envato dies...bring back the NEWEST ITEMS home page!

Envato Authors Video Authors
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Isn’t it “REVENUE”? Sure, visibility ties into that, but I wouldn’t care if my items were displayed as a 1x1 pixel thumbnail on the last page… as long as I get a decent level of revenue. What was that post recently about the artist or artists who designed the current dollar bills? Their ‘item’ probably has the most visibility in the world… but I’m guessing they don’t own private jets, multiple villas around the world and use stacks of $100 bills as firewood as a result.

So what was your reason for not uploading anything for the almost two years before the sorting order changed.

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Because I have a crystal ball that shows the future.

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One of the most frustrating things about this forum is that whenever authors write about their concerns, some others come and say the same thing:

“Hey, why don’t you create some better items, write better description pages & get really good in marketing” etc. etc.

Oh, really?
Thanks for that.

But, just letting you know, it has NOTHING to do with the central matter of discussion that’s going on in this thread.

The problem is, Envato doesn’t care about the consequences of their actions on authors.

(Just a few examples by the way; so, including but NEVER limited to:)

At first, they said:
“You guys create your items, and we deal with marketing”

Then they said:
“We can kill your items’ visibility any time we want in any way we want, so you have to do your own marketing now”

When some authors talked about their concerns, here in the forums, some others came and said the same thing as always:

“Hey, why don’t you stop moaning about your sales and instead create better items?” as if we don’t already know it.

AND, when authors were too busy with doing their own marketing here and there like crazy, guess what happened:

Envato said:
“Hey, we are launching ELEMENTS which results in selling thousands of items for almost free, and we are also putting this wonderful banner on top of each and every page including your own items’ pages”

And, when some authors raised their concerns (i.e killing authors’ marketing efforts
with one simple move + extremely cheapening a whole industry), again we had the same old story, “hey guys c’mon build better items and get good in marketing” etc. etc.

Now, next scenario:
Envato says:
“Hey guys, we decided to move the whole marketplace to Elements and sell the whole package even cheaper ; because we don’t need ThemeForest or other marketplaces anymore”.

I wonder what you’re going to say then.
Let me guess: Create better items, get good in marketing and stop moaning about your sales. (Thanks in advance.)

Note: And, after doing all of that without even considering authors’ thoughts on serious matters, we have these “COMMUNITY HEALTH” surveys. Un be li e vab le. Just check the forums, guys. The “COMMUNITY HEALTH” survey is there.

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Must have been broken the day you decided to focus on Mailchimp templates!

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Yet, not many authors actually take that advice. Instead, complaints carry on about wanting their items to exist on the front page for several days or at the top of a list for weeks upon end so they get the exposure they’re so obsessed with.

Projects I created several years ago still sell at a consistent and regular rate. How could that be without front page or top-of-the-list exposure? :thinking:

With literally thousands of authors participating in the marketplace, how exactly do you propose Envato fairly features every item submitted by every author? This proposal is logistically and realistically impossible. If Envato would show every new item on the front page, do you realize how jumbled and massive that would be? How would a customer even find a specific item in a sea of hundreds of thumbnail images? And how exactly do you perceive that to be an advantage for you?

An author can scoff at obvious advice such as creating better items, writing better descriptions, and doing better social media marketing – but until an author actually implements those things, the frustration will continue.

Too many authors expect instant success, uploading a file and hoping it immediately propels them into early retirement. The brutal fact is not every author is going to be successful. Not every author wants to treat their projects as an actual business or run their profiles like an actual company – all things that require a serious investment of time and legitimate effort.

But I’ve only been selling on Videohive for 9 years, so what do I know? :man_shrugging:

It doesn’t? The main context of this thread is an author’s concern of new items being shown on the home page – and I’m attempting to explain that the front page exposure isn’t quite as effective as many authors believe it to be.

Yet you nudged the conversation in a different direction by complaining about Elements, which really doesn’t have anything to do with this conversation. Elements is another tool in an author’s arsenal to reach customers and generate additional revenue. You may not agree with the model, but the fact is that a lot of authors are finding success on the platform.

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This is a professional answer. Congratulations!

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Also most of authors are missing the fact of huge growth of overall number of new items. Competition has just became to high nowadays and that’s why marketing and all other staff matters

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day by day sales are increasingly terrible, never again feel like sales last year :pensive:

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Yes it is true, Please Bring back the newest items page.

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It won’t help =) Just forget about old newest items type of defaults

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I think it should`nt be Black and White. Default sorting could include mixture of newest and best items. Now it’s better to rename “Best Items” to “Oldiest 5-6y old items”.

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This works for searching by tag/specific words:

First two projects are from 1 to 3 weeks old.
And this is where most of sales come from. Just imagine typical customer behavior: most of them have specific needs, so they search by specific words. Default categories are used by those who doesn’t have that specific type of search (e.g. lower thirds, titles). But it is unlikely that customer who needs iPhone mock-up or App Promo would just go to any category - he will type specific words for search, same for other specific type of projects.

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I do understand what are you trying to say. But i believe oldest earners are the biggest earners over here. Big earnings let them advertise their items elsewhere and bring traffic up here with ease. Or just hire huge team of mates to make more beautiful products. I monitor this market closely by participating in it since 2015 and i am happy that i still feel that i am kind`a “last” person with the ticket to the “Last” train. But this “Last” feeling can be found everywhere around this forum and especially since the day they changed default sorting. The link you just gave me its just straight search, but myself i am affraid i rarely use it while looking for AE templates, for videos yes, but not for Web templates or AE… But anyway i havent seen any of your posts where you havent been advocating envato… Maybe most of your items are in “best items” category and you will defend this way of sorting by any means.
P.S. There were happy folks in Story Blocks. Just few months ago, they cancel regular sales and went to only “subsciption” model like EE. Hopefully this wont happen over here.

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It really depends on type of a project which customer looks for.

I do really have some items in best match category, but they make me around 20% of my monthly income. All other % come from simple search. Not all of my projects are successful and has nice sales

  • basically you can see through sales of my items and make some conclusions. I have one project which I’ve uploaded in May this year just before bad summer season. And it didn’t have sales boost at start, but had some sales every week and still is bringing me money, It is near 1k$ without marketing, newest items etc. It’s not the best result for such kind of items, others of mine made times more, but anyway all of them still has sales every month. +I have elements which boosts earnings even more (now it is around +70-80% to VH earnings).

And now lil bit of history and my past experience here:
I was very active in period of 2015 - start of 2017 and was creating lot’s of items - system was made the way you should produce more and more items because most of sales were coming in first month or two and after that depending on quality of project sales had stopped or were much lower than at the start. And only high-quality items could made constant sales during long period of time.
And with this system following had happened: lots of authors started to create lots of copycats of top-selling projects and copycats of their own projects, I remember one author who was making 3-4 types of projects round by round but in high capacity (just by slight tweaking or adding lil more content) but it wasn’t anything new. (And that author got 9th lvl paw btw:))
So market became oversaturated with that kind of projects and in 2017-2018 even newest items weren’t performing that good. Drop for newest items was BEFORE all recent changes were applied.
And still there are new projects/authors who rockets up with sales. Nowadays old strategies like: “upload anything and earn” don’t work. I’m also adapting to this and must say that this year even without elements is better than previous one because I’ve changed my strategy regards to items I produce. And now with Elements I’m using another strategy and this year will be the best year on Envato EVER :slight_smile:
And I’m not top selling author (let say high-average 100-150 sales a month for VH templates), top-sellers are mostly quiet and don’t write anything on forums)))

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Sorry for making you dive into this discussion. Yes i understand you, and i believe it would be great to chat with you over phone. There is a lot of things which probably just do not fit into “short” post. I do believe you could write a book about it. Other thing is that you main projects are AE, while i concentrate on video stock production and themeforest items. These things look similar (since its all on same platform) but at the same time different. I just uploaded videos of London, which i believe is quite attractive and popular thing, but still didn`t receive any sale. Of course you are right if someone will search for “London” they will find my stock on 1-2pages. But what about those who just passively make some sort of travel video about popular destinations. All videos which i found in default sorting are 4-6y old and most in HD. I also spoted “copy-cate” variations, but i do believe it is bigger issue in videostocks than in AE projects. Recently i have seen many authors put their pricing over 100$ per item. Do you have any idea why? Is it because they are on EE and do not feel the need of sales on VH?

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Yeah, definitely for Stock Footages there is different situation, I have my own vision regards to this category, but can’t prove it :)))

Anyway, those who sets high prices are most likely non-exclusive authors, so they just try to compensate fee loss. And I guess, they are pretty sure that their items are kinda unique in terms of quality and content itself. I’m pretty sure that footages like aerials, nature and all that kind of staff isn’t in demand now and has huge competition these days. What is valuable - are people(Actors) in a frame. Set of videos which can be transformed in logical sequences is valuable. Videos which can be used for composing (it can be different types of overlays or just videos on green screens or with green screen parts inside like laptop monitors, etc.) This is my experience from working with clients. It was kinda tricky to find one set of videos from one author to cover our needs. Gathering items from different authors might be real headache in post-production as videos shot on different cameras, lenses, balance of white, etc

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Most if not all of the oldest authors already have enough outside links leading to their items. People know them for years, sharing them and talking about them here and there. Also most of them are paying for marketing. Changing the filter to newest items will not change anything. Users use the search to look for the items they need, rarely just browse.

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You are absolutely right about promo of the famous ones. But as i said it would be better to see colorful picture. One side asks for “new items” others (conservative) likes as it is. Why not to make cocktail of both? Mixture of best and new ones?