Is it worth selling on themeforest? the numbers

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Freemius have wrriten a very good post on WP themes on Themeforest if you want an idea on the size of the market in numbers - https://freemius.com/blog/themeforest-wordpress-themes-analyisis/

For those who want quick facts:

  • The average theme makes around $12000 a year ($1000 a month)
  • The average theme normally keeps pulling in sales for around 70 months (5 years)
  • The average theme with 100 or more sales has generally been available for 2 years 5 months
  • The average theme with 1000 or more sales has generally been available for 3 years 2 months
  • The average price for a WP theme is $50.63
  • The top 20 themes account for 13% of all WP theme sales
  • 2500 new themes have been added in 2016 so far
  • 64% of themes sell more than 100 licenses
  • 89% of themes don’t reach 1000 sales

Some numbers to mull over for new and existing authors

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Thank your for sharing, very interesting read!

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Hey @Gareth_Gillman, thanks for sharing the article. I’m the guy behind the analysis and the writing, so if you have any questions feel free to ping me here :slight_smile:

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no worries, good useful article for new and existing authors

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Thanks for sharing. In first fact their is a typo, it should be $100/month

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Great stuff. On a lighter note, should have started with:

76% of the wordpress #Themes on themeforest earn below $1,000 per month.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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That’s true, statistics could be misleading. I tried to keep it as unbias as possible. I do think ThemeForest is doing an amazing job to sustain the revenues. But the numbers also show that it’s statistically hard to build a sustainable business now.

Only 5.6% of the WordPress themes on ThemeForest earn more than $3,000 per month.

It’s obviously still possible.

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