Part I: "The community of 2001"

One of the interesting things in setting up a site in a "virtual community" is that no matter what the community is, there are militants. Whether that be a Lord of the Rings website in which self-appointed zealots will scream at the fact that the movie had corn (a new world crop) in it or whether you set up a Star Trek site and militants scream whether Rick Bergman is a destroyer of "Gene's" vision or not. There are militants in every community who usually have a very limited understanding of the whole but are not aware of it and have the time and energy to attack those that do not see things in the way they do. Logic is meaningless to them, emotion, good intentions, and purity are what matter.

Our community is no different and to those of you who visit here for the skins and are just checking this out, it may seem unbelievable (what's there to get upset about)?

2001 was, for better or worse, when commercial interests encroached into realms that had been perceived as grass roots. This site, owned by a company that makes skinnable software, was put up when Skinz.org went down (a for-profit site in itself owned by a for profit-company called eFront).

The angst generated by having a vested interest though owning a large scale skin site was significant and relatively constant. Just as many people are uncomfortable with Newsweek being owned by AOL-Time Warner, quite a number of people had the same problems with a skin site, which "should" be neutral being owned by a software developer (note: a software developer is actually okay to many of them, just that it's a software company that charges money for their software - making money being bad apparently). Stardock went from "good samaritan" to "evil corporate monopolist". The transition in the minds of those who feel that way wasn't based on deeds so much as by the discomfort of any single entity seemingly becoming too "dominant" (and I can assure you, Stardock is a tiny fish in a very large pond, it's all relative).

Looking through the statistics of last year brings some really interesting facts: A full 75% of the referrals of 2001 came from Stardock. 3 out of 4 people that came to this site from another page in 2001 came from Stardock.

This is an important statistic. Not suprisingly, it was ignored in such debates since it was always very devastating to the arguments of the militants. Even when it was put forth at the time.

For example: "Why not put up a section for Application X"?

Our response was generally that we set a threshold of popularity before putting up a section. But even so, there was still a big issue - what if the application competes with something Stardock makes? That's a tough thing. It's one thing to host skins and themes for something that competes with the parent company, it's another thing to PROMOTE them. And that was where that 75% statistic always came into play. The argument by the militants was always that this site somehow leeched off the community to sell Stardock stuff. The statistics don't back that up (not even remotely).

The fact was in 2001, with 3 out of 4 people coming directly from Stardock (and another 9% coming from search engines) any program listed here is effectively being PROMOTED by Stardock.

To pile it on:
Referrals from:
Stardock: 75%
Search Engines: 9%
Other app developers (ICQPlus, Daansystems, Snoopsoft, etc.): 11%

That's 95% of the total referrals in 2001. That leaves only 5% referrals due to all the other sites on the Internet (including skin sites). Every referrals is precious but the point here is that the principle argument by the militants was again, that this site leached off the "community" to sell "Stardock stuff" was utterly false. As you can see from the stats, Paxx's argument was more on target - the site was effectively a Stardock community site - still part of the overall community - that has the most popular third party apps on it as well. And those popular third party apps got a great boost.

And that was much of the site's goal. The site isn't designed to promote Stardock as much as it is designed to promote customization in general. To show that there is a vibrant community of applications made by all sorts of people. Hence, by picking the ones that had created their own success, we could give a those 3 out of 4 people visiting the site a showcase of successful apps made by third parties and hopefully help them.

From Stardock's vantage point, when talking to the press (where the real marketing occurs, not on these websites as some people seem to think) when arguing the popularity of customization, the success of Stardock becomes less important than the success of third parties (like Winstep, snoopsoft, ICQPlus, etc.) becomes key but it has to be self-made success to be legitimate.

The net result is that in 2001, we saw the mainstreaming of customization. The "Skin community" became mainstreamed as literaly hundreds of thousands of new users came in and began to participate and join in on sites from WinCustomize to DeviantART. The militants, the "do Balrogs have wings?" usres, began their own interesting trend - they left. They left and started their own websites or proudly restarted old ones and tried to shut out the riff-raft of the commoners and the "commercial greed" that those commoners seem to embrace.

So where do we go in 2002? One reason we didn't set up more sections was also to avoid harming the other skin sites. At the end of 2001, DeviantART towers above all the other skin sites in traffic and community activity. And Deskmod and Skinbase on the fast rise. With the influence that the militants having waned, the rest of us have to decide which path to take. I'll talk about that in the next post.

It has been a great year though and it has been a real honor to serve you. It has been highly enjoyable interacting with such a group of people and seeing us build such cool things over the past year. Happy new year!