Update: Envato Elements next steps.

Completely agree.[quote=“isoarts, post:9, topic:61882, full:true”]
Envato Elements devalues the work of any author on this marketplace. Of course, you take 50% and the contributors are becoming bread crumbs. What a horrible business model for the people that made you so successful. But as we learned, you give a damn about our opinion.
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One bad move, now buyers can buy unlmited sites templates with one subscription, after this move what will be the future of ThemeForest for web templates? Why buyers will pay for one web template if he/she can have unlimited access?

In summary you are creating a business to kill ThemeForest once for all, the cascade effect will affect everything in here. I just can’t understand such bad moves previous months. First a USA move that would bring more sales for authors, what happened was the contrary the market is going slow and slow as the time passes by, taxes and more taxes made the author’s lives hard, now a subscription model to kill the market where we do our lives. Envato think twice before making such silly and stupid decisions. Many of us don’t have any other source of income and here is part of our lives.

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First step to bury ThemeForest

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Thinking the same thing

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Envato should reveal the complete masterplan to authors, so we know where it heading to and we can make our own plan and decide what to do, please don’t take us on a trial and error journey which we don’t know what may be waiting around the next corner.

I just a new author on GraphicRiver but has experienced the ‘Envato Element Effect’ on my sales this month, so I need to make my own move on it, but one thing for sure, I will not sell my hardwork for cents.

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Hey everyone,

Matt jumping in here with a few answers. There’s a few broader questions here around us illustrating how all this all weaves together, and it’s probably worth calling out Collis’ 2016 Roadmap, which does a pretty good job of doing just that.

When it comes to Market and it’s relationship to Elements, It’s really important to emphasise that Envato Elements is intended to be a very different value proposition for a very certain type of customer. High volume, business class customers will find the subscription based model to be really, useful, whereas customers that don’t have the same frequent need for assets will likely be deterred by a subscription model product.

The two however are intended to, and can quite happily co-exist. Take this piece of feedback from a user for example:

“Elements allows me to download a lot of different options to get an idea of what I want the end product to look like. I understand not everything will be available on Elements, so when I’m looking for something specific I will return to GraphicRiver to find it because it has a larger library. I’m sure in the end I’ll just end up spending more money with Envato because it just causes me to create more stuff for myself and for clients”

@Bedros asked a few questions.

100%. Elements is entirely opt in. We’re reviewing existing portfolios and inviting authors that meet our selection criteria to participate. But if the authors don’t want to take part, that’s fine, we’re not forcing anyone to do anything.

We have systems in place on elements which have been set up to detect “scraping” behaviour, which I believe is at the heart of these question here. But at a basic level, the Elements licence requires a user to actively state which project the subscriber intends to use the downloaded item for. They must assign a download to a project. Otherwise, if they cancel their subscription they will no longer have a valid license.

This is super important, because the type of customer that Elements is seeking to engage is the professional user who has an ongoing need for digital assets. Our research showed they care about licensing and don’t want to take a legal risk with a finished product, particularly if they’re passing that finished product across to a client for end use.

For example, many of our pre-sales support tickets relate to licensing. And in a recent survey asking about the best part of their Elements experience so far, many people cited the license (which might surprise you!) e.g. “I love the licensing part and it’s like a secret weapon for client projects”; and “Fair and easy licence”; and “the license per project to keep things clean”.

In regards to piracy, because we are the re-seller in the elements business model, our legal team will be extra vigilant in acting on item misuse.

Some will and some won’t. It entirely depends on the preference of the contributor. Again, we’re not forcing the anyone to do anything. Just different options depending on how people want to sell.

There’s a bit more to it than that. The important thing is the way in which we share the revenue between our subscribers, which makes this a much fairer deal for contributors. You can check out this medium article written by Xavier, filled with lovely diagrams and some detailed scenarios to get a better idea of our system.

The job of Envato in this model is simple: marketing to the customers. We want our contributors to keep adding fresh content over time, and they’ll only do that if they feel like their investment in Elements is proving to be a worthwhile one. Simply put, we need to make sure contributors do feel like they’re getting a good deal. Otherwise they won’t stick around!

As above, some customers will go in for a subscription model, others will prefer to simply buy the specific product that they want from Market. Some will choose to go for both!

We’ve done a great deal of research on this front, and what we’re seeing already affirms this research. Initiatives like Envato Sites and Envato Elements are simply about acknowledging that there are different types of customers for our Author’s items and/or different use cases in mind. It’s ultimately about bringing in more revenue to share with authors, by growing the customer base and/or by getting existing customers to spend more over time.

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thanks for detailed answers!

Great news.

Thanks very much for your patience & understanding @matthewcoxy ; I really appreciate that. We’ll wait and see.

Hello @matthewcoxy,

Will the current contributors on envato elements be allowed to upload items in web templates category. Or will there be category restrictions for contributors and you will choose whole set of new contributors to upload in this web templates category?

thanks

Crazy stuff. Speechless.

  1. And what about support? Will it also be “included” in the price?
  2. What about Extended license for html templates? How do you want to manage it?
  3. What about exclusivity of items? Can we sell same item on both marketplaces?
  4. What about ratings?
  5. What about refunds? For mistaken purchases :smiley:

For now more questions than answers.

Hey @Kopyov,

  1. Support will be sold through market, it will not be sold on elements. This will be stated to a customer up front. If an elements customer requests support they will be directed to the market item to purchase a support pack, or to an Envato Studio Service Provider if the contributor’s items are unsupported on Market.

  2. The Envato Elements licence is the only licence we have on Elements. The customer needs to state which project they’re using the item in when they download it. However, in a subscription model they can download the item as many times as they like, provided they tell us which project it is being used within with each download.

  3. You can absolutely sell items on both Elements and Market. Being part of Elements does not impact your exclusivity.

  4. Ratings don’t exist on elements. Largely because the contributor selection process.

  5. Refunds don’t exist on elements either, as it’s a subscription based service. Subscribers pay for the subscription, not the individual items they use.

Hope that answers your questions :slight_smile:

Now for @themepassion’s question…

Currently there are no restrictions on what a contributor can add, provided the category for the item type exists.

For Web Templates, all items need to be available on market for them to be uploaded to elements. As we add more categories, a Web Templates contributor could theoretically add, say, a plugin if that was to become a category.

Elements is much more about reviewing the individual contributors themselves, rather than their items.

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when AJ go to Elements )? can not wait :pensive:

Why would you think this is great news? It’s less money for you.

Less per sale, yes, but the volume could result in more money. And seeing as you can have items on the marketplace and on Elements… then you just need one subscriber to download it and then you’ve made more money!

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A subscriber who maybe would have bought the item on the marketplace if it wasn’t available in Elements, and then you would have made even more money.

True, but that also depends on how many potential Market buyers you’d lose as a result of your items being available on Elements. There are bound to be at least a few (regular) Market buyers who would decide that subscribing to Elements is better value than paying $15-19 each time for individual tracks.

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You’re not wrong. I guess it remains to be seen what effect this will have on marketplace sales… hopefully there’s room for both offerings. Watch this space!

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Agreed. Here’s hoping the number of new Elements subscribers outweighs the potential loss of Market buyers!

Anyway, the prospect of including audio in Elements looks promising on the whole, and I’ve got high hopes about offering music there myself… but that’s assuming I get an invitation!

Hi @Hyperprod , I hope in the future it will happen as you might expect, but what I experienced last month as the GraphicRiver author, my sales which always raises from month to month, was fell by nearly 50% last month, I guess some GR buyers switched some of their purchases to Envato Element.

Agree with @AurusAudio right now nearly all the Element subscribers are the same old buyers of Envato Markets, but I hope in the future Element could create its own market and new kind of buyers which will also bring more buyers for Envato Market.

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