In the future, if someone wants to just link to this here's where I've posted this article:

http://draginol.stardock.com/Articles/Thereisnosuchthingsasafre.html


More and more often, users are finding that their favorite websites are now starting to ask them to contribute something back. It doesn't take a long time for some of these users to become offended and complain. Of course, they don't just come out and tell the truth "Look, I'm just a cheap leech and I want everything for free..." No, they try to hide their cheapness behind athe guise of moral outrage.

This faux moral outrage differs from site to site. But it usually involves the person who wants unlimited use of the site without contributing anything back claiming that the people running the site are "greedy".

I am an administrator on WinCustomize.com. It's a skin site where many of the most talented graphics designers from around the world submit their work. Their skins and themes and icons and wallpapers are then downloaded by users. The site is owned by Stardock and the most popular libraries on the site are for Stardock's software. The only thing that makes the site even remotely possible to have up is that a group of very generous hardworking volunteers from the "skinning" community donate their time to run the site. These volunteers are made up of by some of the top graphics designers around. So in essence, the site is actually run by the best and brightest of the community and Stardock pretty much takes a back seat and pays for the bandwidth and the programming.

Even still, the site costs quite a bit of money per year. Our ISP, MCI Worldcom (don't get me started) charges around $400 per megabit and we have 20 megabits in use ($8000 per month). The site also costs us roughly $50,000 per year in salaries and equipment to maintain the site. Or in other words, the site costs roughly $150,000 per year.

Stardock's actually in an unusual situation because it makes the software the most of the users of the site are using.. Because its software is sold directly, it therefore knows which users have purchased the software and which ones have not. As the site began to push up against that 20 megabit limit, something had to be done. The site was simply costing too much per year. So Stardock did some analysis on how that bandwidth was used:

It turned out that while the site got millions of visits each month, the bandwidth was consumed mostly by a tiny percentage of those users. It turned out that over 12,000 people had downloaded over 100 megabytes. Nothing wrong with that until it was discovered that of those 12,000, only a couple thousand of them had actually purchased the software that they were downloading the skins for.

In short, a large percentage of the bandwidth was being used by warez users essentially.

Contrary to what some may believe, no website is free. Someone has to pay for it. WinCustomize is paid for by Stardock but who pays Stardock? The individuals who purchase Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, DesktopX, etc.

So if WinCustomize was to keep going, Stardock either had to raise the prices on its software to help pay for the non-contributing users or it had to find ways to get those bandwidth intensive users to contribute something back or go away (note: getting these people to simply go away is an acceptable result - many users are under the mistaken belief that they do a site a favor simply by visiting).

Throwing pop up ads and other nonsense at its users was not an acceptable solution. The crass commercialism of the Internet was not going to be on WinCustomize (who doesn't hate those pop up ads?). Stardock decided it was not fair to force its customers to indefinitely subsidize those who were just taking and not giving anything back to the community in return.

So the solution WinCustomize came up with was relatively straight forward:

Once a user downloaded 100 megabytes of stuff, they had to do one of the following:

a) Buy a WinCustomize subscription ($20 for 2 years - 80 cents per month). They get a bunch of really cool goodies along with unlimited downloads.

OR

Register the warez/shareware version of the software they were downloading those skins, themes, icons for.

OR

c) Start contributing to the site by helping users on the message boards, submitting news on relevant things, and generally being a positive presence via written activity.

OR

d) Start making skins, icons, themes, whatever to begin contributing something back to the community.

Any one of those 4 things would do the job.

At the end of the day, someone has to pay that $150,000 that the site costs to have per year. For the past year, it's been people who register Object Desktop or one of its components. A user who thinks it's unfair that they have to do something in order to keep downloading stuff forever should ask themselves if it's fair that someone else has to pay for the bandwidth they're consuming. Because there's no such thing as a free website.