Earlier today, many of us recieved an email from David Heller, President of this website. He stated that sharecg isn't looking good finance-wise and starting to go belly up due lack of funds coming from the ads. Hence they are considering switching to subscription accounts that won't have any ads, and would have added features. This decision I can understand, if I step into Mr. Heller's shoes. One must feed the machine somehow.

Personally, as an unemployed artist who is always looking for and to share Poser freebies, I can't afford the $10 a year fee (when I don't even have a penny left over every month to scrap together). I honestly don't mind the ads. I haunt many a site and forum with ads all over them.

If they could come up with a system like, well, Renderosity.com, Renderotica.com and many other sites that have VIP accounts that offer awesome perks and such and leave free accounts with the ads (to also help pay the bills), limited storage space, etc for those of us who can't afford it, that would be cool.

Soooooooooooooo.... I'm wondering what everyone else has to say about this. What do you, the users of sharecg think?

LadySythe

in all honesty, i refuse to pay to give stuff away. Google sites are free as are a lot of other sites. If sharecg decide to charge, i wont be staying.

I'm not too pleased with this development. I too am unemployed. My access to the Internet is though the public library where I live which offer free use of computers.

Times are hard right now. There are other places I can upload and download freebies from that I know of but I like this site the way it is.

One question; would they let us login long enough to remove our stuff before they require payment? I don't have much right now but would like to keep what I have for as long as this site is free.

$10 for one year it is not excessive, but I understands the hesitation of my small companions, time is hard, me even not being rolling in money, now rest has knowledge that they will be exactly the modalities of this subscription and the advantages for the subscribers, there will be always free objects? I have some of it on your site and it would annoy me to see them disappear, the sharing being the soul of this site, for the paying objects I suppose that you take a commision?
The problem is there: make of this site an only paying place at the risk of losing many regular customers, or making a subscription only for the sellers by leaving the free access with frees, but I do not believe that sellers agree of paid for the others.
Or then to make a subscription for the sellers has $10 and one has $5 for those who porposent frees, with different advantages.
Cornelian choices.

I for one am happy to pay to support this site - I own a site as well, and it's expensive to run and a lot of work, to boot. Where do we sign up? I'll be first in the queue...

I'm not even going to bother with a dialog.  They haven't listened in the past, they won't now.  I'm done.  They charge, my stuff comes down, I'll find someplace else for it.  This is not why I posted my work here.  

No offense but the website is a complete mess . You think im going to pay??. Im off already suspended my assets i advise any other artists to do the same.

Total joke fest, the point of sharecg was the FREE aspect of it. Everyone put up with shawdy looking logos and terribly badly coded awfully designed webpages.

But now you cant even run the place on advertising? I smell bs and profiteering and an attempt to take this free community into a more "proftitable" model. Well not with my stuff your not.

I mean just look at the logo top left , they dont even know how to export a web image without it looking like complete crap and now they want money off me for providing them with free advertising revenue?  uhmm !  ShareCg could have been great and the actual people and community were. Its just a pity it was run worse than a second rate blog. 

Trying to tell us that you can’t fund one site on banner ads while other sites do this very same thing even turning profits is just purely insulting our intelligence. Though $9.99 isn’t going to make or break me I find it insulting to ask me to pay to upload free content I spend hours creating.

I have no problem with people making money with the stuff I give away for free. So my content is unrestricted use, where possible.

But.
I.
Won't.
Pay.
For.
It.
Period.

How off putting is even the idea to charge people which give you their work for free?

I'm not ready to pay  for  sent  free  items on this  cite  , for two reasons

you've wrote that  150 peoples  sent  an answers  and 90% says  OK to pay

but  those answers represent only 5% of  contributors  ... have you think what  it's  arrived  if  this majority of  people  don't accept  to pay ? ( me first)...

The  real problem  is  the  dichotomy  between DAZ  and Poser  and  the difficulty of  people  to  create  universal  objects with  actual  version  of  daz, the displayed objects   are divided by two  in one  year ( I download  all  products for DAZ and  Poser and objects poser  and  daz compatible from  2008 and  I can  create  a  statistics around ) and  the  announces  went  down

Personally  I have  stop  the  creation  of stuff  in the  one  of  those format  to present  it in .obj and 3ds Shape  only .

I think, at the place to  cry for money , (that's American habit when they are  problems) that   only thing able to save ShareCG  is  as  same  as  Blender  or  Wing  , that  some smart programmer  able to compute  an  original  and  free version  of software  able  to  read built  and  save   scenes  using all format  of  daz  and  poser models and  restore the  universal compatibility between all models ...new  and  old ...
on other  solution  create  a  strength able  to  be  strong  to  force  Daz  and  Poser  to heard  us  customers.


Friendship

:D-JPP

I remembers an  period  not faraway that  American  peoples  can force  trade  to  make  that they want , now that's  the  trade  who force  people :o(    

I don't have many freebies here as compared to some contributors, and my freebies are not any of the more popular ones.  However, once a paid version of accounts kicks in at ShareCG, I can immediately consider other alternatives to place my freebies.  It is simple economic behaviour.

Alternatives for this would be to make announcements in Renderosity freebie forum (where it is allowed), followed by links to SkyDrive or Gdrive (google drive), or even simply to offer my freebies at Content Paradise.

So, unless the value-add is unique and superior, it would be tough to justify a paid account at ShareCG for distributing my own freebies.

I found out about this plan when it was discussed on another forum (I didn't get any notification), and I was surprised, because in October 2010 ShareCG was offering to share revenue from advertising with uploaders. That wasn't so long ago, and I find it difficult to believe that the economy is worse now than it was then.

My free stuff is mostly on Renderosity. I suppose it will stay that way.

i have to agree; the idea of paying for an account to distribute my FREE models/props to other artists is bogus, at best.  i would guess that our free models/fx/tutorials are the very attractions that drive virtually all traffic to the site and the best idea anybody can come up with to make the site self-sustaining is to start charging the artists an annual fee to share their work? Artists and pixel-engineers who've already donated countless hours of hard work, skill and creativity in support of the site should be offered a better deal up front, at the very least.  Between Nov15-Dec15, they should offer a charter membership deal of a one-time-only lifetime subscription price of $50 or less, then offer the never-2b-increased $10 a year to everyone after Dec15.  For the 'New Features' that are being considered for paying subscribers, the price is too high. i would like to support the site but the methods being offered teeter on the edge of ridiculous.

I think it is important to have a free site and to keep ShareCG free. It has developed a brand on this name within the graphics community that should be leveraged, not changed.

Two things I notice right away from their model. First, there's not much traffic at this Forum. If I posted at Daz there would be hundreds to a thousand views on a subject like this. Even Renderosity, which doesn't have as strong a set of Forums, would have more to say on a subject like this. 

Actually there IS a thread dedicated to this topic at Daz which has over 4,000 views:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/8486/

You should be able to build a forum on a free site such as this and have more stickiness. And a free site such as this should in theory be probabaly the least biased towards having discussions about all the other companies who pay to have products out there. How does eHow or other sites make their revenue?  Wikipedia?

Second, the ads are generic. While I'm here I'm more likely to click on an ad that talks about other 3d items, other 3d sites, 3d magazines, other graphics programs, reviews on graphics equipment, from monitors to motherboards, gaming, etc. you get the idea.

Third, people grow. I can see where beginners look to post to the widest possible audience first and then later get to a point where they think, 'maybe I can sell some of these items.'  If you're going to make it 'pay' think about expanding and make a sister organization separate from share CG where ther poster gets some share of what is put up. The thing is, then you're going to have to have some sort of support organization to monitor the quality control and eventually generate excitement.

I think there is still a lot of opportunity here.

That's all I've got for right now.

Be well.

"If Life gives you melons, maybe you are dyslexsic; If life gives you Lemons, keep them. Hey, FREE Lemons!" (Snorg T-Shirts; See -  I do click on some of the ads!).

seems a bit of a contradiction to have a paying site for free shared products, especially when the artists themselves get nothing. on the other hand, i can understand that when a business goes belly up, it's either they go down and the site disappears - to our big dismay - or somehow money has to be generated.

10$ isn't that much (especially compared to the VIP memberships on Rendo & DAZ!!), i'm pretty tight with my budget too but i could afford it, which i can't with mentioned VIPs. BUT until a while ago, i didn't have an international ccard nor paypal, and if this had been a pay site, i couldn't have joined, even for the only 10$.

so i think what could be done is leave the site free as it is, but offer VIPs, though to under 50$/year...