Quote - Ok, so now it's greedy to give free hosting?

Now c'mon Jen, that was disingenuous... nobody's bitching about the free hosting aspect of it.

I'll grant you that you only hear the regulars (and a few lurkers) bitching about the whole change... but long-term, monitoring the hit counts may be more useful. If the count slows down, plateaus, or even takes a negative trajectory? Then you know you (err, the company, not you) screwed up.

'course, we can all see the counts as well, courtesy of Alexa and a number of other public hit monitors.

Quote - ShareCG is largely a host, but they do have forums, so they are somewhat community minded.  Also, kudos to them for having a Poser only section on their freestuff.

Yep. And their hit count (according to Alexa) is rising nicely, while Renderosity's has been, well, dropping... (kinda explains the move by RO now, don't it?)

Quote - On the actual download page, there are 8 ads.  Again, a flash ad, and two Google ad listings with several advertisements.

...and? The big problem isn't the ads (which are out-of-the-way), it's the three-page click-through that you have to put up with here. On sharecg, you find the item, and go to its download page. You click one button (yes, it is easy to find and always in the same place), and the user gets the item.

Also, sharecg makes no bones about advertising - they said from the start that they support themselves that way. RO has ads... but nobody bitched about them either... until RO has managed to shove ads into an area that folks usually associate with freebie items, likely in the hope of accidental click-throughs - and the multiple ads-in-your-face on the other two windows you get to click through.

Incidentally, Mike keeps mentioning AdBlock. Well, that's nice, but I leave it open on sites I actually haunt frequently - sometimes you find something neat that way. Also, not everyone has Firefox (not advocating for IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc... just stating cold fact here).

Now I will grant that the dial-up users may have a rotten time of it (but then, we're talking multi-MB files here... dial-up would suck in this hobby no matter where you go to feed your CG fix).

Anyrate, them's today's two rubles.