Mindmovie said
- If there is a hard reject, the reviewer should take the time to explain this in much more depth. Just giving us one standard sentence (mixing quality / commercial standards) is to my understanding not sufficient and does no justice to the work the author has spent to create the rejected track.
Nobody wants an explanation if a track is approved, but if you want to improve your audiences learning curve - please reviewers - give us more flesh why you have decided to do a hard reject.
Thanks for the valid questions. They’ve actually been addressed in the past on forums, but we’ll recap here again and make sure the core info is retained in our upcoming FAQ article, in the Help Center.
One of the challenging realities we often encounter on Envato Markets is that many newer and aspiring authors anticipate the commercial stock industry to operate as a school environment.
For reasons of stock industry inexperience perhaps, they feel entitled to be taught and specifically explained why their work can’t be accepted.
Understandably, many novice stock authors do not immediately recognize that libraries and business organizations like Envato Markets exist firstly to provide a communal service platform, to facilitate bridging the needs of both buyers and sellers, to license digital goods. Not to teach people how to improve their skills.
For all the focus and investment in the community’s ability to conglomerate and discuss a wide variety of topics, a basic truth is that Envato Market sites should not be confounded with Envato’s established education sites, “the TutsPlus network”:http://music.tutsplus.com - and thus the review departments cannot provide customized feedback notices on item submissions that result in Hard Rejections. This is aligned with industry standards.
The rejection aspect of the review queue is not a free education service. This is just telling it like it is. 
So, simply, to effectively serve their purpose of keeping our queues efficient, our reviewers cannot respond as item critiquing agents or commercial viability tutors. That is not their job.
When processing many many thousands of submissions, It’s just not realistic to expect our review teams to spend additional and compounded time to elaborate custom critiques and feedback, even in significantly condensed form, where several aspects of a submission are deemed insufficient for acceptance.
And as mentioned in the first post, it’s been clearly seen that the bulk of items we hard reject are not able to accepted when resubmitted, even after we provided extensive feedback in the past. So it’s not a winning proposition for going forward, even if best intentions are very much present.
Therefore, to be clear, it’s up to each professional and aspiring author to understand and seek resources to learn how their productions could be honed and improved, when they cannot be accepted in our library.
Unquestionably, however, this principle does not disrupt the professionalism and respect with which Envato Markets strives to treat every submission received, from every interested author.
It is very easy to hide behind "The Envato Team" - why don't you tell us who was responsible for the reject ? It is not the envato team, infact it is never - it is one of 11 individual reviewers taking a decision.
There’s a simple answer to this, with two parts.
- For starters, saying "It is not the envato team, infact it is never - it is one of 11 individual " is not correct.
As mentioned in the first post:
In the queue, many of the items that we place on hold are ones that go through a second review without you realizing it.
Yes, it’s a team effort quite often enough, with second reviews for certain items, and senior review staff weighing in on reviews in a distinct capacity.
- Why are staff not listed on hard rejections?
Well, here’s a question for you … If we did tell you who rejected your track? What could/would you do, really? What action would you take?
Because in the past, when the names were actually listed, too many reviewers (not just on AJ) were often called out personally, both privately in emails and publicly on forums, receiving all kinds of personal requests, implicit demands for reevaluation, frustrated or angry emails directly, and even insults and threats at times.
Sadly this happened too often, to a point we could not allow it any further. As a result, a professional decision was made to keep Hard Rejection communications represented by the face of the company. We still stand by this decision.
That said, our Quality Team does track and monitor the rejection patterns of individual reviewers, internally, but making them public creates many more problems than it productively solves.
So we hope and trust you can understand this position and decision, in this sense.