There’s a debate raging in the WordPress community at the moment. (In case you didn’t know, WordPress is the blog software used to run this and literally hundreds of thousands of other sites.) The debate centers around the idea of “Sponsored Themes.”
In a nutshell, a “Sponsored Theme” is one that has links in the footer to sites other than the author’s site (as in, neither the blog author or the theme author). Links like “Free web hosting” or “poker secrets” or what not. In other words, spam. Generally, sponsored themes say (although the legal ground for this is probably not valid) that you can’t remove these links if you want to use the theme. So what happens is, your (hopefully) popular blog starts using a nice new theme, and because you are a popular site with links to these other “sponsored” sites, you are effectively “giving” them a boost in search engine ranking. (You should read up on how Google’s PageRank works for more details on why this works.)
They’re called “sponsored” because the theme author is generally paid to make the theme and embed the links. (Alternatively, the sites being linked to will make the theme themselves and release it.) So there’s money involved. And we all know what happens when money gets involved… or more importantly, when money is the only thing involved.
However, the WordPress community has expressed its dislike of this trend. Not because of people making money – but because of people making money unscrupulously. In other words, the WordPress community is being moral about it. And that just warms my heart – because when money gets involved, typically morals (or moral judgments) go right out the window. But not in this case! Hurrah! Way to go, WordPress!
So, at the moment, it looks like all sponsored themes will be removed from the WordPress Theme Viewer – although people can still make and distribute sponsored themes, they just won’t be able to do so on the (free) WordPress Theme Viewer site. Which makes sense, in a moral way.
My personal take on all this is that I don’t like sponsored themes and I won’t use them. The only level of sponsorship I will accept is the requirement from a Creative Commons licensed work that requires attribution – which only applies to the author of the theme. As you can see on my site here, I leave the link to the original theme author’s site intact. (Depending on what theme I’m using at the moment, I may add text such as “modified by Keith M. Survell,” as I do sometimes heavily modify the themes I use.)
So all-in-all, I’m glad to see this happen. A good compromise between the drive for money (making sponsored themes) and the ethical considerations of surprising users with links to (sometimes shady) sites that they can’t remove (which causes Google to view their page as also somewhat shady).
