I highly recommend checking out Crae's insightful article at Tek. It looks back on the world of skinning in the past year:

http://www.teknidermy.net/article.php3?title=25&issue=6&volume=1

I really enjoyed the article. Though I disagree with the view that things look bleak.

But I can see where he's coming from. The skin community is rapidly approaching a cross roads. Actually, an on-ramp may be a better analogy. The release of Windows XP is likely to completely put skinning into the mainstream. This is an anathema to those who like to see it as a cottage industry. Indeed, those who see small developers like Stardock as a threat to the cottage industry are really going to be up in arms as the millions of newbie skinners jump in once XP opens their eyes.

How do we measure the success of a skinning community? Most old timers have an exagerated memory of skinz.org. That was a site I loved. But being friends with Mian and Toasty, I also knew their traffic. In terms of community activity, DeviantArt dwarfs skinz.org (in terms of postings). In terms of actual skins being downloaded per day, WinCustomize does vastly more downloads per day than skinz.org did at its height and rougly and equal amount of message board traffic (in posts per day). And these sites are able to do that without completely dominating the community as skinz.org did.

Of course, back then it was a much smaller community. Skinz.org was the first professionally run no nonsense skin site. For those of you who don't know Mian and Toasty, they are both truly gifted. They..get it. They have an uncanny business sense of knowing what they need to do. They don't innovate, but they see a concept and they make it better and one of the results of their professionalism was skinz.org.

And while it did dominate, it wasn't as popular as DeviantArt or WinCustomize are today. Skinz.org had a total of 100,000+ registered users when it went down after nearly 2 years of being up. WinCustomize got 40,000 new registered accounts last month alone.

A news item on DeviantArt can get hundreds of users participating in it. Something that never would have or could have happened on skinz.org.

So in terms of the quantity of users, the skin community is growing. Perhaps what Crae sees as bleak is the loosening of the community -- it's not tight knit anymore. It's more splintered...more diluted. That I would agree with.