Featured Authors / Featured Items... How does Envato decide?

Envato Authors Author Hangout
#1

Hi, there.

I have always been told that, in order to have an item featured or, even more, to be picked as a featured author, you need to showcase stunning quality, a certain consistency in the sales, more items in your portfolio, outstanding customer support and an excellent rating. All these factors were also confirmed in a recent inquiry to the Author Help Center.

More and more – at least on CodeCanyon – I see authors being featured literally right after signing up, with one single item across the whole market and no sales. It almost looks like you have more chances to be featured if you have just signed up and have just released your first item than if you have an outstanding history. To be completely honest, by how well designed those item/author descriptions are, I even have the impression they are veteran authors who create new accounts for the sole purpose of having more chances to be featured, once it is noticed that this trend of featuring newly released items and newly registered authors is a recurring pattern.

If there was a change in the criteria Envato uses to pick their featured item and authors, we would like to know. It is somehow frustrating to pour countless hours of work to perfect our items and provide the best customer support to build our author history and reputation, only to see that an author gets featured a few weeks after signing up.

Any insights would be very appreciated.

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Featured Authors
#2

Check GraphicRiver featured item and author, it’s hilarious! Sad for actual active designer.

100% agree with you!

I think it was randomly selected by bot and not handpicked by real humans. If it is actually by real human, Envato must fire him/her immediately.

@KingDog Featured items and authors should be part of your marketing strategy. What do you think of this issue? Thank you.

#3

Well… if it is a bot selecting the featured items/authors, I think we all want to know what the metrics of that algorithm are. Like with Google Page Speed, we all would like to “measure” our chances to stand out using clear and transparent metrics. What we all can observe is a recurring pattern contradicting what Envato has been predicating for years here in the forum and through the Help Center.

How would you explain an author registered in April 2020, with 1 single item across the market and 0 sales/rating/reviews being featured as both item and author? I could understand an item when it is exceptionally crafted… but I believed that in order to be featured as an author one should have accomplished much more than just 1 item and a few tens of sales.

Bottom line, if there is something that we are missing, we all would like to understand.

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#4

It seems that you are pertaining to @magicform, I just checked his first item. It’s a hit, already has 100+ sales in less than a month. The code also seem to be of high quality.

#5

Hi, @TitanSystems,

I intentionally avoided to mention any author specifically for two reasons: first of all, I did not want to sound disrespectful to any author; second, I observed this trend over several weeks, so it is not just that single author.

In regards to your observation, if you carefully read what I wrote before, I have no doubt that the product you mentioned is excellently crafted. It truly is. Nevertheless, you have to ask yourself if those 100+ sales were there BEFORE the item was picked as a featured item. Don’t you think that most of those sales were collected AFTER the item was promoted on the homepage? If you look at the review, they are just a few days old. So, when the item was hand picked, it probably had three or four. Again – and I cannot stress this enough! – I am not questioning the quality of the item, I am just trying to understand the rationale behind Envato’s choices.

My point is mostly about the featured author of the week. Envato, hundreds of times here in the forum, in the knowledge base and through the Help Center, emphasized the characteristics of a good candidate for the Featured Author of the week. Good sales history, multiple items across the market, excellent reviews, outstanding customer support and, of course, good item quality.

So, if those are not anymore the criteria Envato uses to pick the featured author of the week, I would simply like to know what the new criteria are.

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#6

And just to elaborate this concept a little further, your item could be another good example. I have no problem in recognizing the high quality of your item, as long as Envato clarifies in the most transparent way that a new product has more chances to be featured that an old one (of course, I am talking about an old one that has recently been updated). But you were not selected as the featured author of the week and I believe – no offense, of course – this is correct because it is consistent with what Envato has always suggested as the possible criteria.

In fact, to prove my professional integrity toward my customers, over the course of the past 4 and a half years, I kept perfecting my product instead of creating a new one with the additional features (and I added a TON of new features in the latest major version just a few weeks ago).

If Envato said that a new item has more chances to be hand picked compared to an old one that has just being completely refactored and revamped… adding tons of new features to also benefit the hundreds of customers who have already purchased it… well, I would acknowledge that and plan my next moves accordingly.

#7

There is a real staff member who chooses the featured item/author and there’s no specific criteria.

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#8

Thanks for clarifying that, @baileyherbert.

I guess the staff at the Envato Author Help should be made aware of this. This is an answer I received when asking if there were any criteria, a few weeks ago.

Also, if there are no specific criteria, we are left with simply observing the trend of those choices. For the featured items, the trend is that over the past 6 months all of them were just a few weeks old when they were picked. This seems to suggest that an older item will never be selected, no matter how feature-rich, good and recent its latest update might be. Something that might discourage authors from investing time in updating their items and push them to release new ones instead, leaving old clients with outdated plugins and forcing them to buy the new product. I guess Ockham’s razor doesn’t apply to business. :wink:

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