Hi authors,
We would like to address some of the concerns raised in the forums regarding the earnings reports and offer some transparency on the way earnings are reported.
First, we are committed to informing you when there are any delays in calculations or potential system outages. One of the first things we have done to keep you informed is the addition of ‘Author Earnings’ to our Envato Status page which you can find HERE. At Envato, we have a whole team dedicated to author earnings who work hard to ensure that all authors are paid fairly, accurately and on time.
So what is happening when there are delays/Earnings Reports are not updating?
One of the big things to keep in mind with Elements earnings; is that we work on the ‘Subscriber Share’ model. This model is designed to be a much fairer distribution method for our authors, however, it is significantly more complicated to calculate and reconcile each month (but we think it is worth the extra effort).
Each month there are also reconciliations that need to occur before we start reporting the earnings; e.g. exchange rates, as we accept payments in multiple currencies for Elements subscriptions and payout earnings in USD. Due to the reconciliation process, there can be a few days delay at the beginning of a month before your Earnings Reports will begin showing data. We are working hard to reduce these delays in the new year. When these delays happen it does not mean there are zero earnings, rather that the earnings have not yet been calculated but will be updated when complete.
On occasion, there are instances where we will run routine maintenance or a third party system may have an outage. This may also cause a delay in the Earnings Reports being updated while the systems are catching up and ensuring all earnings are reported on.
This data is for Analytics purposes to help you understand the performance of your items.
The daily earnings data we provide is intended to help you understand how your items are performing while the total monthly earnings are being calculated. Due to the complexity of the data that is being calculated and reported on, there can be brief outages at the daily level which we appreciate can cause frustration.
We are committed to delivering an Earnings Statement early next year that will be a downloadable overview of your Envato Elements earnings each month - this should be seen as the ‘source of truth’ for earnings, and the daily feed is to assist you in understanding the timely performance of your items.
Why are there two Earnings Reports and why are they not always showing the same information?
We are currently in the middle of a journey to deliver a dashboard that gives you everything you might need to be as successful as possible. While we work towards this reality, we wanted to make sure that you still had access to the old tools. Due to the way the data is connected, the Envato Author Dashboard is updated once per day, whereas the existing Elements Contributors App is often updated throughout the day. This means that at certain times the earnings figures and dates may be out of sync from each other. We’re getting closer to the point in which we can have a single dashboard and a downloadable monthly Earnings Statement to go along with it. You can find some more information about the rollout of the dashboards in this post.
Mythbusting ‘manual’ calculations
As mentioned earlier in this thread there is a lot that goes into calculating your earnings, from attributing item points, to allocating millions of licensing events each month from subscribers with different currencies. Our calculations are done through systems automatically, the only ‘manual’ steps involved with these processes are approvals required to kick off the next month’s calculations.
Otherwise, I think we’d need something like this…
Thank you for your help as we’ve been learning and growing to understand how to best deliver all the information and insights that you want to see. I hope that this information has been helpful and insightful as we strive to be as transparent and informative as possible.
If you have any suggestions or further questions, please feel free to reply to this thread or DM me directly.
Jimmy - Content Product Manager
