I was reading this and something was not clear…
With that example if only one download is made author gets full amount of that 50%… now my question is, is that per month or a fixed 1 download price? If its per month what happens if the subscriber downloads another product from a different author does that monthly fee split or…?
Per month, so he downloads your item and it is his only download you get 50%, if he downloads 5 items from 5 different items, that it will be 10% for each author from his monthly subscribe.
So the key to make money on this you need to get people download only your items, so for authors it is not the best way if I understood all what is written there.
To generate profit there should be not high number of authors with a lot of high quality content more or less equally distributed between them so each of them can generate good revenue.
I took a brake for few minutes to finish this reply and came up with idea that for author the best way will be if envato will pay upfront for items and then put them on envato elements, that way author will not suffer from split of money pool, but it will create conditions where envato must handpick every item and determine fair price to pay upfront and this is to much work. As resume - scheme described in envato blog is bad for author, hard to make money.