If you didn't know already, sponsored WP themes are out.

As many blogs are reporting, a crack-down on sponsored wordpress themes is beginning. At the forefront is Mark Ghosh of weblog tools, and Matt Mullenweg himself.

Matt said:

Before WordCamp all sponsored themes should be removed from Theme Viewer.

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Anyway, there's a big link dump for you. I just thought this needed to be discussed somewhere intelligent (i.e. not shoemoney's blog). I'm shocked at how much people actually AGREE with this. A huge percentage of the themes out there are made by the designers because of the incentive of getting paid to put links at the bottom. Do these sheep honestly think that they will continue to get all these free themes? Sure, they'll get some, but these theme sites are going to lose a lot of designers. It's too much of a blanket ban - the links that are actually causing problems are those to drug sites, etc that can hurt a blog's rankings.

Now I haven't really done anything in this market, so I don't know about a lot of the theme sites - but it seems like weblog tools was a big one. It's obvious that all the designers who have been doing this are going to go somewhere other than weblog tools or themes.wordpress.com. Of course, when the users realize where all the themes have gone, they will follow.

So does anyone know of any big theme sites that aren't stupidly banning sponsored links? It's actually a good way to make money, especially if you're a middle man (that guy is an idiot, but this is a damn good idea) - buy full rights to the themes for $60-80 and then sells the text links for $100+ each. That's a great way of making money, but a lot of the theme downloaders are upset about it because he doesn't really contribute to the WP community. Well, fuck 'em, because it's a good idea.

I don't think this means the end of that as a money making strategy, but it's definitely going to be harder now - you just need to only allow non-spam links, and use a lot more theme sites to reach the level of downloads as before.

Thoughts?

I think their problem is when people put spammy viagra links in there, which could affect Google's trust factor of all the blogs they're put on. This I can understand - but a blanket ban is just a stupid, stupid way to try to solve things.

Since obviously they're going to need to moderate the theme submissions and look at the footer anyway, why not only decline the ones with spammy links? It isn't too hard to tell when you see a BUY VIAGRA link.

So you're against 1) Thanking the designer and 2) against giving away something that is arbitrary and unlimited?

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That's another issue they have - people putting links in there that AREN'T the designer. Like a middleman, as I said. He didn't actually design the templates, but bought rights to them. Still, if you ask me that right there is none of their business. The rest is iffy...but that is definitely crossing the line.

The whole thing is pretty absurd to me - it's about the equivalent of Google saying "anyone using Google Maps on their site can't put ads on it!" Well, maybe not...but something like that.

Still, I wonder if there's a way around the moderation...like submitting your theme, then putting up an "update."

LazyD said:

I guess this would be a good time to open up a wordpress theme site with the premise of "We allow footer links - it leads to higher quality themes" - You promote it correctly and you could have quiet the site when every designer out there realizes that there is ONE big wordpress theme site that allows footer links...

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Exactly my thoughts.