Mark over at weblogtoolscollection.com posted about the “sponsored” theme issue that has been going on in the Wordpress community and here’s an excerpt of it:

Sponsored themes are here to stay. Many people download them and do not remove the links from the bottom of their Wordpress pages. There are many advertisers looking to purchase such links and some theme authors are regularly creating themes just for the sponsorship money.

Just a note to all wordpress users that use our themes, we indeed have a sponsor link at the footer of each theme and while the majority of theme designers will sell a minimum of two sponsor “spots” on their themes i can assure you that our themes has always been and will always be sponsored by no more than one sponsor.

Comments
Looking at the comments on weblogtoolscollection.com (WTC from now on), you will see that most people are quite angry with having to have a sponsor link on the footer of their theme, i understand this as a wordpress user myself but since entering into the field of releasing themes myself i also now understand from a designer/sponsor point of view.

The truth is Wordpress themes is seen as a good investement by some advertisers who are working on link building and gaining Google Pagerank for their site, as for this blog for example, thanks to wordpress users out there that have downloaded and used the themes from us our Technorati ranking is now at 25,708, that a pretty good rank for a new blog.

On my part themes released here are unique and not an edited rehash of other themes, i do know that there’s designers out there that just do this for the sake of money and they rip off a theme and add a little tweak here and there and call it their own and sell 3 spots for a sponsor link and start making money out of other people’s hard work, i do think this is really bad for both the naive advertiser and the owner of the theme that is being ripped, for example the theme that’s being ripped the most is the famous mistylook theme, a sad case indeed.

What are yout thoughts on this issue? should sponsor links carry on or should there be a stop to it?

I can tell you though that being on some popular forums i have seen a sudden dramatic increase in designers releasing and selling wordpress based themes, one of the prove of this is the increase of themes being uploaded at themes.wordpress.net, you will see at least 10 new themes almost everyday as oppose to the slow pace of themes being released a few months back…why? because people are willing to pay for a sponsor spot.

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