In the past few months, we've all seen a lot of great websites go away due to lack of income. The problem those sites have is that they were relying on banner ads. Even Yahoo is having problems.

A skin site is very expensive to run. In fact, as skinning has become increasingly popular, it's become even harder to have a good skin site. So the ultimate in cruel ironies -- the success of the skinning community has been effectively wiping out the skin sites. That's because downloading a skin is a very bandwidth intensive thing. One user on the message boards pointed out that yesterday alone, just the top 10 skin authors efforts received 17,000 downloads. Assuming that each download probably averaged 500K in size, that's over 8 gigabytes of bandwidth used just for the skins of the top skin authors.

If you calculate that out, that's essentially a megabit per second of bandwidth right there. So you can imagine how much bandwidth these skin sites use. And bandwidth costs a great deal. But it doesn't stop there, all the coding and administering can be costly too.

But there is a second issue involved too -- the skin authors. As the quality of the programs improves, the time it takes to create a "proper" skin increases. The first 12 WindowBlinds skins released were by me and each one only took several hours to make. They were awful though. Today, a full skin can take weeks to perfect. Skinning is a hobby but it's a very time consuming hobby. Wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to help users, help the websites, and help skin authors?

That's where the WinCustomize CD comes into play. It'll be available later this month for $19.95. It'll include all the skins, icons, and themes that we have permission to put on the CD. Plus it'll have 2 full skin suites created by two of the top skin authors in the community -- Alexandrie and Treetog. Two people who have contributed many of the best skins over the past couple of years. So users who purchase the CD will not only be helping the site but they'll be getting a handy archive of the skins (with a very nice interface to getting them -- i.e. it's not just a bunch of files dumped into a directory). Given the events of recent weaks with our long time friends at Deskmod, we can all imagine how handy it would have been if there had been a CD archive of Deskmod.

If the CD does well enough, we hope to start creating a second CD that will have more original skin suites made by many of the top authors in the community. Don't worry, as users can see, the number of "free" skins being created not only increases in number but has been increasing in quality. That's not going to change. But imagine the scenario where skin authors could somehow make a little bit of money from their hobby? Enough money to buy that new computer or a new version of a graphics program or something to help their families. Then next time someone says to them "Why are you spending all your time making those skins?" they can give a good reason. Thus if successful, we'll see even more free skins as well as the knowledge that the sites and authors and users are all working together helping each other out.

And at the end of the day, you have a solution in which the increasing bandwidth costs are somewhat offset. The users get a good archive and some really first rate new skins and skin authors start to be able to benefit from the popularity of their work.

The first WinCustomize CD will be available in a couple weeks. Your comments are welcomed.