My purple name and disturbing amount of work to get it tells me it's free for me...

It'd only work if they closed down the Sony and Nintendo forums.

I would pay vg$500 per year

$0.00

I dont give a shit about the charts, im here for the community. 

To be honest Brett I see the future of vgchartz lieing in the community aspects, not the numbers. I know that a lot of people join this site, not because of the numbers but to join in the discussions in the frankly excellent forums. The last sentence in your post is what I believe we should do. Vgchartz should be a site that offers ballpark figures but does so free of charge. The site is, and I think will always be, looked down upon by the likes of David Riley and Gaf but I believe there is little that can be done to change those impressions, and charging money will certainly not help.

I think I speak for all of the posters here when I say that we all really appreciate the time and effort that you and the team put into this site. Its a really great and I am certain that the community aspects will continue to get better and better with 3.0. If you want to do more to improve the accuracy of our data then your are certainly welcome to do that but it is my opinion that all funding should come from money reinvested into the business, not from the users

I don't need the information for anything important, therefore I'm not going to pay for it.

It's good to be on the staff ;)

Wow a combined 80% saying either "nothing" or "I'm staff" has to tell you something.

Please don't make it a paying site or you'll lose over half your visitors.

None.

I'll just.... try to become staff, if I really need my numbers.

The staff can start pimping out the numbers for a small fee :F

And i bet inside information leaks will occur, so the numbers would probably be known throught the interwebs even if they were restricted to staff and premium accounts. And like many have said.. the community is where its at.