Okay. So I’ve sat here and read ever one of the 38 comments so far … and the prognosis is not good. Not good at all. We are at a critical apex of Videohive’s life cycle. And I see vultures coming in. The Microstock industry is now a mature market, and with the increasing quality of iPhones and cheap DSLRs, everyone’s in on the game - shoving up a shot of a duck floating across the water at every angle and hoping it sells.
So Envato are absolutely right to implement a ‘Self Curation’ concept and empower authors to look internally at their work. But the process that Envato have taken to do this IS wrong, and fundamentally flawed. This Acceptance/Rejection Ratio concept is not a detailed qualitative approach to a considered portfolio. It can never be qualitative because no one is looking at them ! It is a quantitative ‘;hack’ to mass reduce the queue- and consequently there are some potentially amazing content which we’ll just never see.
What Envato is doing is the equivalent to taking a blunt machete to hack off your arm, because one doesn’t have plaster/band-aid to cover a little cut on the finger. It is highly interventionist at the extreme and very concerning. Envato, It’s been so good, but please… Wake Up. You are really killing your business here. People will leave.
The migration is happening already and what will happen is a stagnation of content which is irrelevant from a buyer sales point of view, but has ONLY been accepted because an authors’ previous item(s) has been accepted (approval ratio). Do you see what I mean? Do you see how this is not a qualitative approach? Notwithstanding what I mentioned above about the growth of the Microstock industry. This is not the reason of Envato’s problem.
One reason why Envato’s stock footage may be so large and their review queue is so long. It’s simple: People need to eat. If an author uploaded 3 or 4 stock footage items to the queue, if this takes 6 months to review - only to be rejected, it is sensible to assume someone wanted to upload 170 files to the review queue in the hope that 6 months later, if half of those are rejected, some would be accepted. It is a flawed way of doing things from an authors point of view, but it is happening - and it has made Envato’s review issues grow and grow until they’ve now reached this critical problem.
SpaceStockFootage: May i suggest something to Envato: Here’s a new perspective:
Who is the customer here? Who dictates the success of this site? Not Envato. Not The Author. It is the Buyer! So how about putting this in the hands of the Buyer? Let the Purchaser decide. How will this be implemented? Let me explain:
Instead of a Approval/Rejection ratio, How about an Item-To-Sales ratio.
So we can clearly see an author with 150 items that are selling loads is obviously curating a higher concentration/quality of material (relevant saleable material), than an author with 6000 items which are selling none. Because at the end of the day, (as we have seen with Photodune) a Microstock site’s survival is absolutely dependent NOT on how many/how few files a micro stock site has, but how relevant the material is - which manifests itself in a true metric - how well an authors’ portfolio is selling.
An Item-To-Sales metric would be a great and easy way to stop overflowing of basically crap content. It could be displayed on an author’s dashboard, and could be automatically reviewed quarterly, after which, a notice could appear on an authors’ dashboard:
‘’Your Item-To-Sales Ratio for this quarter is now 65%. If this falls below 50%, we’ll temporarily withhold your ability to upload for one quarter (3 months)".
AT LEAST WE KNOW WHEERE WE STAND! And it’s the Buyers telling us our stuff are not selling - not some reviewer.
To reduce the risk of their uploads being capped, and to get their Items-2-Sales ratio up - they simply self-get rid (delete) their own crappy items that aren’t selling. Just think what vast resources this could save Envato where authors are forced to remove their own work which isn’t selling.
This would also take the subjective reviewer nature out of the equation - reviewers rejecting work which has been selling 100s on other sites. Who is right. The reviewer, or the 100s sold on others sites?
So that’s how you implement effective self curation - let him/her upload it here. If it sells it sells, if it doesn’t eventually the author will be forced to remove it him/herself.
I could imagine this being a revolutionary feature. We could do away with ‘The Sales Monitor’ thread and have an Items-2-Sales monitor. I envisage posts like: ‘’Hey I’m a new author - I’ve just uploaded two videos in the last three months and both have sold. My Item-to-Sales ratio for this quarter is 100% Yeah - I must be doing something right, I’m going to upload 10 more relevant content, and see how they do’’.
Secondly, Videohive should wholeheartedly adopt the Audiojungle trial method of allowing ALL authors maximum of, say, 5 uploads per month. (Or even 3 per month). This surely gives time for Reviewers time to qualitatively look at 3 items properly, then approve… and of course, if your Items-2-Sales ratio increases - then your upload capacity increases too.
Just an idea, It’s gotta be better than the current ‘hack’ rejecting masses of potentially great and unique work and suspending authors !