Themeforest statistical overview. Part #1.

Envato Authors Theme Authors
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2016 was the year of changes on Themeforest. Author-driving pricing, review queue changes, Envato Elements and Envato Hosted were introduced. Seems like Envato team worked really hard this year on all of these innovations.
But we should not forget those, without whom ThemeForest will never be like this. We’re talking about authors.

Read this article and other insights in our blog

Browsing Envato forums we frequently saw topics where authors discussed different tendencies and possible upcoming trends of template market. There were a lot of issues from sales dynamics to design trends and everything in between in those topics.
That is why we decided to provide a study in several parts regarding such aspects of template business as sales, trends, sales dynamics and other entertaining stuff. We hope that this study will be interesting and useful for all the authors.

Let’s start with basics. More then 10000 items were uploaded on ThemeForest in 2016. In comparison with previous year the amount of added items raised by almost 68%.

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Marketplaces 2015 vs 2016.png1354×300 24.1 KB

Now let’s proceed a bit further. Wordpress themes were always one of the biggest categories on Themeforest. No surprises, but Wordpress themes is still the most popular category. For the moment of writing this article, the TOP-5 biggest categories looks like this:
 1. Wordpress Themes - 3052 added items in 2016
 2. Website Templates - 2978 added items in 2016
 3. PSD Templates - 2053 added items in 2016
 4. Email Templates - 472 added items in 2016
 5. Joomla Themes - 300 added items in 2016

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Categories 2016.png1294×477 25.5 KB

But what was the numbers in 2015? We’ve got that covered. If we’ll compare this year’s results with the past year’s amount of added items, we can put together the TOP-5 fastest growing categories and the places will be distributed in other way:
 1. Shopify template - 323.4% more added items than in 2015
 2. PSD template - 204.6% more added items than in 2015
 3. Sketch template - 130% more added items than in 2015
 4. Website template - 92.1% more added items than in 2015
 5. PrestaShop - 59.5% more added items than in 2015

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Categories 2015 vs 2016.png1341×1028 93 KB

This TOP-5 is far more representable than the previous one. From it we can assume this:
 * We definitely will see more Shopify templates and demand on them in 2017
 * The bigger is the demand the more is the supply. As we can see, there are two e-commerce categories in the TOP. We think that e-commerce market will hugely grow in 2017
 * Although Sketch Templates category didn’t grow that much in absolute values, but the relative values are saying that Sketch Templates are getting more attention from authors, who like to experiment with new. We believe that Sketch Templates will find their audience represented by both authors and buyers.

And for the end of the first article we’ve got something else. Here are graphs on added items for 2015’s December and 2016’s December.

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December 2015 vs 2016.png1351×414 35.3 KB

What is your opinion on the topic? Discussion is welcomed.

Thanks a lot for reading. The second part is available through this link.
How to get more sales for your upcoming item. ThemeForest statistical overview. Part #3
PSD Template sales insights. Themeforest statistical overview. Part #4

12 Likes
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That’s very nice & detailed statistics.
Wow, so many more PSD, themes have been uploaded this year. That;s why some old-time specific authors see the sale is decreasing. The cake is growing slower than the authors.
Regarding the ecommerce trend, it seems that Shopify is growing but don’t you think the ecommerce will be on the down trend? Facebook has touched their hands on Ecommerce and I’m really concerned if working on Ecommerce will be stable as we have to compete with Facebook.

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Interesting information. I found it very helpful to know, because I’m an aspiring writer. I wonder how long it took you to gather information and how you treated it - it’s a huge amount of data !!! Unbelievable! Will more data later?

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Hi,
ok, Joomla have +300 items by last year.
Total joomla templates 917, so we have 30% growth. Awesome! What about sales? How much money, this 30% earned?

With WP all clear.

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Same here. I’m for 2 years at TF, a waste some much time to understand that work with Envato is really profitable & very difficult at the beginning. Without such information that shown above it’s just a shot in the head. This helpful new, but what’s there, and old authors! can save from serious blunders.

Indeed enlightens brain! Awesome service. GL

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Thanks for such an interesting question. Regarding Facebook and Ecommerce: Facebook allows to add an online store to their pages via Ecwid. As far as I know, Ecwid and Shopify are used for a little bit different purposes. For those, who want to build their website from skratch, Shopify will be more suitable than Ecwid, because with Ecwid you can add store the already existing website. Same thing with Facebook. Actually, I believe that you can make a Shopify template and then make an Ecwid template out of yours Shopify template store page and have them both represented on ThemeForest. Ecommerce template market will grow anyway, no doubts about that.
Hope I answered to your question.

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Thank you for the question.
In the study I researched the amount of added items for 2015 and 2016. If you look closer at the third table presented in the article you can see that only 6 more Joomla themes were uploaded in 2016 than in 2015. And that is only 2% growth in comparison with 2015’s results.
There will be some information on sales, wait a little bit, I am preparing a report on this topic now.