Wow, this one blew me away. What you get is a ready made website. The website runs automatically, you never have to maintain it or pay monthly hosting fees. I got one and it’s been bringing in around $1000 month for me. I absolutely love it.
I give Adsense Treasure a score of 5/5 (5 out of 5)
Click below for more info, check out his Porsche:

http://abid.in/paypal/?e=cyberprofessional

The same goes for free themes. And since you bring up the very good point of support, learning, and teaching … it just so happens that if you need that kind of stuff, that’s exactly what you’ll get out of an ElevateThemes.com premium membership. And in the grand scheme of things, I think you’ll find the price point pretty tempting as well.

But don’t worry, the tutorial-type posts here at the blog won’t be going away. This blog’s been active for about a year now, and the second year is going to have SO MANY more posts than the first.

(PS – look out for a redesign real, real soon) ;-)

I’ve learned a lot from your posts, a lot. I got hooked with WordPress because of Brian Gardner’s free themes and when he went “premium”, well, I knew I wanted to learn what ever I could about WordPress and themes. There’s a lot to learn for an old guy like me, but I’m getting there, thanks to posts like yours.

I admire Brian’s design talents, but this latest move, the open source thing, in my opinion is genius.

I’ve read on a site that “if you can use MSWord – you can use our WordPress theme.” Not so! The themes work out of the box, but as soon as a user wants to add anything, text or graphics, they have to know a whole bunch of tech things. The potential for a Theme help system is enormous.

I’ve used vBulletin for years, so I hope you’ll choose it to run your forum, if you go that route.

Help… we all need it and you’re the perfect guy to run a forum or offer help. Best of luck on choosing the business model that will work for you.

Yes, open source themes will be 100% GPL and free to download. I definitely don’t want to be a zealot … I have to pay the bills, so a business model very similar to the one your outlined will be implemented. Wish us luck!

I only started testing this blogging stuff a year ago and I thought I was going to fall behind. But, now I’m on a proactive roll to get my blog up and going. I’m realizing that a premium theme is THE way to jump-start my blog with a professional, up-to-date, and high-powered-ready-for-business image. I don’t mind paying upfront for the great boost in appearances/features and satisifaction of knowing my blog is great!

As far as offering open-source premium themes, I guess you’d be offering them free because they’re open-source, right? Well, it would come down to a business model for you and your longevity. You could have the theme be free, then charge for the support and customization, which could be done on a per feature basis – depending on the feature.

Anyway, I hope the best for you and Brian in this new direction of both your endeavors.

Thanks!
-Kaye