I’ve been uploading designs (nearly 50) since 2016 and insulted that Thingiverse wants to charge me for access without ads. Haven’t I earned free use status due to my contributions andsome downloaded more than 27,000 times.
It’s OK to monitize the site/service, but I’m happy to share my designs with a different site if Thingiverse can’t recognise those that makes their site so popular.
Sincerely,
Eric
I believe they are trying to come up with some ways to help the designers. Read through some of the Ad related posts and you might get a better Idea of some of the ideas that others have offered. It is a rather complicated situation and I agree that the people that provide the designs are the most important group here. How to support them in a fair way is not necessarily an easy fix. I think that the more ideas that come forward the more likely a fair solution will be found.
Thanks for sharing this feedback. Believe me, we’re totally aware that Creators are the true heroes on Thingiverse. We’re thinking of “rewarding” Creators with free memberships. What do you think would be fair “criteria” that we could use to gift these memberships?
Thingiro,
Something on the order of the uploads of 5 to 10 COMPLETELY original designs. Also the designs should be completely free and not protected or licensed.
(no re-spins or modifications of models that already exist on Thingiverse or its competitors.)
Managing this won’t be easy. I can imagine 10 year olds uploading existing models that may or may not already exist on Thingiverse. So it’s going to require some hands-on or ai functionality to avoid bloating THingiverse with duplicates.
-Eric
I can see the benefit of having an Ad free across the board setup as a reward, but is there not a way to make a member’s work space ad free only. If they are working on creating and editing their own creations that area should always be ad free. If they search other designs and models ads could appear. If this was site wide and was all built into the system it would not need to have special rules of how many valid uploads etc. Programmers should be able to code it to work that way without too much trouble as they would just separate the areas of access?
I am personally fine with that type of setup. Yeah it doesn’t really reward those who are doing the heavy lifting but it certainly makes their current work easier. It might be a first step?
Great idea! We’re listening (or in this case, reading), and we’d love to know more! As creators, what requirements or conditions do you think a fellow creator should meet to be featured in the Thingiverse ad-free selection? For example: number of likes, followers, downloads, having been featured a certain number of times, contests winners…
The problem with that setup is that only special creators get ad free. Yes, you could provide a totally ad free account type and specify certain criteria need to be met but, what I see that needs to happen first is that, no matter what creation a person makes to share that area/process should not be encumbered by ads.
When you set up the special criteria you will always find those who try to benefit by creating or stealing/copying things that will just give them the benefit and not necessarily be providing “valuable” designs. In the scenario I am talking about ALL creations are ‘valuable’ so that work flow does not include ads. Other aspects of the site like searching for items to print does include ads.
This does not really benefit (pay) the creator other than to make the job of participating and sharing easier and less cumbersome.
In my case, none of the items listed above would put me into the benefit category yet I feel that I do provide some benefit to some.
Completely agree, the upload zones will no longer have ads. Thanks for pointing that area out. We’re still looking into the rest, but your comments help us a lot!