It’s first time I can agree with SpaceStockFootage 
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I have my moments!
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Sorry for sound critical, but this is one of the cryptic and meaningless official post so far. Who? Where? When? How? Could you please translate this for us. I mean explain CLEAR what you plan to change, how and when. Thanks.
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I have seen that the Envato market currently hosts a lot of non-updated themes, plugins and scripts for sale on themeforest/codecanyon. These items are not not updated for above a period of 1 year, some are above 2 years and some of their preview links won’t even work.
Scout for such items and reach out to their respective authors and ask them to update these items.
Envato should give such authors a time frame of 10-15 days to update such items to make it compatible with their latest software versions. If the author fails to do it, such items should be disabled immediately giving author another extended time-frame of 30 days to update their item.
Even after this, the author fails to update, such items should be permanently removed as this shows the author’s least interest in his/her item which is certainly bad for buyers out there and Envato Market experience as a whole.
But, Envato should take this initiative. Result: Updated products, Clutter free market, More Exposure, Happy Authors and Buyers.
I had made this suggestion when Elements was released WordPress on Elements - Author Information
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Better to disable authors with 10-13 accounts, selling the same content.
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I am almost sure that this is a precursor to the next move, which is going to be thinning the herd. the 90 days so casually mentioned will be the template for it.
Something like if an item Z is not selling more than N times in 90 days it will get removed, it’s a practice which is done in some other markets also.
This was already hinted in certain occasions.
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90s day is not a metric, IMO. Some items boosted in sales later. More logical period is 6 month
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I too am confused… is there a policy change coming or are you just trying to teach proper business strategy? Will items be flagged as inactive, or are you just hoping to cut down on some waste?
As an author, I absolutely agree with this. I recently retired an item and I don’t think anybody noticed so clearly it was the right decision 
As a buyer, it is indeed frustrating, especially on sites like Graphic River. When searching for something I’ll get thousands of results, and too much of it is outdated content that is just left there because it doesn’t hurt the author to have it there, and they might make a buck out of it each month. It’s annoying to sift through it though, I don’t have hours to go through thousands of images to find something current.
On the other hand, photography I suppose is dateless in many cases, so how do you propose going about this? I think marking an item as inactive to a buyer is extremely hurtful to any hope for future sales, but maybe notifying the author that they should reevaluate would be helpful.
Sounds impossible, because there is a seasonable content such as christmas, valentine’s day, halloween, ramadan an many many more… For instance i have many summer items that have sales only at may-august period , and vice versa i have “Winter Transition” bundle that always beeing on week top at december - january, and have no sales at spring-summer period
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Better to start advertising again on Google instead.
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It’s crazy to me that Envato makes announcement like this, and then the announcements just simply aren’t monitored, or they are, but no one feels like responding. EDIT: I know eventually someone will respond, and then I’ll look silly, but seriously, make announcements on a Monday or Tuesday and then actually stick around to answer questions.
Also, I love how this post says to check out the Author Hub article, and it’s the exact same thing, apart from a link at the end telling us to come back to the forums.
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I think this is in danger of becoming too cryptic and confusing from the authors’ point of view!
I can see that it might be good for the the market as a whole to clear out older ‘inactive’ content. But any approach that depends on everyone acting collectively and of their own volition for it to work will not succeed if it looks like opting out could give you, as an individual, an advantage. And on the face of things keeping your portfolio at its current size while the majority of other authors reduce theirs would give you an advantage. It is also the case that a lot of authors (on audio jungle at any rate) have often experienced older items suddenly getting a sale or two - sometimes for big licenses - even if they initially sunk without a trace.
Therefore if Envato want to go down this route I think they will need to enforce it, either by simply removing the items themselves or by creating such strong and transparent incentives that it is almost 100% certain that authors will lose out on an individual basis if they don’t delete ‘inactive content’ regardless of how others behave.
On a slightly different subject, I think to get the maximum possible response to these types of announcements it would be better if they were tagged to all the market places on the forums as many of us tend to only check out our own area.
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404’s! They are annoying for everyone. The more we can invite authors to be proactive about their portfolio the better the experience of using Envato Market is for everyone. It’s better for customers and authors. We do try to connect with authors when we encounter 404’s and are constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience when browsing categories and search results. Thanks for the feedback.
Active Content is an internal term we’ve been using since the content group began and we’ve introduced it to authors because we want to start having more conversations about active content.
If you look back at announcements over the last few years you’ll see a steady increase in words that talk around the term, especially in the area of portfolio curation. We wanted to bridge the gap on language as a starting point to a long term conversation.
You are right that we haven’t really talked about what this ‘new’ metric means. For us, it’s not new. It’s something we’ve been working with for a few years now. Actions we’ve already been taking (the PhotoDune refresh for example) is all part of how this metric has played out.
Will there be more in this conversation and product changes as a result? Yes.
Do we know what all those changes are yet? No, but we’re working on a few ways forward, stay tuned.
You are right, we’re not as good at this as we could be and it’s something we are trying to do more of. You’ll notice that the Author Hub now has regularly posted trend articles and content focuses. We’re working hard to find ways to get relevant insights to authors in meaningful ways.
We have to be careful because if we announce that everyone’s looking for “dudes shaking hands” we’d have a mad rush to publish that kind of item that could impact the variety of content. At scale, giving out trends has to be carefully thought through because it has impacts for authors, customers and Envato.
Great ideas and opportunities for us to share. We do regularly survey customers and get interesting results. I’ll chat with our team about seeing what insights we might be able to pull out of those surveys to share with authors.
We love you too mate. An announcement by definition is a formal public statement about a fact, occurrence, or intention. In this case, it’s a bit of all three. Often when we communicate things it’s when the actions have already been taken and we’re informing authors about it.
In this case, we’re flipping that around a bit and opening up the conversation about the language we use and the concept in general.
At the moment, inactive items do not affect the Envato search algorithm. We also do not penalize authors who have old items. But we are watching and testing and measuring the impact these items have on customer satisfaction, operational costs and author sentiment.
As some authors have already noted, items that are broken or outdated clutter search results and categories in a way that hinders customers from finding what they’re looking for. So, for now, we’re starting the discussion and raising awareness about the negative impact these kinds of items can have.
We would like to see all authors regularly updating their items, reviewing item performance and removing items that aren’t selling. Introducing the concept of active content is one of the ways we’re beginning to action that desire.
At the moment, we’re introducing the concept of active content. In the future, we would like to do more with active content and see how that impacts the ways authors manage their portfolios. We don’t yet know exactly what this looks like and will use the feedback you give us here to inform next steps. Would you be interested in knowing which of your items are “active” or “inactive”? What might you do with that info?
We’re not announcing any changes to anything, just introducing a new concept and a metric we’re using internally. We want to share this terminology with authors so we can start having conversations here and 1:1 with authors about active content and the value we place in it as a metric.
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As I said, this conversation has started to prepare us for the eventual sweeping. I wonder if you guys learned from the Photodune fiasco and if it’s going to be executed with more elegance and care.
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Great, at least there is clarification of what you planning to do and now i can understand what you already wrote here. This is great idea, because i am sure, if you really care about a quality of your portfolio, you will revise your older items and improve your best selling items. So hopefully all this work behind the curtains will gain us more sales. So thank you for clarification.
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AudioJungle here.
I understand the need of changes in the most popular categories like “corporate” or “cinematic”. But I am not sure how would this affect some high quality specialized in a musical niche AudioJungle portfolios.
I know plenty of AJ authors who are specialized in one niche and their portfolio is a gold mine for buyers seeking for a specific type of hiqh quality music or effects. Searching for items via their html portfolio catalog is usually way more effective than using search engine. For example @Hyperprod has a impressive jazz portfolio. @turkaynisanci makes great oriental music. I make a lot of percussive stomps and percussive music.
Specialization in a niche means that author creates a lot of various tracks from a specific genre. This model of selling is based both on returning clients/VideoHive authors and on the mass selling of the most popular tracks from portfolio. It means that tracks which aren’t selling for a long period also have high value, because they are a part of a big specialized portfolio. And they can be sold even if they have poor visibility in search because they can be found in portfolio.
For example an author creating European-folklore music can make the recording of very rare ethnic instrument.
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Who will buy this? Only people seeking for strange folklore music. Rare music is selling quite good for movies and creative commercials, so bigger licenses are expected.
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How many sales it will have? Only a few. But keep in mind that the Author Driving Pricing will come to AudioJungle probably this year, so author can set higher price. Also rare tracks tend to be bought with bigger licenses = more money and royalties. And do not forget, that track can be a part of bigger “discounted” pack.
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How he will find this track? Via author’s portfolio/html catalog. Search engine results will be flooded with popular African, oriental and ethnic music.
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When will they buy it? Anytime they will find it in portfolio. Even years after last sale. So active or inactive - in this case it doesn’t even matter.
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Why it’s important for portfolio? Because buyer seeking for a specific music can see that this author have a various high quality niche tracks in his portfolio. Even if he will not buy this item, he can remember this author and he can return to him in a future.
In my opinion this model is very important. Without a big-niche-portfolios AudioJungle would become only the kitsch music stock with epic and motivating tracks with few other trending genres. And of course less amount of big companies and big licenses. This would mean lower reputation in the industry.
So let them be inactive, do not delete them and do not let them affect the visibility of whole author’s portfolio.
Another thing is that “inactive” files can be moved to other stocks. A lot of currently inactive tracks in AudioJungle are in high quality. They aren’t popular because market is over-saturated. Forcing them to be deleted from AJ will “release” them. So I would expect growing quality of other stocks.
BTW This announcement was quite confusing. Actually I can’t find any useful information in it. But I appreciate that you are sharing your thoughts and that you have started the discussion.
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Stock footage/motion graphics author here.
I haven’t really understood much of the meaning of this post, but I guess you guys are tying to do something with items that haven’t sold for a while…
So, in my case shooting mostly timelapses, there’s not that much that I can do to improve them… If it hasn’t sold, it hasn’t sold…customers didn’t like it or they thought they would spend money on other content.
I’ve got some timelapses that have never been sold for 5 years or so, I accept the fact that customers don’t like them and I don’t take it personally, so I wouldn’t mind reduce the price by a lot, creating a category called something like “Cheap Charlies” 
and give them away super cheap…or, I would also give them away as freebies too if there was a category for freebies.
Many websites have a freebies category and I think is a good idea too, if someone downloaded one of my freebie they might also have a look at my portfolio and spend some money there.
They can also be used for previews here on videohive, link to the author’s portfolio, more traffic,
Pretty much like Pexels, a lot of us use their photos for previews and put a link in a description to their website, Envato also suggests to use their photos for previews, so if Envato had a freebies category, other websites could suggest Videohive freebies and generate more traffic.
I used to receive emails from another website who was asking me what I wanted to do with the items that I’ve never sold…I had 2 choices, delete them, or give them away for free in the freebie category…they went straight to the freebie category!
Anyway, whatever you are thinking to do, please try to give us choices instead of just take one way decision! =)
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+1 to this!
I believe many authors would win if there would be a statistic made. Your file X sold Y in the past year. We recommend deleting it for better exposure or updating it to give it new life"
Would make a heck of a difference. I’m certain must authors would update/delete their items given such a statistic available! 
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Well If I sort my portfolio by sales, those that have the same number of sales are put in chronological order, so I can easily see how old are those files with 0 sales. I already know which item didn’t sell in my portfolio, they just need to ask me what I want to do with them, since in my case, I can not update a timelapse =)
This announcement is very confusing to me. So, we now know what active content is - now what? I just don’t really see the purpose of it, unless it’s meant to prepare people for a larger change, such as removing non-performing items from the marketplace.
Basically, this announcement is saying ‘things that sell typically sell better than things that don’t sell so you should try and make your items sell so they can sell better.’ I mean, that’s good (though somewhat obvious) advice. I just don’t see why it warrants an announcement.