Hey all! Lots of great questions have been coming in, and I’ve gone for a mix of grouping them into some themes and topics to write general answers, and some specific replies. While I don’t promise the answers will totally satisfy everyone, hopefully they will give you a bit of insight into how we (and I) are thinking:
Subscriptions and Market Sales.
It is a huge difference, and a big insight into how digital content markets move. When I started out in this industry, “Rights Managed” was still a type of license. After a while ‘Royalty Free’ came along and it felt tough for creators who saw it initially as less money for more licenses. However over time the volume of these new cheaper licenses made up for the lower prices. Then ‘Microstock’ came along and did the same thing to royalty free, making it way more affordable (think like $300 photo licenses vs $1). Then subscriptions. And more recently you have Unsplash and all the free sites.
The other week there was a great quote from the new CEO of Getty, about their erstwhile rival Corbis, who refused to move with the times:
“Craig Peters, the new CEO of Getty Images points to Corbis Images, Getty’s one-time crosstown rival, which Getty acquired parts of in 2016 and which, Peters notes, was tenaciously sticking to an outdated pricing model “right up until the end.” - Seattle Times
Those same industry forces are at play on the content types we sell at Envato. Right now subscription economics are moving quicker than ever across the industry. Not a day goes by that I don’t see news about a new unlimited subscription, or a new ‘free’ site popping up.
It’s easy to get disenfranchised and think its just a race to the bottom. But for me, the lower prices and increased affordability, is also growing the total addressable customer base by huge leaps. Again, when I started out, the only people who used stock assets were well paid agencies. These days it’s really anyone with a creative project. Even the ‘free’ sites have a part to play here where more people get introduced to the idea of creating using stock and assets and templates.
I see our job as being to innovate with the market and make sure that wherever the industry goes, we have a viable option for authors from a company that is committed to community earnings.
Anyhow to your question on Market sales, they’re holding up better than we’d hoped, though they are down year on year. Internally we look at the combination of Market and Elements both in gross revenue (which is up) and in authors earnings (which is up). But Market itself is down a few percent on this time last year, and that looks like an ongoing trend (though one that’s not as steep as my worst fears at times!)
It’s tempting to think the driver of Market’s changes are Elements, especially as we drive subscription customers over. But we’d been mapping the trend of the sales curve for years prior to the launch of Elements and had been seeing changes before we ever launched into subscriptions, because of the movement of the industry, first to ‘bundles’ and then to ‘subscriptions’ and ‘free’. From what I can tell the bigger forces on Market are actually industry ones.
There are always people who want to buy things in single doses, especially in the ‘templates’ end of the market. And Envato Market is a huge traffic net, and the majority of our work goes to maintaining that traffic (we spend a lot of our developer and product time on ‘seo’ for example).
Overall though we are definitely moving to a world where Envato Market is just one part of the overall Envato ecosystem of offerings, and while Elements is still the junior player, it’s coming up fast and creating overall more earning opportunity. I think that’s a better picture than if we just stuck to the one model and refused to move with the industry. I think there’d be some short term gains for individual Market authors, but overall it wouldn’t be a good idea for the community or Envato as a whole.
New Items.
One of the biggest focuses for UX change on Market has been around discoverability, and I know this is also a source of some major frustrations, especially as it relates to ‘new’ content.
As you all know, we first tested whether just showing ‘best sellers’ as the default sort was going to drive more sales. It did, but we did also see a decrease in sales on ‘new items’ (not as big a decrease as is sometimes touted in the forums, but there was a decrease). This suggested that customers are often interested in things that show hallmarks of quality (sales, reviews, etc), so that when we show them more prominently they result in overall more sales. However it’s also not a good idea to have no exposure for new and up-and-coming items.
This year we’ve rolled out new category pages that are working well to balance new items along with best selling and other quality items. We can now show a wider range of the library instead of one long list of items with a single sort.
On ThemeForest for example, with the new Category page, new item sales increased significantly by 50% compared to the old single list of items with Best Selling sort, while maintaining the same conversion rate. This design also allowed us to show on sale items for Cyber Monday and helped customers find relevant items on sale.
We still have more work to do in discoverability on Market, as well as tools for authors to manage prices, and get exposure.
General Answers …
We definitely are starting to open the Elements doors to more authors, though we’re trying to go slowly and cautiously. Sometimes that’s been good, other times there’s been authors with proven track records that would be a good fit who have had frustrating experiences. It will get better in time. Our Content teams have really shifted focus to try to create a more frictionless experience as we know there are a lot of issues from joining to upload to feedback.
On Market, we’re doing our best to use customer feedback to guide the decisions in what to show. Unsurprisingly, customers like affordable and value offerings, and where we’ve shown items that are a bargain they get a lot of pick up. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for higher priced or premium items, it’s just that there’s a mix.
I’m sorry to hear our communications have felt like closed doors. We’re actually working to be more communicative, especially with our in person events, and more staff working in the Content area than ever in our history.
@Monkeysan and @Datasata asked about an Annual Affiliate Earnings Report - we don’t currently have one, but it’s a great suggestion for next year!
@tips4design - That’s an interesting point! I had been thinking about just the profit share component, but you are right staff are also paid salaries! I’ll give that some thought for next year. We did actually think about profit sharing with authors, but there are so many authors that the profits don’t go very far. Put another way, author earnings is way larger than profits, so as a % increase it’d be super small 
Great question styleWish! We sure do:
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On international, we’ve been slowly translating Elements into more languages, and then working on traffic (customer) acquisition in those languages. That’s a slow but steady part of the plan. For example Tuts+ has 40% of its traffic in non-English, and it is the largest referrer through to Elements. We haven’t gone to Chinese yet though! Actually there’s a company in China which I came across recently called iBaotu which is a bit of an ‘envato’ in china which is interesting!
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On other opportunities, we’re opening WordPress ‘Template Kits’ up to authors this year. We’ve been trialing them for a year first for free, then for Elements subscribers, and we think there’s real earning potential there. Also we’re opening up for Elements authors to have their mockups, icons, videos and other things piped through to Placeit, for the team there to rework them into the tool and create some more earning.
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And lastly the Content team here is looking at introducing other new categories into both Market and Elements. It’s been a while since we added a major one (the last was Premiere Pro). That said, many promising platforms are actually quite small when it comes to comparing to the bigger ones like Adobe and WordPress. But if you have suggestions, they’re always welcome!
An annual report of everything we didn’t do would be VERY long The truth is we’re constantly trying to figure out how to do more internally. When we were a lot smaller (like ten people at Envato), I used to laugh at bigger companies and how slow they seemed. These days, I have a lot more sympathy as I’ve come to understand how hard it can be to work with big large codebases, sometimes with legacy problems that make them hard to change, lots of scale of traffic and customers meaning everything has to be done very carefully, and of course lack of people to do all the things you could do. That all said, we can and should do better to deliver more value to authors (and customers)!
OK that’s it for now!
Responses to more questions are on their way! Feel free to post more as well, and I’ll aim to have another batch of answers on Monday! 