To those of you who promote your sponsored themes on themes.wordpress.net or the Weblog Tools collection - did you see this? http://www.simplekindoflife.com/2007/07/12/no-more-sponsored-themes/ If Matt's plans go as planned, all themes listed on the WordPress Theme Viewer, those in the Codex WordPress Theme List which contain sponsored links, will be removed by July 21, 2007, unless their authors remove them first. I'm none too pleased about that. Just an FYI for those of you buying / selling sponsor spots on your themes.
Yes, it's the buzz right now, however there ar other directories out there but most will argue that these sites (wtc,themes.wordpress.net) have good traffic but i think in the longer the run other sites that actually post about sponsored themes will also gain popularity. Anywayz i do hope to get comments on my post.
It was inevitable but also kinda dumb. Sponsored themes are too much of a good thing to webmasters and all it will do is drive things underground. The theme makers (myself included) will just have one link - the sponsors link - at the bottom of future themes they create. Therefore what has it stopped? Nothing! I've had over 100,000 inbound links from themes I've created over the years -- both for my own sites as well as customers sites. You think I'm gonna stop with that? No way!! The juice is just too damn good!!
I have to agree that the quality of templates have been lowered (There are soooo many ugly ones out there). Maybe this will work best... it'll force designers to design nicer themes.. even though we have to promote them somewhere else, atleast the download rates might become higher since they're of higher quality? (and fewer themes will be released..) if that makes sense
Well I have to agree with you somewhat. A lot of the designs are quite bad but many of them are quite good as well (of course the ones I do are great! ). What amazes me is how fast they all wiz through so maybe things will slow down a bit and you will get more downloads per theme (as you said). It'll definitely be interesting anyway.
IT's good for us who design nice themes it just means that we get more exposure .. so more downloads takes out some competition eh?
I believe so.. if you read the article. Atleast those who started in the beginning already have their downloaded WP themes floating around.. so those backlinks won't really be effected. You just won't be gaining anymore new backlinks once the themes have been removed (atleast from there)
This is stupid, cos 80% of the themes ARE sponsored, if they remove them all, they'll only have a few crappy ones left and no one would actually want to visit their site because it wouldn't have any themes at all.
But if you look at the ratio between nice and ugly sponsored themes.. most are ugly Ah, they can't remove the nice popular ones can they? I have to agree with you on only having ugly themes left.. lol... Do you think they'll allow us to keep ATLEAST "designed by ___" (a credit???)
Yup, previously sponsored themes will be removed. Just as well most of my themes aren't sponsored Sure gonna put a dampener on those people currently auctioning off themes here though! I mean what's the point of buying them if they can't be uploaded anywhere decent?
There are still quite a few WP theme sites that still lead to downloads so the market is still there. Someone is eventually going to have to create a free WP theme site that allows people to upload sponsor links, maybe it'll become more popular
Weblogtoolscollection.com and WordPress.com are the really big ones though. The other sites are fairly minimal, downloads wise, compared to the two main ones. You are right though. It might open up some new opportunities for some people.
then they can get more popular.. it's quite obvious as WP.net will lower in submissions while these other sites will higher in theme submissions. People will go to the one with more themes Hopefully competition for better designs will rise as well.
This suck but instead of having sponsored links can we put. Designed by: Link Coded by: Link ? Will that be allowed?
That's what I asked but who knows.. you know that could be abused by putting a sponsor's link there instead right? unless they monitor it! I hope they can do this = maximum exposure for my graphics design business
I was thinking of putting a Designed link by me and finding a sponsor VIA pm for the Coded by. I buy and then find sponsors for my themes to make my money back so I get links and have equal money.
Even if you do this discreetly it's still really easy to detect simply because the URL will lead to a non design portfolio site (something unrelated like.. a directory or fan site )