So are you honestly saying that you only sell something by giving something else away for free? If that were the case, millions of businesses all over the globe are collapsing as we speak...

I guess the only people to comment on this with any kind of authority would be those involved in the sale of skins already, but I doubt very much that they'll be giving us their sales statistics any time soon.

As for the argument that nobody would buy a skin for the quality of that skin alone while there are so many free skins available, I'd say that's pretty insulting to those who are already selling skin packs and suites. I know you said you don't mean any offense, but there's no other way to look at it I'm afraid.

If what you say is true and people only pay for skins to support an artist, then how do you explain the fact that donations don't work? Surely those asking for donations should be making just as much as those who sell a skin outright...

grayhaze, ok, see it as an offense then. But while pay skins are excellent, there are plenty of equally good free skins. And I am sure that Pixtudio would be the first ones to admit it.

As for why donations don't work, I don't know. Maybe there is the matter of knowledge. I, as many others have pointed out, didn't even know you were asking for donations.  But I think there is some other weird psychological factor. I think a lot of people are more inclined to BUY for support rather than donate.  

Kevin.....perhaps you should be talking to Renato and Johanne, for example...and maybe they can convince you of the 'angle' Paxx and I are trying to put on this....there's certainly nothing offensive or insulting in any of it.....quite the reverse...

grayhaze, no insult taken and without inference on my part; I was kidding with that about being a minority

One potential problem with examining the sales achieved by Pixtudio, SkinPlant or any of the others is that they were producing free skins long before they started charging for commercial ones. They therefore have a large back catalog of free skins already existing before they start selling. It's therefore impossible to assess whether the existence of free skins helps sales without having an author who only produces commercial skins to compare against.

Again I could be wrong, and I mean no disrespect toward them, but I haven't seen nearly as many free skins being released from those parties since they started producing commercial suites. They get the majority of their money from producing skins for commercial clients, with the commercial skin suites providing a smaller steady income.

For what it's worth, I would buy skins/icons for the design, whether I had heard of the author or not, and it would make no difference to me, if the author had never released a free skin in his life. Take mormegil's Orion icon suite.......... I had to have them. It was a plus that Paul had produced them, but it wouldn't have mattered, who made them.

Donations..... If the skin was fantastic (IMHO), I may intend to contribute, but I get distracted so easily, I may never get around to it.......... but it would never happen with with Pay Pal. Something about Pay Pal has always bothered me, and I would be more likely to send a money order.

But, I'm not a typical example. I mainly use stuff I'm working on, and a skin has to be something really special before I would want to buy it.

Other the other hand, if I had more disposeable income, I would probably purchase everything available.

Just my 2 cents........ take for what it's worth.  (not much) 

The skins I've purchased have been out of support for the skinner. I don't use them any more often than the freebies - even Mormegil's or Pixtudios'. There are indeed a lot of great free skins - enough so that no one ever need buy.

I'm really not keen on PayPal either so far as that goes.

Certainly GH don't take the lack of support as lack of appreciation. I really don't believe that's the case. Of course as my wife is fond of pointing out, I've been wrong before

PayPal have had a bit of bad press in the past, most of which has been without any real grounding in the truth. Much in the same way as WindowBlinds no longer resembles the product it was two years ago, so too have PayPal continued to upgrade and improve their service.

They are now actually one of the safest and easiest online payment providers, and offer a huge range of features for sellers and buyers which would otherwise cost a lot to sign up for with other companies.

I'm not saying this because I have anything to gain from it (aside from calming the fears of those who are put off from using the system), but rather because it annoys me somewhat that people refuse to use a company's product because of rumours and second-hand stories of woe.

If anyone knows of any company which provides the same services in a better way, then I'd be more than happy to listen.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

1 point, 1 point only....be glad your good enough to even think of getting payments..

To me (not you but in general) it seems when you first start making something and its not that good you don't care who likes and who don't but once you get real good at what you do all of a sudden you put a charge on, fair enough if you do it for a living but if you end up doing it expecting cash then its the end, the fun just goes, you can't say it took me ages and i tried really hard so pay me...you do it cause you want to not because your getting orders, sometimes that can make you feel guilty enough to pay.

Again I could be wrong, and I mean no disrespect toward them, but I haven't seen nearly as many free skins being released from those parties since they started producing commercial suites.

Since Mike and I started Skinplant. we have released 3 free suites, and I did a new Sysmetrix skin only two weeks ago.
But we've only made 1 premium suite.
Before Skinplant even existed, my only contribution for the entire first 6 months of this year was 2 WB skins.
We've put out more freebies since joining up together.


And when Prometheus and Avenger went up, we got a few more sales on Solara.

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No offering a more exstensive skin is a good idea. But not including standard features is what i was referring to.

My bad Hippy. I apologise for getting the facts wrong about SkinPlant.

Obviously you don't have to answer this, but were the extra sales enough to support the development of those free skins? That's my main point about the free skins really. It's all well and good if free skins do create extra sales for the commercial ones, but if there aren't enough of those extra sales, is it really time well spent?

I can see there is a definate divide between people on the issue, as some agree with me and some don't. I guess the thing to do is just to find what works for you as an individual and go with it.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea that skins should only be made for fun, and asking money for them takes away that fun. I don't believe there's ever been a rule book written on who is and who isn't justified to make skins, and what their motives must be in creating them. I do still enjoy making skins, but I'm willing to sacrifice a little of the 'fun' element in favour of creating the best skins I can. If I then need to charge to support the extra work that creates, then so be it. If someone wants to pay they will.

On a similar subject, it wasn't too long ago that people were criticized for charging for web design services. In its infancy, the web was seen as a hobbyist activity and any suggestion that money could be made through its use was seen as almost blasphemy.

These days there are still those who think everything on the web should be free and that it should be one big open-source activity. The web is now big business though, and there are those companies who sell web designs in almost the same way as skins are sold.

Obviously you don't have to answer this, but were the extra sales enough to support the development of those free skins? That's my main point about the free skins really

Well those ones weren't created as a way to promote our pay-for stuff.
We had just finished Solara, and wanted to do some personal skinning, with no pressure or hassle to please the lowest common denominator.
And in fact when people saw screenshots of the skins before we'd even considered uploading, the general opinions were that we could have sold either of those as well.

I uploaded Prometheus as an afterthought. The suite had actually been around for about 3 or 4 weeks before I thought to put it on any skin sites.

 

Well those ones weren't created as a way to promote our pay-for stuff. We had just finished Solara, and wanted to do some personal skinning, with no pressure or hassle to please the lowest common denominator.

Indeed, there is a certain amount of pressure when you're creating a skin you intend to sell, or have been hired to develop. It makes doing a skin for yourself a little sweeter. But even though it was the farthest thing from my mind while I created Avenger, everything with your name on it helps to promote your pay stuff.

Obviously you don't have to answer this, but were the extra sales enough to support the development of those free skins?

It's difficult to asses whether giving away the Avenger and Prometheus skins have driven enough Solara sales to cover the cost of their production, because it's difficult to tell what that cost is. I spent a few hours every night after work and a couple of Saturdays over the course of 2 weeks putting together the Avenger skins. But that was in my free time. That's the same way I worked on Solara, only it took more like 6 to 8 weeks, and there were far more applications skinned. That, however, is the advantage of working with a partner. That's the same way I work on corporate skins too, because it's the only time I have to skin. So the cost to me is whatever I value my free time at.

Your skins are of the highest quality, and all those subdesigns are surely making a lot of people very happy (including myself, honestly, I've been running it at home since the day you released it), but what you have with MetalX2 is more like 10 skins than 1. No wonder it seems difficult to justify the production time, you're spending weeks longer on a single release than most people who are selling skins do. Now, if you sold a skin with a whole bunch of subdesigns and cool features like metalX, and gave away skins of the same quality with fewer bell and whistles, I think you might strike a balance. You don't have to try and meet every possible configuration and feature that any user might desire. Just make it the way you like it, polish any imperfections, and release it for free. I don't believe that any of the current premium skins out there contain subdesigns, custom colors, special-function buttons, winamp controls, or any of that, yet they still sell.

Of course, it would be naive for anyone to expect that they could jump right in and instantly be profitable. No business can. You have to build a brand, and build a loyal customer base. Those people tell more people about you. Give things away to get people's attention. Get them to join your mailing list so you can tell them when you've released something exclusive. Releasing Avenger and Prometheus, as well as Stinger (which came before Solara), introduced people to SkinPlant and resulted in sales of Solara. A few times a week, somebody new joins our mailing list. New people discover our skins, then visit our site, and if they don't buy Solara, they will at least know about us when we release our next premium creation.

A poll seeing who buys skins to support the artists or who buys skins simply for the skin would probably be a good idea, or did they already a poll like that?

I have to say... I started skinning during the Windows95 days. Skinning was not easy but it wasn't a nightmare either. Since I've returned, I've updated 3 of my old skins to XP standards. It was a hell of a learning curve and took longer than it did to create the originals. I can't even imagine what it would be like if I hadn't had a base to work from.

My point... as Brad said, skinning is a lot harder than it was in the old days. Thus unlike those days gone, I believe more than ever that some of these top-notch skinners are totally justified in asking for some kind of return on thier investment.

I fear that at some point, some of them are going to regain thier sanity and realize just what they've been giving away all these years.

If people want to ignore my experience in selling niche stuff then by all means do so.

But here's some food for thought:

When you sell something you have factors that affect things based on percentages and you have factors that affect things in absolute numbers.

In niche markets (<100,000 potential sales) absolute numbers do matter. If commercial skins were selling 50,000 copies even, then the absolute number of people who buy it to support those who support the community could probably be considered secondary.

But as I wrote before, premium skins are likely to sell between 1500 to 3000 units in their effective lifetime. 2000 units X $9 = $18,000 which is a pretty decent return considering the time involved. But 1500 to 3000 is definitely a niche market.

As a result, taking into account the absolute numbers of people who do buy things based on the fame of the author matter. Or put another way, the "core" group in the skinning community (roughly 30,000 people) are the ones who are statistically much more likely to buy skins based on the fame and support of the skin author.

The general public, by contrast, won't care. But of the 1500 to 3000 likely purchases a good quality skin suite would get, I would expect that a solid 500 to 1000 of them do so because of WHO is creating the skin pack.

So unless the skin author can find a truly vast distribution mechanism to get their skin out to a lot more casual users, those core buyers have to be taken into consideration. And since I don't see that situation changing in the short term, that is why I believe premium skins will help generate more free skins.

But if that's not enough, the fact is, before someone is going to get published, they need to have a solid resume.

The moral of the story is, you can't apply broad market forces to niche markets. Which is what some people are attempting to do here.  My career has been spent making "stuff" for niche markets so I do have some idea what I'm talking about.

I am amazed this business is playing out on a public message board.... I am intrigued; this is like the skinning version of the Godfather.

I think a basic point has been missed here. The question is: why are you skinning? If you have a vested interest in your creations then maybe you should be looking at this from a business point of view. If you skin because you love to skin or create for it's own sake then you should not even ask the question. The motive of action is all important in determining the outcome.

So the question remains: why?

Well Fuzzy, I'd have to give an answer which sits in between the two you've given to choose from. I skin for pleasure and to improve my graphic skills, but increasingly find it an expensive hobby to maintain as an unemployed person. I therefore look for ways to support my hobby through the generation of a small amount of income.

I don't skin purely for business or for pleasure, but somewhere in between.

Lot of substance in what Brad has mentioned in #45....about niche markets, etc...

One saving grace is that generally, Pixtudio has already pioneered the uncharted waters....copping one heck of a lot of flak over the concept of free vs. paid....just think back to the hysteria over at Customize.org..where their reputation/s were insulted and degraded by the 'FREE AT ALL COST' 'me' generation.

Since then, with the successes of those actively doing commissioned works for quite prominent companies, and the publicly released 'commercial' skins and suites, those who follow really only have to have suitable 'product', as the concept of 'buying a skin' is well established....[within that core that Brad mentioned, at least].

Good old 'Joe Public', who knows little about skinning and even less about skinners will need more than only one option of 'buying' a person's skin....he'll NEED to see for himself that person's capabilities via a 'freebie', which, if sufficiently enticing in style and quality may coerce him to lay down his readies on a premium one...essentially creating a 'fan' who could very well go on to purchase ALL that person's product.

I can see 'logic' in this.....can anyone else?...

Oh Oh I do I do

I m having fun seeing some people whom I look up to posting things along the same lines of posts I have started to make and then only delete because I do not figure I am qualified to post on the subject very much if at all.

Set a goal and then pick your vehicles you will make the most from and use those to get you to your desired destination...

While your at it, don't reinvent the wheel but stream lining it a bit where you can is a good thing

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