Important changes to Elements Content Bonus

i contacted them and they are saying it will be paid on 20th october. thanks

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For example I also removed 6-7 items in 1 day from Elements and my main market sales huge increased from that day. Now planning remove another items also.

Envato Elements is affecting everyone in different ways.

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Any reason why the Elements earnings for August missed a day and only showed up to the 30th?

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There are earnings for 31 also - check the diagram earnings

There is report for August 31, you have to ckeck the green bars graph and you’ll see the earnings for that day.

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So it’s 6 months after this news. Income has fallen almost twice. So @BenLeong could You please share some light on what has been done on this: “We believe that funds previously provided for the Content Bonus are better invested in continuing to attract, retain, and grow even more subscribers. These investments will help to secure a strong future for Elements, and ultimately benefit Authors by increasing the overall amount and flow of future earnings.”

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So I’ve made 9 new font families and various other graphics since this announcement, none of which will ever be uploaded here due to this change.

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I would also love to hear about the future plans for Elements. The forum is full of people complaining about low incomes and arbitrary rejections, so what exactly has changed for the better?

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Trusting the view and strategy made by those ones at the top of Envato, I doubled the amount if Items I have. And the only thing I saw was a huge drop of my earnings going down, and super super low earnings days. Like less than 1 dolar a day so many times. LOL. How comes?

I would also love to hear about the future plans for Elements.

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Yes of course, We need some new information about our Content bonus. We need it. We are authors who pays 30% of income for tax. Please think about us @BenLeong @Envato . Give back our Content Bonus :slight_smile:

Thanks

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Hey! Very interesting to know what you decide. Because at the moment there is no incentive bonus. And he’s been gone for a long time

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This is what @BenLeong said when asked when we’ll see what was promised.

So it might be years before we even see change… would be good to know what they’re doing right now tho.

But honestly I think @Rickyloca said it the best in the post right after that question was asked:

“You do the creative we do the rest”

This mantra doesn’t work anymore especially with EE.
When they were bringing in customers for VH it definitely made sense…but on EE it’s like a joke.
If you make 1000$ monthly with 600k active subscribers it means that you make an average of 0.0016 for each subscriber. We are not even in the range of cents…but thousandth…it’s the first time I write the word “thousandth” when I talk about money/my salary :smiling_face_with_tear:
Then you wonder why they don’t tell you the downloads number? What’s the point?
It’s already disrespectful talking about 1000th of $, let’s not make things worse.

Envato is not going to fix absoultely nothing for us, all they do is for their return, so no one here, myself included, should expect anything from them.
“Adapt or leave” simple as that.

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Just to throw a positive comment into this thread of doom and gloom:

Since the content bonus scheme ended, our sales have continued to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is true for many other authors (who’re probably not contributing to this echo chamber).

We got a nice seasonal bump this holiday season, probably helped by the end of covid restrictions around the world.

But we’ve also continued to focus on making stock for Elements and double-down on the opportunity at hand here.

I still think it was incredible of Envato to have shared the content bonus for so long - literally giving you free money just for being an author here.

As I said at the beginning of this thread, personally I believe Envato will use the additional cash to grow Elements - and rising tides raise all ships - so rather than sitting around calling the end or mourning the loss of this free money, we’re working hard to continue growing.

It’s really sad to see people saying things like “I’m not uploading to Elements any more because of this”.

The opportunity here is still absolutely massive. Don’t give up!

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That’s a super weird way of putting it! If you did the same calculation for the marketplace, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same or even less.

It is strange.
But that’s the solution that Envato came up with, and subscribers number is the only metric they give us.
What Envato expect us to believe when they say they are working hard to increase the number of subscribers?
More subscribers=more earning for us? Not at all, at least in my case.
I would love to hear from someone who had an increase in earnings proportional to the increase of subscribers!
Should we stop uploading and wait for Envato to bring more subscribers?
Anyone here recovered the 10-15% loss from the bonus without uploading new items?

No, the only way to stay alive is to keep uploading like crazy, definitely not waiting for envato to fix our problems.
So instead of saying that they are working hard…they should say something like “we messed up a couple of things lately, and you guys better work way harder that you used to because here things are getting slow and out of control” :joy:

On the market (before EE) I think it’s different because we make money from sales, and more customer could potentially spend a lot of money on our portfolios. it was a win-win for everyone.
Now on EE is a win-lose because Envato makes 50% of the subscription while we share the other 50% among thousands of us.

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More subscribers=more earning for us? Not at all, at least in my case.

Envato provide a marketplace. It’s up to you to produce items which people want to download. If the number of people downloading your items doesn’t increase inline with new subscribers, why should you get paid more?

Now on EE is a win-lose because Envato makes 50% of the subscription while we share the other 50% among thousands of us.

I’ll bet my left nut that very few subscribers are downloading 1,000+ items per month. The average freelancer probably needs no more than 100 items per month. So in reality, you’re competing with 100 other authors at most for a share of that subscription.

We already know that ~15% of people download nothing each month, so the actual average is probably much less than 100 items per month.

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I never said I should get paid more.
What I’m saying is that if any of us is having an increase in sales, the reason is because they are costantly uploading new items.
You think your graph looks like that because Envato made some magic tricks with subscribers or because you’ve been working super hard?
Try to stop uploading and let Envato do the rest, let them double the number of subscribers and see if you get a double salary…probably not.
Double your portfolio, and you’ll probably double your income, so thank yourself if your business is going well, not Envato!

I don’t really care how many items they donwload, I care about how many authors they are downloading from.
1 item from 100 authors or 10 items from 100 authors we are still making 1/100 of our share, while Envato a full 50% cut…no wonder they aim to get more subscribers.

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What I’m saying is that if any of us is having an increase in sales, the reason is because they are costantly uploading new items.

Do you expect your competitors to stop uploading new content whilst Envato grows subscriber count so your share of downloads doesn’t decrease?

New authors join everyday, and existing authors continue to upload.

I don’t really care how many items they donwload, I care about how many authors they are downloading from.
1 item from 100 authors or 10 items from 100 authors we are still making 1/100 of our share, while Envato a full 50% cut…no wonder they aim to get more subscribers.

If you can make more money overall by earning less per download, who cares about the actual price per download?

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I was suggesting to stop uploading as a test to see if subscribers growth is enough to increase earnings as Envato says.
At the moment I’ve only seen an increase in salary proportional to efforts… otherwise we all should be making at least 4x from 2018 :smiling_face_with_tear:

That’s one of the main problems. I remember it was supposed to be “for a few selected authors”.
If they had invited only handpicked authors, and let those people feed EE it would be a compleatly different environment.

Imagine if there was only me and you on EE, I’ve got 1 item and you have 1 item. :joy:
Subscribers would obviously download both of them because they are free, so we would make half share each.
Now if that was the case I’m ok with more subscribers = more money!!
But in a pool with millions of items and thousand of authors…it’s peanuts for each subscriber!

Anyway folks there’s only one way to be succesfull on EE, which is constant uploading. That’s it.

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