Although there are 1000s of different xxx sites, most fall into one of two categories. Those that charge for access and those that are free to access. The one thing in common they all have is photo or video content for their users. To start we will take a look at those that offer content for free.

Free Access

The most popular free xxx sites are thumbnail gallery posts or more commonly known as a TGP. This is usually a one page site, often with many categories, where the site owner has listed links to pages, the galleries, where there is usually 10 to 20 small photos, the thumbnails. When a visitor clicks on one of the thumbnails it opens up into a full size picture. The site owner may create and list their own galleries or those of other companies or individuals that have submitted them. As bandwidth increased, TGPs started adding links to video galleries in addition to photos and these soon became known as MGPs for movie gallery posts.

While TGPs and MGPs provide visitors with free photo sets and short video clips, the whole purpose of them is for the creator to add advertising on the pages to membership sites that cost money. The idea is if a visitor likes the photos or videos and wants to see more, they will click through to the pay site and sign up. If they do so, the membership site pays a commission, either a flat rate or a percentage, back to the web site operator that put the banners up on their TGP or MGP pages.

As the popularity of TGPs and MGPs grew there was a belief among many that too much free content was being given away. This in theory prevented people from signing up to pay sites. This started a movement known as TGP2 that used certain tactics to reduce the amount of free content made available. For example, less thumbnails per page or linking some of the thumbnails to the pay site join page or not linking the thumbnails to anything. As you might guess, TGP2 style free sites were not well accepted by the public and as such never really gained much momentum.

There are so many TGP/MGP sites out there now that it is hard to tell some of them apart. A few of the larger ones attracted many repeat visitors - especially when the site updates their galleries often. Those that get allot of traffic also sell advertising on their sites to help supplement their income. While they certainly have their usefulness, their downside is that the quantity and quality of the content is usually not very good. For example, the photos and videos are often not high resolution and the video clips are often very short and small in dimensions.

Paid Access

Sites that offer access to their content for a fee come in a variety of formats. In the early days of Internet porn, adult verification services, otherwise known as an AVS, were popular. These types of sites charged a fee and in the process verified that you were and adult or at least that you owned a credit card. Once signed up, you were provided access to multiple sites within the AVS's network. The sites in the AVS network were independent sites that the AVS had partnered with in order to share access and membership fees with. The partner sites were of varying qualities but often they were nothing more than TGPs with a larger than normal quantity of content. Although AVSs are still around, they are not nearly as popular anymore.

As billing solutions began to be offered to more and more site owners and content became more available and at a lower cost, many who previously had built sites to get listed in AVSs began creating their own membership sites. This way they could earn more money from membership fees as they did not need to share it with the AVS. This trend continues to this day and many site owners create and manage multiple sites.

Those that created multiple sites often ended up creating what are known as affiliate programs whereby they pay a commission to others, such as TGP and MGP owners and gallery builders, for promoting one or more of their sites. The majority of membership sites today are run by companies that operate a network of sites. The tell tale sign of this is when you see a "Webmasters" link at the bottom of the page which leads to a site where affiliates can signup and start promoting the company's sites.

The conventional membership site consists of a often attractive looking "tour" which tries to sell visitors on signing up for access to the "members" area. At the end of a tour, which is usually a 2 to 3 pages, there is a join form where interested people can sign up for access to the members area.Once inside the members area visitors are provided access to photos and videos or any other features as promised on the tour.

As more and more Internet users got high speed broadband connections the idea of video on demand otherwise known as VOD started to catch on. Unlike a membership site where you pay a set amount per month for access, a VOD site allows one to view videos on a pay per view basis. Usually when videos are rented in this manner they are streaming over the Internet in real time or in some cases downloaded to ones computer for viewing later. Users usually buy "minutes" which they can then apply to watch partial or complete xxx movies.

Conclusion

Free sites and paid sites both have their advantage and disadvantages. If you are not as concerned with the quality or length of the content, you can still find quite a lot of content through TGP and MGP sites. However if you want higher quality and a larger selection of photos and longer and larger videos, you probably want to look into a traditional membership site or newer VOD site.