In a effort to help Jake and Dave come up with a way to make this site work the way they wanted it to, I have the following ideas ...

Make revenue sharing payments only apply to a limited number of items per person, ie: 20 or 25. Anyone who has less than this limit would be paid on all items. Anyone who has more than this limit would be paid on the most recently posted items or items specified by the user. In this manner, all content posted would still be generating views for the advertisers, but only a limited amount of content would be splitting the shared revenue. This would level the playing field and allow for only the quality items (or what a user believes to be quality) to be paid on.

Also, the rating system needs to be upgraded. For a rating/review to be entered the individual has to be logged into the system so that their handle is identified on the post. No more 'guest' postings. The rating stars and comments need to be linked together so that when ever a comment is posted it requires a rating to be associated with it. This way abuse of the rating system will be removed because you will know who posted the rating and why they rated it the way they did. Comment sections with gibberish entered would be automatically removed even if the rating was a five star.

For download items, a review process needs to be put in place that removes any items that uses trade names, film titles, or other copyrights/trademarks that could create issues for the site. These types of items are fine for fan sites, but not on a business site and not when the items are being used for advertising purposes for other sites that are money making sites. "LIKE" items would have to be dealt with on a one to one basis to determine if there is any copyright infringments involved or leave it up to the community to decided in comments and reviews.

David

You are all missunderstanding what I'm saying. I agree that the rating system should not be used to decide what is payable content. What I am saying is that if there is going to be a rating system it needs to be tied into the comment system and require a person to be logged in so that their comment and rating is identified to an individual. This would make many people who abuse the system to think twice about being as @$$ towards someone and giving them a one star because they don't like them for whatever reason. If you have to identify yourself and put a reason down for why you are giving the rating, it makes it much more difficult to mess with the system.

Personally I think what is needed here is a two tier system.  The first tier is for folks who want to upload models, textures, etc and just have people who download them.  They can upload as much as they want when they want but they wouldn't be eligible for revenue sharing.  The signup process would be just as the site does now, with little verification or requests for personal information, and you could always leave them the "donate via paypal" button in case someone wanted to donate to them for their work.

The second tier would be a little harder to qualify for, and this would be those folks who want to take part in revenue sharing.   The amount of information required would go beyond just a simple email address and paypal account. Your IP would be logged (not foolproof, granted, but it cuts way down on multiple account abuses) to start with and you could not start a duplicate account from the same ip address.

When you sign up to be considered for revenue sharing, your submission would be reviewed for quality.  At first this could be done by the admins, and later on once you have a few people who qualify as revenue sharing "vendors" for lack of a better term, you could allow them to volunteer to help in this vetting process.

Good suggestions Stepdad though there could be problems with reviewing for quality as that requires a person's opinion. How will a 'quality' product be defined? The criteria would need to be set out very clearly. Also it can be difficult to predict what the punters want - I have been quite surprised at times by the popularity of certain items.

Also, by nominating 'vendors' as volunteers in the process of approval, you could also be creating problems. How do you prevent prejudice? If a person accidentally offends one of these vendors couldn't that lead to submissions being rejected or judged too harshly? Also, if you submit an item that directly 'competes' with the vendors own work, couldn't that also cause problems?

I say this, not because I think your ideas aren't valid, it's just that I can see the potential for other problems to arise. Will it become a case of who you know rather than what you create? [Point in case, I have noticed that some of my products which are of a particular type always attract a one star rating - interestingly it is the items I've created which are similar - but not identical - to another contributer's works. These items are unusual which is why I provide them. So what would happen if the ratings were done by the 'competing' vendor and that person happened to be chosen as a quality reviewer?

Just my two cents worth. 

Well, quality naturally is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but with a committie voting on it I think you can pretty much be assured that the standard will remain pretty much the same throughout.  Individual opinions might vary somewhat but get a small group together and your results will be fairly uniform.

Also, once someone has acheived status as a revenue sharing member they wouldn't need to worry about their submissions being judged unless someone reported them for uploading a bunch of less than quality submissions, in which case the committee could review it again and see if their was a big difference in quality between their original submissions and there new ones.  It would be pretty easy to spot the spammers in something like that, and if you catch one they lose revenue sharing status and can't regain it for a long time, perhaps as much as a year.

Also, if you want to make sure the committee reviews everything fairly just make it so they can't see who submitted the model up for review, all they have to go on is the quality of the submission itself.  That way you could never say "I got rejected because the committee has it in for me.." because they would have no idea who's models were who's.

Pay your committee members a little extra stipend from the revenue sharing dividends as long as they remain active in judging submissions, and your all set. 

One other thing to note of course, since your initial submissions would be reviewed by a group of people, no one person could deny you status as a revenue sharing member regardless, so as long as you make a quality submission you should be good to go.

Have the site track the committee members votes both ya and nay, and if you have someone with a much higher percentage of nay votes per month they'll stand out like a sore thumb, giving you the ability to deal with the QC member by either talking to them about your expectations or in extreme cases just replacing them with someone else.  I think if the QC members know their votes are being tallied in such a fashion they'll stay honest enough, and granted one guy might be a bit more particular in what he feels a quality submission is but again this will cause a minor variance in vote tallies, not a huge one.  A  huge one gets you noticed.

I guess my thinking here is it's alot easier as a site admin to ride herd on a small group to whom you have delegated some authority than it is to try and police the entire site yourself, and I think it wouldn't take long before you could get a good staff together to QC material and review those that have been marked as questionable by concerned site members.  But not to worry, I don't take your pointing out areas of concern about these ideas as a bad thing, indeed I think it's a good thing when people do that.  Gives you a chance to consider all the pro's and con's and fix problems before they arise.