I think it’s even worse for music artists than for the rest since when all the traffic is forwarded to Envato Elements from AudioJungle and AJ Market is dying, you could at least make some of the lost money back by joining Envato Elements, but the music side has been closed for a few years already, nobody can get in, nobody can even apply.
Sorry, is it possible to connect somehow with your marketing department? I have some other ideas, how Envato can earn more and how authors can get more traffic.
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Totally agree with every single word you left. We are also seeing a huge drop in traffic on Themeforest. Instead, the envato elements ads are getting more prominent month by month. I am afraid, however, that none of the decision-makers will speak up here. We have already sent several messages to Envato regarding this matter, but we have not received any reply from them. It looks like authors are no longer needed at this marketplace.
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@Rickyloca 100% on subject. What happened in the May 2021 is that Envato Market Marketing investments have shifted to Elements, and were probably paid by the Market itself too. That’s about it. This Market is already dead.
p.s.
“When you discover you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to get off.”
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Glad to see some big sellers here reporting the same situation which I have been saying for years. This place is now nowhere near when authors were the priority for Envato. Elements subscription model specially for the code(themes/plugins) will eventually kill the market.
One important thing I noticed in the past 4-5 years, that every starting April sales/earnings drops significantly. For us it is almost 10-20% every year in average comparison .
Agree with all the points raised by @StylemixThemes . It reflects our situation precisely. Thank you for raising this issue on our behalf.
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But how will elements grow if there are no more authors submitting templates on the market. I’ve never spoke with an author who makes a living out of elements. Therefore, Iam really skeptical on how all of this could turn. Eventually, that will only help competitors.
same on our sales. earnings drops significantly
Ben, for years we are listening that something will be forwarded to staff, but i honestly believe no one
up there cares anymore…
If i were a buyer on Envato (including Elements marketplace), i would give it up within few minutes because of terrible search engine Envato has for many years.
And this is one of main reasons buyers are leaving you.
for example, go into Elements and use tags filters like : cinematic, epic/powerful, dramatic/emotional
Combine all three of them, or use any two of them combine, or only one of them as filters.
Each time first item that will appear some soft pop song, that does not belong to any of these tags.
And there are hundreds of songs that should be the first on the list.
So with such lousy search engine within entire marketplace, it is strange that buyers did not leave Envato years ago.
So, i wrote to support, and i got a response from one of the guys thjere that he does not find this to be an issue.
He also does not find to be and issue that best selling audio item on Elements in April is “Jingle Bells”.
So, what is there for us to do?
Well here is what i will do . I will permanently go non-exclusive, try to redirect as much clients as possible on my site, and when i get enough of them, i will terminate my account here.
Unless suppliers show that they are not dependent on Envato, and that they will not sell them selves for miserable monthly income, Envato will abuse your work. in various ways, one of them being redirecting Audiojungle clients to Elements through your sales with aggressive banners, links etc…
Envato turned from most widespread and popular markeplace to low-end item marketplace , and sucks compared t oShutterstock, Artgrid, Artlist, Musicvine etc…
What a pitty…
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Well, I was waiting for a year (since all those falls started) and now I think enough is enough. Went and found a proper job, starting on the 30th of May.
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It’s true. Sales are going down tremendously. Good to see authors discussing it and hopefully Envato team will look into it and come up with a proper solution.
May is really going bad 
Hi guys,
since you mentioned us, just wanted to give you some thoughts from our end regarding the subject and based on WP themes, as we are only in that market.
Our data shows that there is a huge drop in the number of theme sales of around 35% between 2019 and 2022. In the spring 2019 (the pre-Covid year) TF was selling around 22k themes per week, while right now the sales are at around 15k. These numbers are approximate. It is a particularly big drop if you compare them with the 2020 numbers but since it was the Covid year with changes in customer behavior we can’t take that year as relevant. Since spring last year numbers have been worse every month and I would not say it is connected with just one thing, such as Envato investment in marketing (not sure if they changed something in their marketing strategy).
It is true that WordPress market is growing, but it doesn’t mean that premium WordPress themes market is growing as well, as obviously there are changes in Automattic plans for themes with new versions of WordPress, while also Elementor has their own plans and with the free Hello theme and template kits and the significant market share they are getting. Those changes certainly influence the market for TF premium themes. We think it is one of the important and relevant reasons.
Google search for themes in various contexts is dropping as well as the traffic of the websites specialized in WP themes. So, a lot of this decline has something to do with the popularity of themes these days, or at least with the ThemeForest concept of themes.
We don’t think there is a significant impact of Elements on WP themes market as the support is an important issue here, and the most popular themes are not there.
Also, keep in mind that Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and others have also been in uptrend during Covid and took some of the players from the market. While WordPress is growing, they are growing too, and since they are more oriented towards paying users, they are probably taking away some of the buyers from the TF market.
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Nice to see big players here ))
Well, yes, I totally agree with you. WordPress themes are becoming less value because of Elementor template kits, Gutenberg blocks and YES, Wix and Tilda are doing great job with solution for a cheap corporate website.
Well i would say its just a point of view from one corner. If you were in other markets (photo, music ans etc.) You would see that sale drop happened for all authors almost instantly. So if i would agree with you we both were wrong. Envato marketing is the only thing which makes those drops. Probably for this reason there is two job ads for SEM specialists.
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Indeed the traffic and even more the quality of the remaining traffic dropped tremendously. Selling since 2012 here and it started to drop about one year ago. We published dozens of updates, upgrades and maintained excellent support level with our products but sales went always down since the last 10 months.
The fact that the online marketing dept. appears to be the first responsible on this appears to be confirmed by the rapid spikes and drops in sales/visits in conjunction with paid sources of traffic.
We had almost ready a new A-class theme full of features but, if this is the interest from Envato in our work, I’m not sure this market is still the right place to sell it.
Even because being exclusive authors means we have cutted out many other markets.
What’s the point of this when Envato is not promoting?
Exclusivity on no traffic/sales?
Please Envato consider what is going on and provide some feedback, after 10+ years of collaboration this is something you owe to the authors, at least clarity please. If we need to switch to our own marketplace just let us know.
We can’t leave a 10$ commission on each sale AND pay for our own PPC/Promotion (which we already paid A LOT in the past years on our own).
Please provide some insight on the situation, future development and cause of the sales drop.
Thanks
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