Proof that music markets were doing fine. This written in December of 2018:
Thanks enabled -
Great question! We sure can create more of a Marketplace report in our future impact statements for sure.
At a high level Market revenue is on par to the same time last year — which is to say, it’s big and healthy.
Every day thousands of new customers arrive for the first time and make purchases, and an even larger cohort are returning. So that overall we’re still seeing the over 2.2M active customer base cited in the report (which is largely Market). It’s an enormous number of customers and means there’s still a lot of opportunity to make sales and attract customers to products.
But there is a lot happening inside the overall engine as some markets are rising (audio, video) others are slowing down (graphics, photos), and others are just at a mature stage of high volume (themes).
A lot of the change is driven by macro trends outside Envato, so for example - audio/video is a huge growth market in the world because of the increasing accessibility of both tools and platforms (like YouTube and Instagram) leading to more video content, more video ads, and more demand for content for it all. On the other hand graphics and photos are in a world where there is a huge amount of bundling and free content out there that simply didn’t exist ten years ago, meaning customers have more choice of how they get their assets, and even whether they pay for them.
I’ll have a think how to bring in more of this info in a sensible way next year as part of the report so that its digestible (as there are so many micro trends mixed in).
Overall Envato is growing (record sales, record community earnings, etc), and Market is a strong and healthy part of that, with lots of new opportunities in there!