you can't http a news link...

Do-eth.

Frogboy, here's what I think:
If a site provides a "home base"/showcase for content that would otherwise require dozens of "stops" on the web, that's a good thing. If it also happens to be a site that serves as a sort of support channel for users, that's even better. But, in my opinion, such sites rely heavily (or they certainly should be thinking about it) on "brand loyalty". The primary reason I am here, and support WinCustomize/Stardock is because of the support *I* get. That is to say, the quality of the products, and the attitude of the staff and those that support the products. If that turns to crap, I'd have no problem searching out the content on as many sites as it takes to get it. So, yes, in a nutshell, I think the financial viability of a website, and particularly their ability to succeed using a subscription based model depends almost entirely on loyalty. If people perceive that things are going south (perception is everything), they will leave. So, I guess that as you noted under "donations", paying users are going to expect a website's "soul" too.

Good points.

Let me clarify - on donations the users seem to expect to own the soul of the individual operator. Whereas subscribers become customers of the site and thus have a reasonable expectation of support and loyalty from the site.

But no one, for instance, expects me or Alexandrie or T-man to provide our tax returns in exchange for a WC subscription. That's basically what happened at .

How is profiting from artist creations a service? You mean the bandwidth? Do you charge or have an upload cap? You'll have to excuse me but I find it hard too believe that you're not selling content... its not like this is slashdot where news is the content and that news being written by yourself or exclusive videos and interviews at gamespot....this is other people works.

Bandwidth isn't free. Access to skins is free. How much bandwidth a user uses without contributing something back is therefore limited.

BTW, slashdot? Uh, what original news are you talking about?

Selling content doesn't work IMO. You have to sell the services. When a user subscribes to an ISP, they are subscribing to get bandwidth. The same is true of WinCustomize. Your ISP isn't selling content, they are selling you bandwidth to access the content (the Internet).

Competition between ISPs therefore focuses on their ability to deliver that content (usually in terms of speed). That is the model websites should use (IMO). Since a user can get most content from a variety of sources, the website has to show that by subscribing they are able to save the user time or money in accessing that content.

Here's my odd ball way of putting it. If you are a member of a country club you have to pay to become a member. Once you pay nothings free. You still have to pay for your green fees, food and what not. If you go to most strip clubs, there's a cover charge. Nothing's free once you get inside. Here, once you subscribe everything's still free.Artists have a place to upload tons of their works, users can down load a ton of whatever they want. I don't see the problem with this system.

Memberships, donations, and merchandise start out doing pretty well and slowly fade. As a result, none of them are really stable ways of funding a site. I've seen quite a few sites try all of these out, and very few actually do well with these programs. Memberships only really work if users want something from the site they can't get for free anywhere else. That's why sites like F'dcompany have done well from memberships, but skin/art sites haven't. As most people know, advertising is pretty much dead at this point, especially with ad companies charging a .20cpm serving fee. That said, unless you're running a unique site where one of these methods fits in really well, making money off a site is near impossible.

deviantART seems to be doing really well with their prints service, and it's pretty obvious to me why. First off, you can't really get something like what they offer anywhere else (the same reason memberships sometimes work), you get something tangible for your money, and finally because they've created a really solid system. What they've done takes a lot of time and money to setup, so a similar program isn't viable for most sites.

At DeskMod we never wanted to alienate our users with pop-up ads, desperate news posts asking for donations, and membership plans that didn't really offer much. Basically, we don't want money from our users because we still believe the Internet was meant to be free, even though that isn't viable for most sites. We had many requests for DeskMod t-shirts, so we have made those available, but just slightly above cost to make it worth our while. Merchandise sells well when you first introduce it, but over time it slows down greatly, so there's no way to fund a site just on that.

We finally realized ads weren’t working and there was really no other option that would allow us to pay our bills yet not annoy our users. So we've decided to make the site non-profit, which it basically always has been. We don't display any paying ads now, we will never try to take people's money for some random service we think we can provide, and we won't try and pay our bills by overcharging for merchandise. Instead, we've decided to take an entirely different route.

As an alternative to trying to make money from the site itself, we've decided to make it on the side and fund the site with our profits from that. The idea is simple, put our skills to work for other people. We opened up a small web development company and pick up a few contract jobs to pay our bills. We're making enough now to support the site and ourselves, we were able to keep the site "pure", and we have plenty of remaining time to work on the site. Our plan is to pick up contract jobs every few months, and then live off the money while focusing our time on developing DeskMod. The best part is, it's working.

Sure, it would be great to only work on DeskMod, but that just isn't realistic in our case. This seems to be the answer for us, but every site is truly different.

Guess my view on it is that the material offered here is user created putting it under copyright laws. I understand the theory of "bandwidth", and a serious issue is the question of, "How do we pay for this bandwidth?" I really don't see what the goal is though. If this is a stardock funded site then it should be a write-off for the promotion of stardocks software. I think you have gone one further and have now focused on making the site turn a profit. Is this a win, win situation at the expence of other peoples creativity and hard work is all i'm asking. So, if the website doesn't turn a profit, write it off as a bussiness expence. But, if it does don't claim it and take the money and run? I don't understand the minimization of "Bandwidth" over copyright law. How bandwidth cost overides trademarks in certain materials on this site. The trademaked material was created by artists. Someone just like me, I went to an academy of art for 4 years, made little if any money for 5 years after that and then I saw one of my creations used on this site, a trademark I made. I won't ask anyone too remove it; infact, I can't. The contract forbids me claiming it as my work. But, I would still like you too know that I feel for you too offer it as "bandwidth", for you too use it as an insentive or in anyother manner without consent from the corporation it was produced for is, well... just terrible. Did you put me through school? Did I speand 5 years trying too support my wife and kids for you? This is where I feel a little pain in the theory of "too pay for bandwidth." How does that give this site the right to charge for bandwidth when you shouldn't be distributing the media in the first place. You accepting an upload of trademarked copywritten logo then charging for the bandwidth to download it isn't your right. Im not sure how anyone can minimize that with a thruthfull reply.

risk7, please think about what you are saying with an open mind. I give you this example.

I haven't been to a video game store in a while cause I just don't have money to spend on that, but I remember when they had shareware for sale. You know that free software that you give to your friends for free? But you had to pay for it sometimes, just a few bucks. This was enough to cover the cost of the medium & shipping for the shareware software creator.

It is the same idea as paying for a membership to wincustomize. You are paying for the medium on which you get the data. Would you make the same argument to your internet provider as above and demand they give you internet service for free cause you are not accessing their data? Chances are no, you would not. You pay them for access to bandwidth, the medium over which you transfer data for the internet. So you see it's really not much different.

If wincustomize decides to charge you to use their medium to access their data that is their call. Now if the authors of the data disagree then definitely their data should be taken off the site, that is the author's right.

I definitely do not want to have to pay for access to wincustomize, and I probably wouldn't, I would most likely just discontinue my object desktop subscription when it ran out & forget about it cause there are other things more important to me. But I must say I feel their pain on the bandwidth bill. It's not cheap man. I am not restricted by amount of bandwidth for my website cause I host it off my dsl but it is a hefty bill let me tell you for a 1.1 mb/sec up/down sdsl. And I wish I could provide faster access to my content for people, I hate to imagine if I had a limited gb transfer per month and always went over it.

I guess in short it all boils down to lately the economy is not in great shape and everybody is getting up tight about money. I'm not saying this is the case for star dock or wincustomize but maybe its the case for the company they get their bandwidth from, or perhaps the company that does hardware services for stardock/wincust bandwidth provider. Somewhere along the line it hits you no matter where you're at. Right now that's just the way it is.

If you read this far, sorry for such a long post.

I wanted to comment on this earlier but didn't have time. I agree with Nate Pinchot as far as paying for bandwidth. The arguement being made by risk7, while good, lacks at certain major points.

The bottom line is that a good site cost money to run. The idea that the internet should be free never really was a reality since you DO have o pay a service provider just to access it. Also once a site reaches a cerstain size, it becomes expencive to run. If you want boring stangnate sites then read some of the earlier sites web pages... nothing but text. No graphics or site design what so ever. Do you think as many people would come to this site is it was just text? Somebody had to design this site (and get paid for it), somebody has to maintain the site (and pay for it).


I have been watching closely how sites make money or at least break even and I truely believe that there is a way for sites to make profit or at least break even.

One way I have been analizing is a consortium of sites standing up to advertisers by saying we are worth more. Much like TV or newspapers, or even billboards, ads are just for viewing, not for click throughs. If your ad is on my site you pay me for the millions of people who veiw your ad. That is clearly a commotity. Depending on how many times I see Tide detergent I might be more inclinde to buy it. (Which is the idea)

Aslo advertising on the web is lame at best. No thought is really put into it. Most advertiser think if the are using flash then its good enough, as oppossed to designing it well.

I hope when I finish my research I can show it to you guys and get some opinions as to how the internet can look a few years from now. But we will have to work together. All sites.

I agree with Nate as well.

Risk7's arguments just don't hold water. Redhat Linux, which is open source, isn't free at the store. Why is that?

It's because there are costs incurred in order to provide users with that level of access to their distribution of Linux.

When a given thing costs money, someone has to pay for it. If it's not going to be the people using it then who? Different companies have different ideas on how to do it. On WinCustomize, Object Desktop users get full access to WinCustomize automatically.

Ideally, coersion is never needed. The guy who's using WindowBlinds and downloading skins shouldn't have to be coerced to pay the $20 to buy it. But what do you do when they don't pay for the shareware they're using? When they don't contribute back to the site they're making massive use on? It always strikes me as odd that someone can paint those people as victims.

In the case of WinCustomize, no one has every put forth a compelling argument as to why Stardock should have to pay the bandwidth used by warez users.

Regarding deviantART. The DAPrints concept is a great idea. And I hope it's doing well. It would be interesting to find out how well it is doing.

The challenge Deskmod faces is as Gorman has illustrated - it's essentially a hobbiest site. The problem with such sites is that there is a limit as to how big it can grow.

In the article series I'm writing I talk about measuring expenses as cost per 1000 people. What kills hobbiest sites is that they start out with say a cost of say $3 per 1000 visit per month. If the site gets say 500,000 visits per month then it's costing the people who run the site $1,500 per month. At some point the site's popularity may exceed the ability of the people who own the site to keep it going.

That's why you so often see popular sites run as hobbies disappear when they get really popular. This is something Neowin is currently running into.