Just seen an article on why TVD ratings have fallen...
1) You lost a lot of viewers when the Klaus, Rebekkah and Elijah left.
2) The sire bond storyline, even though it had enormous potential, flopped.
3) There's too much going on in each season. Stick to one main storyline. And have the damn storylines interlinked if you're doing a separate storyline after the mid-season break.
3) Nina Dobrev left. You signed the cast for 6 seasons. You got greedy. You lost a main (if not the main) character.
4)You constantly shit all over Bonnie Bennet
5) Because Nina was leaving you wrote her character as shitty throughout the entire of season 6. You gave her little air time and made her whiney so in the end people didn't really care that she was put in a coma (Despite this I cried for the entire 45 minutes).
6) The show needed to be better written and should have ended last season. You knew you had 6 seasons. You knew who you wanted as endgame,you knew there was going to be an end. Instead of trying to drag the series out and gain more money you should have written the ending better and planned it out so that each character either died or was happy.
You could have done the series so well but you can't write a decent episode since season 2 (which still stands as the best overall season) apart from the odd epiosde or interaction. And knowing this you still aren't going to stop at season 7... You're going to write a season 8, you're going to be picked up despite the fact you're hemoraging viewers and you'll hopefully end it there. 7x01 wasn't too bad, just don't go downhill from here, don't fuck with the characters who by now should be your babies and don't have too many bloody storylines going on at once, season 5 was a trainwreck because of that.