, we've recently opened (but not yet officially announced)
http://www.tgpgrunts.com We'll have more (better) samples up shortly. Scooter and I are working on some other designs and layouts. We've discovered that turning your TGP gallery into a full page ad is better than just slopping together a bunch of pictures and a couple banners/text links. This is the common trend with galleries, fpa's and not the same 5 pics, banner, 5 pics, banner format that causes a surfer to simply ignore the banners/ads.
I've noticed a lot more sponsors providing hosted galleries. If done correctly these can be more profitable for the sponsor (they have better control voer the advertising message and content) they are making it even harder for the TGP submitter as the TGP owners are often using these hosted galleries and listing them higher than the submittals.
-- PS, we also provide hosted gallery templates ;))