TL;DR
Free file reward affects your views and sales of featured item in a positive way, but as the one keep progressing on Audiojungle, the worth of free file becomes lower, because an author already has a big customer base and well-established portfolio.
Hey guys,
A few months ago I was lucky enough to get the free file of the month, and I was kinda curious about how this would affect my views and sales, etc, and I think a lot of people might be curious as well about how free file affects your progress on Audiojungle.
So once I got the free file I thought It will be the very cool boost during the period my file was “pinned” to the main page, but as it turned out it is much more than that. So let’s take a look.
First of all, let’s check the data during the November 2017, when I had the free file.
A few things come to mind, first - these two big peaks - 24869 on the period from Nov 09 to Nov 11 and 22937 from Nov 28 to Nov 30 respectfully.
Now, it is very interesting why these peaks occurred, and why only two of them? The answer is very simple - on these particular days, there were mass emails to Envato subs (I am one of them 
)
Now let’s involve a little math here.
Assuming that the average pageview of my item was around 2892,2 per day (without mailout), can we agree that mailout increased the views in around ~8.6 times?
The second interesting thing is the comparison of views before and after the free file was pinned on the main page. Let’s take a quick a look at the month before - October 2017.
The significant difference and it is pretty terrible The average view per day is 1.8.
Now let’s involve some math again here. I want to know the exact difference I had before and after featured free file. Ready for that?
The views increased in 2320,2 times which is the ridiculous number!
But It is actually way more than that, because of the outcome in a long run, and I will show it below now.
Take a look at this graph:
Now, it shows that before I got the spot, my file had some activity in May/June 2017 (probably because of Videohive) and after that It was almost silent. Featuring gave an enormous boost, and what is much more important, it gave my file “new life” for a long run (more than 5 months so far). Unfortunately, it is slowly decreasing again and probably will reach the spot before featuring sooner or later.
UPDATE
A quick update (thanks @SineBricks for rising my interest) - another short graph just to show you guys how free file affects sales of the whole portfolio:
It is turned out that there is no significant difference in terms of sales from the whole portfolio.
Moreover, you can clearly see that I had the nice peak at the March/April 2017, and I only had quite the same only once after free file, in Feb 2018. Moreover, sales decreased dramatically in the last few months! So, if a free file is good for you (we can see the numbers), then something must be wrong here then…
And actually, in my particular case, this might happened because from February to the beginning of April of 2018 I did not upload anything, but again it seems to be that the problem is not that easy, and I think it involves lots factors, such as current trends, the necessity of new/niche tracks, search engine tweaks and test, etc…
UPDATE #2
Thanks for the great question, @RedOctopus, but I went a little bit further, to gather more data.
Here is the graph:
I think it basically speaks for itself, but let’s make some quick calculations:
I want to know the average number of sales for the 6 months before and after featuring and it is around 2.3 and 5.3 sales respectfully each month, or ~120% growth of sales for a featured item after getting the spot.
IS IT WORTH IT?
An answer would be “of course, why don’t you want to get a free file”. But I want to dive a little bit deeper here, and actually, the true answer is - it depends.
First of all, I want to calculate average views per month before featured file and it is around 111.8 views. Now, assuming that 2.3 was the average sale number in this period, we can estimate that ratio of sale/view is 0.02.
Let’s check now the period after featuring.
Again, the average views per month after featuring are 19681, which is great, right? Alright, let’s take 5.3 sales from this and calculate the ratio of sale/view and it is 0.00026.
Ok, so what these numbers tell to us. Well, it turned out that things are not that simple with the Free File. While I had 120% growth in sales, considering the ratio of post-free file period (+ lost sales during the free period, although I got a few 
) , I would not think about that as a huge boost in general.
So is it worth it or not?
Well, basically, I think it could be a really great boost for the beginners and average authors like me because of growing customer base + Videohive partnering, but for those who already good and established at AJ, I do not think it could be the best item investment. You may disagree.
Now, this graph just to show in my opinion, what happens in the reality:
That’s being said, you want to have a free file as early as possible because you want to build yourself fast and you want earn more, and on the later stages it is probably, does not affect your business much, (except if you have your top-seller as a free file, but I am not sure this could happen), plus, at some point it could be even harmful, if the one has established, well-selling portfolio and big customer base, getting free file might be a disaster in this particular situation because the one lose sales from the item. But do not worry, I am sure this is the very very rare case
That’s it for today, thanks for reading this, I hope it was not very boring and please share your thoughts and ideas as well!
Regards
