I am of the opinion that removing items with low sales over time is good for individual authors and good for the marketplace as a whole. I think the biggest drawback to a site like envato is that it offers too many options and has the potential to be filled with things users are not looking for thus driving them to other online catalogs that may be more tightly curated. I think this rule is good for individual portfolios as well for the entire marketplace. The higher concentrated the catalog is with songs users want to buy the the better it is for everyone. Anyone agree or disagree?
I’m not sure I understand. What’s wrong with a file that has low sales? You are aware that some customers actually prefer those files, files that nobody else has.
They just got themselves a great deal, especially when it comes to music and graphics and it cost them almost nothing to own it exclusively 
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That is true, that would be a benefit of not removing low sale items. I am thinking more in terms of over crowding where it takes the average customer much longer to find what they are looking for because of the bulk of material they have to wade through to find the song they want. In a catalog that contains only the greatest hits its much easier for customers to find what they are looking for in less time. There are other sites out there that have smaller catalogs but the average item is more what the average customer is looking for. My solution to this with envato is removing items with low sales after a time, hopefully increasing the average value per item contained on envato.
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I was wrestling with this for quite awhile myself. However my last two sales were from a song that did not ever have any sales since it was approved back in December 2012. I have also recently had sales from other songs that also had never had any sales before. So I will now be keeping all of my songs active. I think the solution to the points you make are better solved by fixing the search engine to assist the customers find the type of songs they are seeking rather than mandating that authors trim their catalogs.
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So what you are saying is let’s remove all these other files and maybe when people find mine, they will just buy it. Instead what will most likely happen is it won’t sell as much as you think it would and then they will just remove your file too.
And now from a few sales you could have made, you won’t make any at all.
Anyway, that’s besides the point. I think the idea of removing a file wont work. It will just make authors angry because their file on which they worked so hard on getting approved was removed 
As for customers, they are already angry that people are removing files.
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I think you are absolutely right about improving the search. I have also had the same experience of a song not selling, then even a year or two later finally making a sale. Its nice to know that happens to other people as well. My thought on that though is that I would rather sacrifice those very occasional sales to improve overall traffic and conversion rate. That is assuming that having less total files on envato would improve traffic, that may not even be the case. I have just been looking at other sites that I believe get more traffic and at authors that get more sales and it seems to me the difference is the concentration of high sale items to low sale items. Thanks for your input, this is why I posted the question, I am not sure which is better.
I just mean removing files that have proven to be low demand over time. I am not saying I think this should be implimented by Envato, removing files automatically after a certain amount of time, I am just wondering what others thought about the idea as a way to improve overall sales. I am asking to find out if I should consider getting rid of old low sale files in my own portfolio so my better selling items are essentially more visible.
It’s all about metadata and search results, there could be 1,000 items or 10,000,000 items but either way most buyers aren’t going to look past the first page or two of results. This doesn’t have anything to do with quality, number of tracks, or individual sales volume, whatever targets the search engine properly is what will show up and often what people will buy. Also, buyers can already filter search results by “best sellers,” if they want to search through the hits. Think about something like google; 500,000 results match your search term - so what? Who looks past the first couple pages of results? The last 499,980 results might as well not even exist.
As far as deleting things from your portfolio to get more sales, I think that’s a bit like saying you are going to catch more fish by using fewer nets. I think the AJ portfolio is a bit overrated anyway - are buyers really sitting their consuming individual authors portfolios? Maybe if you do a lot of outside redirecting to your portfolio it makes sense, but otherwise I think the majority of buyers are just using the search engine to find tracks and probably aren’t even aware of the name of the author they are buying from. Sad but true.
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Very good points indeed. I think there is something to be said about keeping only high quality tracks though, or rather not keeping low quality tracks in your profile. If your low quality track comes up on a search and someone listens to it and doesn’t like it, they will most likely remember and choose not to listen to other tracks of yours that come up in the future. I think you are right though that it really is all about the search results, but the higher quality of the track the more people will be likely to buy it once they have heard it.
i have not read much of all the developments that have been made here but if u ask me, as for me i an pretty much against this idea … let’s face it , unlike what some guys are considering sometimes a good item is not am item which is necessarily selling much , there are way other things to take into account and according to category that the item belong to , the flow of potential customers that an author can manage to bring to his / her account and these sorts of things are all being influential … . By the way sorry to say just that but such an idea is also basically implying to keep some very old items which are also much celebrated because they are so old that they were added ages ago when there was a good potential purchasing base but not the tons of authors , unlike what happens today, in other words the big sales that sone items have because uploaded back then do not necessarily mean that these items are killing ones … exposure is also some times quite difficult to understand but the fact of the matter is that here u can see huge items with almost or even no sale at all and sone pretty flat ones or even pretty poor with good sales. There is also a reason for that all buyers are not professional from digital worlds and sone of them are either looking for something very simple or also in keeping with their personal tastes and all the people are far away from having good taste, let’s talk the talk …
Good points! That has been the general consensus so far, low sales doesn’t necessarily mean low quality. I think what I am going to do is only remove songs that I deem are low quality, not necessarily based on sales count.
hi, i think that spring cleaning is not always a bad idea for authors and that taking into account quality is a good idea, too , now this si also difficult to think about a lower quality item that is not working so badly as , let’s be completely honest, the more items u have in a volume based system like this and the bets this actually is … by the way this is part of the problem that there is here … . Many people depend on sales and to sell they need to upload as often as possible and have always more items so basically this is also reinforcing the saturation of the market … if u ask me, i would personally like to see the number of submissions not as essential and also limited to one daily … but this is just my personal opinion for this, i just think that it would help not to have all items overflooded and not selling at all …
If i will remove low sale items to i have empty portfolio))))
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