The general underlying fact that everything is derived from is simple:
The main ratio between “Amount of daily sales” / “Amount of items available”
Only Envato knows the details, but if the Amount of daily sales is growing slower than the Amount of items available, it means that from the seller point of view, sales will dwindle due time.
There is no escaping this baseline. If any seller manages to hoard more sales from himself, it is away from other sellers. On a daily basis it’s a zero sum game because sellers can’t create sales out of thin air, the amount of sales is capped by the customers. The problem is that if sellers aim to increase their sales by pushing more items to the market, they effectively just grow the items being sold even faster, causing no change in the customers / sales being done in a day.
Hence the only way to actually give more income to sellers is to find a way to actually grow the “Amount of daily sales” - which means that some method would actually increase the amount of customers or the amount of money customers use during a day on Envato market. The problem here is that sellers might not have any reasonable ways to achieve this feat.
Kind of like the law of conservation of mass. Sales cannot be created or destroyed, only altered from one state to another. Sales are constant across the universe.
I mean, that’s not entirely true… more people buying more stuff results I more total sales. But anything that brings more sales to one author, is likely to bring less sales to other authors.
The only way to get constant or increasing sales is to outrun the percentage increase in items and authors… which gets exponentially more difficult as time goes on. Upload ten items in your first year, it’s easy to double your portfolio in the next year. Upload ten items every year over ten years… it’s virtually impossible to double your portfolio in the eleventh year.
I hate to break it to you, but things are never going to ‘return to normal’ for you. You may get spikes here and there, so next month might be better than this month, for example… but on the whole, your sales are going to gradually decrease over time until you’re not even making payout every month.
On the bright side though… that’s if things carry on unchanged. If you start making a bunch of new items, plenty of them, and of a high quality, you should be able to cancel out that gradual decrease without too much trouble, and maybe even see a gradual increase over time.
Imagine if Envato stopped accepting new items since 2015 and just kept on a skeleton staff to keep the site running, handle sales and process payments. Would they be wise to expect or hope that sales might ‘return to normal’ any time soon? Sorry if any of that sounds harsh, but you never know… it might be the wakeup call you need! I don’t want to see any authors earning less than they should be, and I’m sure Envato doesn’t either… but you can’t just sit back and expect things to carry on as they were indefinitely.
For quality authors, this is a means for a kind of semi-residual income that will hopefully continue for a reasonable amount of time… but it’s by no means a retirement plan.
I hate to break it to you, but things are never going to ‘return to normal’ for you. You may get spikes here and there, so next month might be better than this month, for example… but on the whole, your sales are going to gradually decrease over time until you’re not even making payout every month.
Sorry, but I completely disagree with you.
While generally speaking, the logic of not uploading new templates = gradual decrease in sales does make sense; there are many other factors to consider.
I regularly update my top selling item. In the past, every time I updated this item - sales boosted. I released my last major update on August 2nd, but it had no positive effect on sales.
Some top selling authors have only 1 or 2 items, but have incredible sales. These authors haven’t released new items for ages, but keep things updated and put a lot of efforts into marketing - and sales keep rising each month.
My mailing list and YouTube channel drive constant traffic to my items. In fact, 30+ people join my list every single day, and each of those subscribers gets an automated sequence of 7 emails promoting my items (among other things). So the traffic I’m referring to my Envato items is the same (if not higher) than in previous months.
I believe in quality vs quantity. I have very limited time to work on new templates. So instead of constantly releasing low to medium quality items, I focus on releasing a new high-quality item (or a major item update) whenever I get a chance. And then, I promote those items across my marketing streams.
Despite releasing my last item in late 2015, I’ve seen a constant INCREASE in sales. In fact, in 2016 I doubled my revenue compared to 2015, and until THIS month, 2017 was on a clear path to cross revenue in 2016.
I’m not the only author who noticed the low sales trend this month. Sadly, according to 90% of the latest comments in this thread, many authors (including @cyzer, @miseld, @MotionPatriot, @video_prod and others) have reported a significant decrease in sales THIS month. Meaning, this situation is on a more global scale than my personal scenario.
Conclusion:
Taking all that into account, I reach the following conclusion:
Something changed in (the first half) of August 2017.
Perhaps it’s something to do with Envato’s search engine, or the Elements promotion banners, or other marketplaces attracting our buyers, or just a global coincidence… who knows.
But saying that I’m seeing a 70% decrease in sales this month because I didn’t release a new item lately, is simply not true.
It’s August. One of, if not the number one, worst month of the year.
And just for accuracy… I didn’t say you’re seeing a 70% drop in sales this month due to not due to releasing any new items. I couldn’t, because you only disclosed that information after my post.
Not in my case. August has always been a normal month for me.
And you’re right, I didn’t mention 70% in my first comment, but I think I made it quite clear that what brought me back to this thread was an unusual and significant drop in sales - this month - compared to my previous 3+ years.
Hello everyone, I think that the main problem of sales reduction is an imperfect system of search, I noticed that basically only the first five new projects are bought, the remaining projects disappear from the search system
Yeah go ahead and dismiss me and keep complaining about your sales to the end of days and not actually do anything about it. I can’t possibly understand how people can expect to get paid without working
during august i have had 0 sales, maybe thats because of the search algorythm, or the summer o just because my files have been on the review queue for the last 4 months and counting…
Well you normally get 1 sale about every 14 days*, and we’re just over 17 days into the month. Combine that with it being August, and 0 sales this month isn’t exactly out of the ordinary.
Hopefully if/when your new items are approved, and the summer is over, things will start to pick up a bit. Fingers crossed!
*Based on an average of your total sales since your first item was approved.
you are funny. Gimme a hug all of you!!! I love you all you cute drama queens :))