A large percentage of you who read this are already WinCustomize premium subscribers. You've already done your part to help this site keep going.

But I must say, things are grim this holiday season here. 2 expensive servers are down. We must get 2 new servers in here. We need to get another 2 servers on top of that for redundancy but that can wait a bit. But it's depressing knowing that millions visit this site each month and we've only gotten 156 new subscribers since the subscription drive began. It definitely makes a strong case that perhaps the days of free skins are over. That the skin authors and web masters, who pull their weight, should move towards a more commercial model that benefits primarily those who contribute (skinners, subscribers, and developers). 

My friend Scott (Jark) has much the same problems over at deviantART: http://news.deviantart.com/article/12039/

That is, the problem of having massive MASSIVE traffic but only a tiny fraction of those users paying the bill. Many people think, incorrectly, that massive traffic == money. It doesn't.

I can tell you, those of you who have purchased premium subscriptions here have helped the community in ways that the average user can't possibly fathom.  Premium subscribers combined with the volunteer efforts of this site's administrators (Jafo, Boxxi, DavidK, Treetog, Alexandrie, Kaosati, MikeB, Hippy, and others) are what keep things going.

Without the premium subscriptions, I can tell you right now what would happen.  This site would slowly morph into being a purely Stardock oriented site with bandwidth caps for all users (including Object Desktop users - though theirs would be higher). Support for non-Stardock sections would slowly disappear or be restricted to subscribers only.  The wallpaper section would only be available to those who either have a wallpaper on there that got accepted or subscribers (in all these exaples, anyone with apprentice access or higher would be treated as a subscriber).

There would be banner ads, and things would become vastly more commercial. Instead of a free Christmas suite, it would be a $8 Christmas suite. Instead of free skins, a new system would b eput in place to allow authors to sell their skins as part of te library once they had achieved a certain access level. One-click purchasing by users with the skin authors getting a percent.

That is the commercialized future of skinning. The alternative. It's not necessarily dark and evil. But it is a much different world than what we have now. I suspect many skin authors out there would jump at the chance of being able to get paid for their skins.

I've posted for years that our community is made up of 3 co-equal groups: The skinners, the web masters, and the users.  We webmasters are doing everythign we can.  The skinners have done their part.  The users have to do their part as a collective.  Which means of the 75,000 unique visitors this site gets each day, 500 more of them need to contribute back too.  As the alternative to voluntarily helping will be paying bits and pieces here and there for skins and themes.  The alternative is a smaller community, a more commercialized community but a sustainable one too.

Personally, I hope some balance can be found. While some people think we represent the commercialization of skinning, in reality, we don't. We simply want...must find a sustainable model that allows our community to grow.  We have all seen the instability Deskmod, Skinz.org, and even Customize.org have faced.  The site has grown beyond what Stardock can pay for via Object Desktop sales.  While Stardock's revenue has grown, the traffic to this site has DOUBLED this year.

Like I said, a large percentage of you have already done your part. There's nothing more you can do.  But hopefully, the millions of people who come to this site will have some infintesible number of them that recognize that someone has to pay for all this stuff. 

The end of the year may end up being the end of this site as we know it. Those new machines will be purchased one way or the other. But if Stardock ends up having to pay for any of those two new machines, it's going to come with strings attached. Ones that will certainly benefit subscribers but the casual users of the world will probably not like.