Adjusting Our Focus: A New Approach for Photos at Envato

[jamesgiroux]

Hi
Sounds good.

1. What happens the the images already in the queue?
2. When are you stopping buyers buying from photodune?
3. What happens to users accounts and money that you deem not to be accepted to the new format?
4. Those that are accepted, will their entire port be included?
5. Will accepted users need to resubmit any existing content?

Its typical, I just became full time artist photographer last month dedicating my life to creating. Now Photodune life hangs in the balance, hopefully for the better.

Good luck all

What happens to the images already in the queue?
One of the main goals of the assessment process is to identify authors we can trust to upload only content that meets the new quality requirements. So, we’ll be looking at things like the overall quality of your portfolio, how you respond to the feedback, etc. Once we’re confident you’re just as committed to quality as we are, you’ll be free to upload any items without an item-by-item review process and queued items will be automatically added to your portfolio.

If you don’t make this initial cut, we’ll be disabling your portfolio and deleting any queued items. You’ll have another chance to be part of it when we reopen portfolio submissions in the future.

When are you stopping buyers buying from PhotoDune?
We’re not! There are no plans to stop customers from purchasing items from PhotoDune’s existing library. PhotoDune will remain open for the duration of the project.

What happens to users accounts and earnings balance for authors not invited to tomorrow’s PhotoDune?
Authors who have content available on other Envato marketplaces will be able to withdraw earnings as they always have. If their earnings are below the minimum withdrawal threshold, we’ve got a process in place to help them receive their balance.

For authors not invited to tomorrow’s PhotoDune, their Envato Market account will remain active and available to them. Only their ability to upload new items to PhotoDune will be removed, and their current PhotoDune portfolio will be disabled.

All authors, irrespective of the results of a portfolio assessment are welcome to submit a portfolio for review.

For those who are accepted, will their entire portfolio be included?
Will their entire portfolio be included on Elements? Our current thinking is yes.

Will accepted authors need to resubmit any existing content?
No, authors will not have to resubmit any existing content. Authors will, however, be expected to maintain a high level of quality and consistency within their portfolio, and we plan to move toward more actively coaching authors on this.

This is a very short notice.

Will it happen to audiojungle, codecanyon, themeforest too? Soon?

Will we be at least notified with a couple of months before just suddenly turning off new submissions like here?

So is this the plan? To shutdown the Envato Market and move slowly completely to Envato Elements?

We would love to know in advance, because there are people here who left their real time jobs in favor of authoring on Envato Market.

Many of the reasons behind this project relate to PhotoDune’s specific situation and don’t apply to other marketplaces.

However, there are some overlaps. Quality, for example, is something we’re after across all marketplaces (like AudioJungle, VideoHive, ThemeForest, etc.). We know that can be a challenge and we’ll continue to support author success with new tools and resources that help them earn more and earn smarter. This includes providing more details around what we think will sell (commercial demand guides) and what technical quality we want as a minimum (you’re welcome to show off your mad skills beyond the minimums).

There is no plan to shut down Envato Market. We want to create more opportunities for authors to earn and Elements is one way to do that. We’ve got plans to introduce new categories to Envato Elements and you can expect to see more details on that right here in the forums.

This seems like a bit of a helping the rich get richer approach.

It’s easy to take this view when traditionally those with the largest portfolios earn the most. What we’re encouraging is a new way of looking at the stock photo world as one where authors earn revenue because of the quality of their work, not the size of their portfolio. We know there are great quality photos in the library that haven’t had many sales, and historically higher selling photos that will not meet our latest requirements and policies. We believe that this entire process will help all authors with great content have more opportunities to earn.

On another note, any chance you could look into creating plugins/UI panels for applications people are using the items in so they have a direct in app link to the marketplace?

Part of our current plans is to do some work to the underlying platform and technology that’s a necessary first step to enabling future improvements such as this.

Will inclusion in Elements be mandatory? Selling unlimited subscriptions for $49 / month is insane, that’s just undercutting all other markets and will only lead to further erosion of photographers income.

At this stage, yes.

A lot of our graphics authors initially had similar concerns about undercutting markets, but it’s not something we’ve seen play out in reality. In fact, GraphicRiver had its best August ever in the same month Elements launched, and we’ve continued to see strong sales in the months following. On top of this, many of the Elements contributors who are also authors on Market have had healthy growth in Market earnings as well as a new revenue stream from Elements.

For authors/contributors, Elements is a new product is attracting whole new customer segments that you might otherwise not be selling to. It’s about incremental income to support your earnings from Market.

We recently posted a more detailed update about Elements in a separate thread - check it out and feel free to join the discussion.

“Quality over quantity” always sounds good, but very much depends on the definition of quality. Let’s wait what that means.

Why wait?! We’ve got an overview of our new requirements ready for you and a lookbook available on Pinterest to give you a sense of what we’d like to see more of on PhotoDune.

I think it would have been helpful to have an easier way for Authors to clean up their Portfolios.

We agree, and we’re sorry we weren’t able to deliver on this in time for this project. The good news is the foundational work outlined in section 3 above (our photos platform and the technology behind it) will make it a lot easier to develop tools like this going forward.