@roeyrafael , thanks for quick response, I’m glad we have you here!
I’ve been a very active member of the community here for years and my OCD brain forces me to analyze and absorb all the details and info I’ve come across 
So I’m gonna share general feedback I get from authors and affiliates in hope you can see the things from a perspective of real humans who earn their living here. This will help Envato staff to realise why there is so much frustration caused by the banners here, even if your stats don’t show a lot of traffic being lost. I apologize in advance, because this will be a very long post, but I promise it’s worth it. So please take a few minutes to read it, I’ve been thinking a lot and want to explain problems from both author and affiliate perspectives, and offer soultions that could solve all of it. So, @roeyrafael, @collis, @emile_b , please understand I love Envato very much and want it to succeed, so I don’t mean to offend anybody, I have respect for all of you and I hope we could make this place even better.
- REGULAR (NON-AFFILIATE) AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE:
I want to express the concerns I saw from a global Envato community of authors, it’s important to also see these problems from the regular author perspective.
No one wants these Elements banners anywhere on the market, that is a fact and can easily be proved.
The problem is not in the percentages of traffic being lost, the problem is that authors find advertising of a cheaper competitive product over their own items on market highly unethical and unfair. They don’t really care about the stats at all, the problem is they see this as disrespectful and they feel used, especially the ones that are not a part of Elements. There is no potential benefit from this for them, they can only lose the sale(or referral cut) as a result and gain absolutely nothing in return. They lose motivation to continue creating new items for Envato.
If you create a poll to see how much authors agree to advertising Elements over markets, I bet you will get almost 100% result for the option “No, I don’t agree”. In fact, it would be nice if we actually create such poll, so Envato can see how much negativity, anger and frustration they caused on the marketplace lately with banners. That can’t be good for business long-term, and I’m afraid it’s going in the wrong direction on many levels.
As a result, people feel very frustrated and unhappy here, and you can really feel the tension and anger growing rapidly for the past few months. This used to be a happy place where everyone wanted to sell their items and were recommending their friends to join (this is actually how I ended up here), and the general vibe was awesome. Now, countless threads have been opened about the same issue - elements advertising on market. People feel betrayed by Envato, and more and more authors go non-exclusive and move to competitor markets. Most of them see Elements and their aggressive advertising as the main reason for a bad situation, and I’m afraid 0,7% stats won’t change this, because people want to be treated fairly and be respected on a place where they work. Banners over their items are causing a completely opposite feeling.
Question for Envato: (Let’s forget about the stats, because they won’t change the negative perception banners.)
Is it really worth keeping banners who, judging by your stats don’t bring you any significant traffic, yet they create so much negativity and anger amongst authors who work for you?
Bad news spread fast, and don’t forget this market grow to this point because authors were happy to work here and the community vibe was great. (There are other great markets offering amazing stock products for simmilar prices, but everyone will say they prefer to work for Envato because the community is awesome here, and this is still a community-driven marketplace where authors and Envato staff should communicate back and forth. Now we are going in the direction where Envato is acting as a cold billion dollar company and makes the decisions without considering what community thinks about moves that directly have an impact on us. I really want it to go back to the golden times where staff and authors were much closer and working together to grow this place.)
So, as a conclusion, generally, I still believe completely removing banners everywhere is the best decision you can make not just for authors, but also for the long-term health of your entire business. By doing this, you also solve the affiliate problems mentioned in this thread in a very simple and fast way.
- AFFILIATE PERSPECTIVE
Most affiliates primarily promote their own products on Envato Market. In real-life, customers come to our item page, and often continue browsing through Envato and buy the item that isn’t ours. Sometimes we sell our own products via our links, and sometimes the buyer buys something completely different. We still get the referral cut in that case, so that’s fine, if the buyer finds something better than my item, at least I earn for introducing him to Envato. Perfectly fine by me.
But now, Envato is bombarding with banners everywhere and it’s hard to compete with “UNLIMITED DOWNLOADS FOR 16.50$” deal versus one of my songs for 20$. Especially since Elements is full of great music by the some of the most talented producers on Envato. The thing is, a lot of times our customers needs just a simple generic track that will play at very low volume on a video for a few seconds, so our music quality isn’t always a big factor in videos and thousands of other songs will do just as good.
Elements deal clearly wins if customer is looking for that type of track. (or need a lot of tracks like that) He also gets a couple of images, stock videos and nice photoshop effects while he’s there, and spends less money than for just one of my tracks, awesome deal!
From affiliate perspective, that would be fine if I got a referral cut for that customer. OK, he didn’t buy my song, but he subscribed to Elements and I got 20 or even 120$ for bringing him there, that’s still perfectly fine by me! But that’s not the case now. I lost a sale & referral cut from market, and Elements got a new customer and 198$, both Envato and elements authors gain money because of my promotion work. So, I act like a charity advertising agency when that happens. This is unacceptable, especially because I started to invest thousands of dollars in growing affiliate channels for Envato, and I hope to see results coming in the next months. I’m talking to much, let’s cut to the chase:
Let’s say markets are connected now, and when someone comes to market via our affiliate link, that affiliate link is tracked/transfered further when the customer goes to Elements via banner. 1 tracking ID is generated for market, and the second tracking ID is generated automatically when customer clicks on Elements banner from market. Or maybe links can be updated from our impact market id number to our Impact Elements id number. if we provide you with both id numbers maybe click on the banner can be coded to open elements page automatically with our elements id. In the case where click comes from affiliate link with our market id. Both are part of the same Impact account, so maybe there’s a chance for this to work. In this case, 2 separate tracking IDs are created under the same affiliate profile, 1 for market and the second when customer clicks on elements banner. This way, you can count the same customer as a new purchase, both for market and Elements. So, elements affiliates will not be affected at all. They can even get 2 referral cuts like now, one for purchase on AudioJungle, and the other one for Elements subscriber, all from the same customer. And affiliates who want to drive traffic to AudioJungle which ends up in Elements are fairly treated. Ultimate win. So, in this situation markets are not actually connected, but they act as they are because of such tracking setup. And this way, we avoid the all the negative sides of connecting markets you’ve mentioned before.
So, if we can set this up, even in the case as you described, where the customer already organically came to AudioJungle first day, and the next day comes to Elements via affiliate links and the case where customer comes via our to audiojungle and clicks the banner, that changes nothing even though markets are now connected. It can only be better.
I don’t know how complicated this is technically to set up, but you must admit this sounds as a nice idea and should be seriously considered. Your tech team has solved much bigger problems so far, so I believe in you 
OK, I’m done with talking now. And I will offer the ultimate solution to all problems now, authors and affiliates will love you:
1. Connect markets the way as I described above
This is the ultimate solutions for all affiliate problems.
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But what about authors who don’t want banners on their items and they are not affiliates?
2.Allow us to opt-out from showing any banners on our profiles and item pages.
Example, in settings of our AJ profiles give us option “I don’t want advertising banners to show on my profile and item pages”.You owe this fairness and basic business etchics to people who work hard to produce new items and have choosen you as a platform to sell them, without traffic being redirected elsewhere and stolen, you know this is the only fair and ethical solution. It keeps regular authors happy and motivated to continue to work for you.
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But we want to continue advertise Elements on the Markets, what if everyone opts-out?
3. A LOT of people will choose to not opt-out because potential benefits
If you set affiliate tracking the way I suggested, affiliates will not opt-out from banners because they now have a choice to sell their item on the market, and if not they have a chance to get amazing 120$ referral cut from Elements. If they have their portfolio on Elements, maybe they will even put affiliate banners in the descriptions!
Also, people who have items or even their entire portfolio on Elements and have more success there than on Market, (and some are reporting this) will choose to leave banners in order to get more customers to Elements, since the overall revenue is shared between all authors there.
Also, I’m equally motivated to promote both markets and elements because I have different targeted traffic for both type of customers. If markets are connected, I will still promote Elements to people interested in subscription models. The fact that I get paid from banners anyway will not cause a lack of motivation to also do direct elements promotions.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope I didn’t say something stupid.
@roeyrafael and @emile_b , I would like to hear your honest thoughts on the practical solutions of tracking I suggested. Since I’m not a programmer, I’m not aware of the complexity of such solutions, I’m just throwing ideas here. Is this something that has the potential to be implemented by your programmers/coders?