(2015) https://www.premiumwp.com/themeforest-authors-report-50-70-drop-in-theme-sales/
(2018) sales down by 95% since 1st of July
(2019) You are here
Each year?
I totally agree with all authors here. Please remove the Elements banner and make Newest items as a default page.
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Envato has removed the last remaining reason to upload anything to any of their marketplaces, namely, mass exposure. Everything else Envato does makes no business sense at all for an authour:
The fee structure is extortionately high, adding to that a second lot of commission, the “Buyer Fee”, and you are left with a fraction of the original item price.
Then there is the huge promotion of Elements across all our products, what amounts to a rival marketplace, which says to buyers “Don’t buy this item for $49, get an Elements sub and download thousands of items for half the price”.
The ONLY thing that made the fee’s and Elements promotion tolerable from a business standpoint was the huge amounts of exposure, the potential to get noticed and build sales were large enough to take a volume approach to selling, that is what made Envato a viable proposition, that has now been removed.
I see a lot of people mentioning the lack of competition as a reason for sticking with what amounts to a really bad deal here on Envato, and granted none of Envato’s competitors are quite as big, but that does not mean that they should be ignored, the commission structure on these rival sites is much more generous, so you won’t have to sell as much to walk away with the same money. In my experience these rival marketplaces are much more authour oriented, one, in particular, decided to open an “Elements” style subscription service, after about a year they closed it down, they gave numerous reasons for shutting it down, one of which was that the subscription site harmed authors on their main marketplace site, can you honestly imagine Envato admitting to that? The opportunities on rival sites are very real, and once enough people migrate to them, they won’t be as small.
I have taken the decision to not add any more items to Envato, it just makes no sense now that new items get zero exposure, I appreciate that Envato is a business, and if an A/B test tells them that they can increase conversions by 5% then I totally get that, but a company that uses other peoples work to build their own business have to maintain a certain amount of trust with the authours who contribute to their success, that trust has been broken far too many times now. Bottom line, Envato cannot be trusted to make decisions that benefit all, only themselves.
The response from Envato, what little there has been, can be summed up in one sentence “That’s what’s happening, suck it up” people need to start voting with their feet, its been made clear new items/authours are not welcome here.
As a new authour myself I am bitterly disappointed with my experience here, greedy extra fees implemented, elements banners absolutely everywhere, burying new items under 7-year-old broken items with no working previews, cut and paste replies from support operatives, and just to add insult to injury, Envato staff basically saying “It’s not us, it’s you”, not great.
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#Newest Items PLEASE
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#Newest Items PLEASE
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@jamesgiroux , can you ask @collis to attend this discussion?
It’s strange to see him not participating in such an important discussion.
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I have to pay traffic for elements from my pocket - cool! What’s next? Need to buy their own products? You say that on this Intrusive banner no one clicks? If that’s the case, remove it. He annoys me as an author. Why can’t I close it?
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Why you would not keep your own advice and they did the same with Elements obviously you need traffic there and leave the authors here to work without forcing banners and steal traffic…fair play if you know what that means…
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hello, James
Your idea with best sellers makes no sense for new items, authors. Best sellers remain best sellers, they are sold, sold and will be sold. But not new. Sooner or later, your idea will die, it is only a matter of time.
Do you think the authors will leave envato before this moment or not? …
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Just check sales for new items and you will understand what’s going on with envato. You will understand our rage, anger, dissatisfaction and dissapointment
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your biggest mistake is that you discovered the elements, with the help of which you gave the opportunity to earn well NOT the AUTHORS, but the PIRATES who download a bunch of projects by subscription, and then resell them, which means you don’t worry about your authors, you just worried about the popularity and traffic of the site, which were already out of competition along with the rest of the stock sites
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It’s the other way around. Collis makes the decision and James is the messenger. Long time ago when Envato had handful of authors and we were not disposable / replaceable yet, Collis would personally discuss all important decisions with us. The current stage the Envato is in does no more require such interventions. So no, we won’t be hearing anything from Collis. He is busy.
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It’s great to see so many honest and well articulated posts here from both new and really prominent authors.
I guess this is the point where we sit back and wait for the next cut and paste reply from Envato which most likely won’t change anything?
IF we are not getting any satisfying answer from Envato regarding the return of newest items sort on all marketplaces and removal of Elements banner asap, I suggest we take it to the next level and “Take the bull by the horn”.
We are many who have tried very hard being polite and extremely patient in these issues, explaining why Envato fails to respect their marketplace authors, in particular the exclusive ones.
So what can be done? There is a mountain of evidence here that Envato cares less about marketplace authors and their voices therefore do not count as much as they should.
As @collis stated in the annual public announcement, Envato’s goal is to switch customers from shopping to creating, in other words a big focus on subscription. Behind that focus goes big budgets and project prioritisation. Point is Envato have actually been very clear about how much they care about getting customers to sign up to Elements.
Elements is Envato’s weak spot, in the core of that weak spot the highest performing categories like Video and possible Audio as a close second at least. Regardless it is as obvious as the day is long that Envato wants to fill up their Elements catalogue and frustrating exclusive market authors leads in many cases to this. Consider this a very nice bonus effect to the increase in temporary conversion at the markets.
So ultimately the power of the ALL authors lies in uniting Elements authors and send the message “Hey, we will not upload anything more to Elements unless you start respecting the marketplace and meet our demands there” This is Phase 1. If Envato still refuse to listen to the opinion of 98% of the authors on this marketplace, phase 2 can be started, this is were Elements authors start reducing their Elements catalogue. In a synchronised and controlled manner.
I would like to clarify that this is not a threat against Envato, it is an open and transparent post about what power the authors actually have on this marketplace per 2019. A power to stand up and say enough is enough, we won’t accept how you are treating authors, authors who essentially have built up these successful markets.
So how do we unite the Elements authors? I have a couple of ideas, but I won’t waste more space here on this thread discussing that, anyone who want’s to discuss this idea feel free to send me a private message or email me and we’ll take it from there. I will gladly help out with a potential “Envato Elements union”.
The thing is that there is no such thing as the Market authors versus the Elements authors, we are all under the same machinery and in the same boat at the end of the day. We have nothing to loose by standing up for ourselves. The leadership who is running the marketplaces are the same people who are running Elements. The hostile and insensitive author decisions of the marketplace will hit the Elements authors sooner or later as well, maybe quite sooner than one should expect. Envato have just hired an author growth specialist, so that really says something about their future plans. It’s easier to unite and demand some healthy changes now before the author pool of Elements grows out of proportions.
Some might say, yeah that’s quite amazingly naive trying to unite the Elements authors to speak up. Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s actually much more naive to sit around here on the forum waiting for better times to be served to us out of the blue. We’ll see. I am also 100% sure that a lot of Envato employees agrees with the authors here and we might get some “unexpected Envato help” if we now show them that we are seriously not taking this non sense anymore.
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Yeah, It’s enough naive.
Your speech is understandable if it would be related to a state government or smth like that.
But, if you don’t like Envato, why don’t you leave?
If you think they don’t care, why would you?
There are lots of opportunities around.
It’s a business platform, people earn here. I believe Elements authors don’t want to lose their money, because somebody loses. It is market reality.
Why would author who came here to earn, will drop his earnings for idea? For possible growth in market? What if this won’t happen? Who will compensate their loss?
I’m not saying that this is just impossible, lots of authors just not visiting/posting here and they will easily replace those, who dropped from Elements.
To sum:
I’m for reasonable demands on such things as page design changes (as result pills were added what is better than nothing)
I’m against to calls for authors to act in certain ways which somebody thinks will be good.
We are all here have different experiences, different results. Nobody forces anybody to stay here and add items with 0 exposure. It’s not like the country where you were born and you don’t wanna leave cause of inappropriate government.
Also authors should start uploading their items to Envatos competitors, who by the way, seem to be treating their authors with waaaaay more respect. Then once there’s at least two big players in the market, Envato won’t be able to get away with such nonsense decisions without noticeable repercussions to their business.
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We as authors have to be unite to do this, I feel it happens, I saw a significant slow down of new items arrival at the home page, saying that authors have started striking Envato. If we come together as one bunch hopefully we can get through and we can make envato safe, before they say “We have seen such a huge lost on Envato market places compared to elements and we are closing this and that” like they did for active den
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Wow, what a sorry state of affairs. I wish we could know if, and to what extent, these horrible changes have impacted profits on the marketplace as a whole. With so many authors saying their sales have fallen drastically, it makes me wonder who’s collecting those dropping sales. Is it really a case of one author loses and another author gains? To muse on my own question, I guess forums aren’t a precise place to collect data, as people are more likely to voice their grief than their joy, but I beg the question: Have the market places’ total profit dropped since the implementation of a rally of seemingly blinkered decisions, and is the domination of the Elements platform the end game of their latest business strategy, coming to the conclusion that they stand to make more profit from the few and so forsaking the many? The Collis quote that @MojoSoundtrack posted “we want them to switch from ‘shopping’ to ‘making’. That translates to a big focus on subscriptions.” makes me wonder because I thought the credits system did that wonderfully well.
I agree with many of the points already raised, especially this one:
If we’re to pay for our own marketing, why should I just accept that the conversions from the page views that I bought can just be siphoned off via the Elements banner.
Also, OlexandrIgnatov wrote a really thought provoking post. Some ideas there that I hadn’t even considered. I’m looking forward to Envato’s response to those great points, even if they keep ignoring the banner complaints.
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All of our items were affected by this experiment, especially our latest item (Was published during this experiment), we experienced a huge decline in sales in the last 4 months.
Almost no traffic at all, most of our items used get 50 views per day, now most of them get 1 to 3 views per day, no traffic no sales, we only had 2 sales this month. It’s a really bad move from Envato to kill almost all authors businesses’ just because the experiment gave them 5% increase in conversion rate. It’s actually unbelievable.
Didn’t Envato realize that the 5% increase in sales won’t last forever? just give it few months until most of costumers realize that this market became outdated, seeing the same top selling items over and over, how do you expect them to find what they want? At some point they will eventually think about using other marketplaces, because most of other online marketplaces’ goals is to make the items discovery system as effective as it can be, and that’s the key to keep the costumer happy, just show them something that is modern and high-quality quickly. Unlike Envato that keeps showing them the same outdated items from ~ 2011 over and over. So it’s about time until Envato realizes this mistake.
Do you think that there are authors that will keep making and submitting items even if they don’t get sales anymore? what’s the point? they will also think about leaving the market eventually. It’s pretty logical for anyone to find another job if the current one doesn’t make money anymore.
Pretty sure since Envato is now at its finest, they will be like “Oh we don’t care about few customers or authors leaving us, we are a huge company and it doesn’t affect us that much”, yes that’s true for now but only time can tell, don’t treat authors like some objects to make experiments on, we are all humans and have business, without authors you wouldn’t be this successful and huge, so i guess you can count this as a stab in the back from Envato.
There are big competitors to Envato, and it doesn’t matter if they are community-driven or not, as long as they provide the customer something that is high-quality and modern, they will win over Envato eventually. I’m not saying that Envato will die soon, i’m just saying they won’t be “huge” anymore if they keep doing things like this, it’s pretty logical.
Envato, if you are reading this, you still have some time to think about switching back to the old default sort, it benefits everyone that is not happy right now (Customers, New Authors, Top Authors, Elite Authors, Power Elite Authors, and you : ) ). Do you rather keep 90% of you community unhappy over having a temporarily 5% increase in conversion rate?
I’m just saying how we Authors feel like, sorry if this sounds rude to anyone. However we decided to leave the market, wishing good luck to every author, hope you all achieve you dreams. Sayonara!
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Let me tell you what’s going on, they just want to close Themeforest. Quietly. It is quite obvious now. 
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Preface, let me apologize for my bad English.
We are a team with 4-5 year experienced people separated from big companies. We have been investing in the Magento platform for nearly a year, building the framework, and a high quality Magento template in terms of design and code optimization. It’s sad to have the recent change of envato. Our item will be submitted to Themeforest on June 15, but perhaps we will choose another market, Envato does not allow me to specify the specific name of the market we will come (I have tried and the character has been blackened and censored)
This is sad. We have trusted to choose Envato market. until now Envato is still the number one market in terms of traffic.
Envato said that all authors should invest money in marketing, this is true, not wrong at all! However you see if we invest money in marketing, and envato continues to put customer-oriented banners on the Element page, so we wasted money. We put our own pocket money to market for the envato element. This is an unacceptable deception!
This is when all authors should unite. We not only share on this forum, but also share widely on other social network channels (Facebook, twitter …) with hashtag about envato’s deception. Here we censored the content. Use social networking tools to oppose this issue strongly so that envato understands that they can’t do what they want to betray all the authors who have devoted many years to them.
Finally, we would like to say that the new market we will move to is not equal to envato. However, they have been on the market for a long time (appearing before envato), better profit sharing, higher prices of goods … and currently the number of authors has switch from envato to many. I believe they will grow well if there are more new items to attract customers. We no longer trust Envato, and we will deliver the message to our customers so that they will also believe in this market.
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