I reported on the Blog Herald how Blogging Pro has released its latest InSense theme under a sponsored scheme. This means a sponsor paid for a link at the footer of the theme. The benefits? Users get a great DesignDisease-designed theme, the designer gets paid good money, and the sponsor gets inbound links.

I know several designers who give away WordPress themes to blog hosting services for free, so long as they get a link back to their sites. Now this seems to be a great business model for people who want to monetize their theme creations. Not all bloggers can afford to pay for your themes. But there are companies and businesses that would be willing to foot the bill. In the end, everyone’s happy: users get great themes, designers get good money, companies get inbound links.

There are some who aren’t too happy with such an arrangement, and view sponsorship as a sneaky way to get backlinks. However, Blogging Pro is quite candid with the fact that their theme is sponsored, and the theme license even allows for the removal of the sponsor link if a user chooses so.

Fellow Blog Herald writer Lorelle VanFossen has this to say about sponsored themes:

Actually, this was brought up over a month ago and was seriously slammed. People were digging into their WordPress Themes to remove these. There was a huge backlash against Theme designers and sites which sponsor such links.

A link back is considered appropriate. A link to a “sponsor”, aka advertising, is very much frowned upon by serious bloggers and WordPress fans. The average blogger won’t care or even notice, as you say, but the ones who do have spoken loudly that they find this bad manners, poor taste, and, for some, criminal.

Personally, I would think there is no harm in having themes sponsored, as long as this is stated explicitly outright, and not done in a sneaky manner. Even better if the user can opt to remove the link.

What do you think?

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