Posted on July 28, 2002

• For a while today I had completely removed the User Gallery from my site.

  Signups have been pretty slow for the past couple of months (due to a lot of pessimism regarding the economy and the state of the world I imagine) and I’ve been feeling pretty down about it. The User Gallery started out as a way to make a little extra money from banner ads and to draw some extra traffic. Then the bottom fell out the banner-ad market and I came to realize that my site will have to survive on signups or not at all.

  Well, it’s pretty hard to get people to sign up when there are 200 freebies available, updated every week. I decided the User Gallery had to go, so I took it down this afternoon.

  After it was gone, though, I found that I missed it. I was always proud to be able to showcase undiscovered talent (like Greg Martin and Ferenc Haraszti). So after a few hours without it, I decided that the UG could stay but only after I pared it down to 40 images which rotate out as new ones are added. The top ten will stay until they are voted out. Hopefully this compromise will work for everyone.