I think this is a bit strange way to let this all end....
Why not just having a look once a day what people were uploading and remove all you don´t want to have on the site? There are some people who constantly uploading junk? Warn them. They do it again? - bann them. Easy thing.
You say people are lying somewhere else to get people looking at their stuff. If you know that - bann the user. Also simple thing.
I uploaded a lot of my freebies here. Not to make big money . Just to have a bit of "pocket money" at PayPal when I want to buy something. I´m posting links to the freebies at 2 stores and on my homepage. That`s all I do.
I had a look at my earnings a moment ago: You have received 2,376 views this month (since the beginning of January) (sorry about the large text - I copied that and can not find out where I can make the text size smaller)
Not fantastic for 4 days - but not to bad I would say . But I have an own homepage with so many GB free trafic I´ll never ever use. I love to make freebies and hope people will like to use them - but I´ll not have my freebies on a site which makes money with siteviews and "generate" income for them with uploading my freebies here.
You said in your announcement "Second, it became uneconomical. We would pay thousands of dollars to our users, but most individual users would not make that much"
I´m a bit confused now...... .... you want to say it´s more "economical" to pay nothing to the people who are uploading here and the money stays in your pocket *lol* ?
Ok - If it stays the way it is now, I´ll upload my freebies on my own homepage and delete them here.
Well and getting a job with uploading freebies here? You are kidding? Nobody will get any job doing things like that. Really not.