It's not an event, it's just bonuses for spending money. Technically, it's bonuses for spending the digital currency you get with real money, so if you're a survey/offers maniac you can polish off those first 2-3 tiers without spending any money at all.
If websites ran on wishes and desperation, we'd be fine but unfortunately that's not how business works. Gaia's got a long history of
-being- -unable- -to turn- -a profit- even in their glory days.
At its prime Gaia had hundreds of thousands of users online at once, up to half a million, all active, posting, and viewing advertisements. Now we've got 10-25k on average and while that may seem like it would put less stress on the servers, it's also a MASSIVE loss of revenue. Gaia isn't popular and it's not attracting sponsors like it once was. Before we had quests, car sponsorships, events, theatres, authors promoting books, Gaia was
in demand and seen as a lucrative partnership to reach a fairly broad demographic that was being missed by a lot of traditional advertising. Gaia is nothing now. It's not in the news, it's not winning awards, it's not being advertised in magazines, online games, and anime websites, and it's been abandoned by almost everyone that once used it. Features such as Adblock also cut deeply into profits. While the traffic costs are much lower, they haven't routinely purged past threads and the vast majority of Gaia's content remains active as do old user accounts. Artists, programmers, and developers haven't magically become cheaper either, it costs just as much to have an artist design clothing items for ten people as it does ten million. Games and new features are something you develop as you grow because you know you'll have a userbase large enough to make them profitable, or at least to break even. The market for pixel goods is much smaller than it once was, we don't get the ad revenue we once did, and forum based communities are dying as a whole. Tweens and kids who are looking to express themselves online are no longer searching for message boards but are instead finding an outlet in sites like Tumblr and FaceBook. There's not a lot of potential growth in Gaia's future. It's been on a long, slow decline for a while and I'd honestly be surprised if it was still around in 5-6 years. Even strongholds like Neopets, once a massively successful children's site, have crumbled.
TLDR:
When there were half a million people online daily clicking advertisements and luring corporations to run sponsored events/items Gaia didn't have to push their cash shop. Now they do because it's the only way for them to earn money. They are a company and their employees need to eat and their bills need to get paid.
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