Discussion - VideoHive Free File criteria and Premiere Pro

Envato Authors Video Authors
1

Hi VideoHive! :slight_smile:

I’d like your input on potential changes to the VH Free File criteria - both in a general sense, and also for the new category of Premiere Pro items. Last year I ran a similar discussion over in AudioJungle, and it produced some great feedback that resulted in changing our criteria to better suit the authors in that marketplace.

Why is quality important for free files?

For many customers, a free item is their first direct experience of VideoHive: they’ve browsed through some item listings, downloaded a free item, and will test it out to see what it’s like. Item quality is important because you aren’t just presenting a part of your individual portfolio to a potential buyer - you’re helping to represent VideoHive as a whole to brand-new customers.

Striking a balance

Free Files are one of the most powerful mechanisms for item exposure that we have - whether they appear on the VH homepage, on SEO-driven landing pages, or in an email campaign. Because of that, free files are also a valuable way of giving a second chance to good-quality items that might not have seen commercial success straight after release.

If we’re too restrictive (“only 5.00 ratings,” “minimum 10,000 sales” etc) then we exclude many good items from that exposure opportunity. We’re aiming to find a balance that ensures all potential free items are good enough from a quality perspective, without limiting it to only the top selling items that have less of a need for extra promotion.

We’re also interested in finding a way to include items from newer categories, such as Premiere Pro. As that category is brand new, very few items show any rating at all. Free files help us to promote those categories, helping them to develop a customer base.

What can we look for?

There’s one thing we can’t always do when selecting free files: that’s a subjective, expert assessment of “quality” as defined by an expert reviewer. We set minimum criteria as these files are often selected by staff in other roles within Envato - our reviewers are already flat out managing the review queues :wink:

Some of the other factors available are:

  • Total sales
  • Minimum rating
  • Release date (and sometimes date of last update)

What are we doing now?

The current VH Free File criteria are:

  • You must be the author of the file you’re submitting.
  • Maximum of ONE file nomination per author, per marketplace.
  • The file must be rated 4 stars or higher.

What is a fair way of changing this?

That’s where you come in: this process needs to work for the authors who participate, and also for the VideoHive marketplace as a whole.

Possible additions:

  • Replace the star rating with “At least X sales or At least a rating of 4+ stars”
  • Temporarily use different criteria for new categories, to allow more nominations from categories like Premiere Pro

If you’d like to make a suggestion, please let me know! My goals here are to ensure we have a pool of VideoHive free file nominations that are of high quality, but that also help the Envato Marketing team to promote items, item categories and authors that aren’t currently in the best-seller list. We want to have more authors making more sales overall :slight_smile:

2

  1. Replacing the “star rating” criteria with a minimum number of sales is a good idea. In the past 2 years the number of ratings per item has gone down significantly. There is a lot of great items, with hundreds of sales, that have just one or two, or even no rating at all.

  2. Usually the Free File Topics get a lot of views, we can invite market members (authors and customers) to hit like on their favorite item nominations, here on the forum post. It’s a way to involve the community in assessing the quality and value of the item (independently from the number of sales and rating).

1 Like
3

Thanks @framestore :slight_smile: What would a fair minimum sales number be, in your opinion? We’re currently using 50 sales as the threshold for AudioJungle free files.

4

No problem @BenLeong :slight_smile:
Around that number would be reasonable. It’s enough to prove the positive appeal of the item and also the fact that if it had any technical issues they would’ve come up.
Maybe combining this with the date of approval on the market? For example; the item should have at least 50 sales and should have been approved in the last 2 years. Just to keep it on trend.

1 Like