Update: Envato Elements next steps.

Hi everyone,

It’s now been a month since we announced the beta launch of Elements, and we just wanted to give our community some visibility on how the project is progressing, as well as let you know about some next steps.

After an initial beta launch to the Envato Community, the platform has gained over 8,000 paying subscribers. This is a super encouraging start.

We’re now moving to the next phase of our launch, scaling up external marketing to introduce new customers to the Envato network of sites. This includes a huge PR launch, and an extensive program of sponsored content and paid acquisition.

As we said back when we launched, we’re looking to grow the content included in Elements. In September we’re also going to be introducing our next category: Web Templates.

This will initially include:

  • Site Templates
  • Email Templates
  • Landing Page Templates
  • Admin Templates

For the category launch, we’ll be aiming for at least 100 items, with a view to expanding the offering over time.

In the coming weeks, our content team will be approaching ThemeForest authors to invite them to participate in Elements for this new category. In preparation for this, our content team has been hard at work reviewing the portfolios of all active authors in that category on ThemeForest.

We’re really excited about this next stage of the elements launch. We’ll be sure to keep the community updated as we move forward.

If you have any questions, feel free to shout out below and we’ll do our best to answer them.

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You should have a ‘space’ category. Buyers go wild for space stuff. It’s like the future… but it’s now.

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You break me.

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Thank you for including web templates in this bundle/service…now we know that we will sell our upcoming stuff on a different marketplace as why should an author sell there new stuff here as buyers can buy it cheaper in a bundle.

Thanks Envato!

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That’s just the way I roll. Or whatever the kids are saying these days.

Great news. Do you plan to expand this service with music?

What about WordPress themes? Are you planing to add them? If yes, doesn’t it beat the purpose of Envato Sites (any plans of launching that?)

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So,

  • This will be up to the Author’s choice, right? In other words, if an Author does NOT want to be a part of it, then they are free to choose to not participating too.

  • What prevents an “Elements” subscriber to get anything they need for a really “cheap” amount of money and never look back? I mean, they can cancel anytime and those are digital items, they can download all of them… So what’s preventing them to do that for a very cheap price? (this is purely devaluing our hardWork , the price will be NonSense Cheap - Also, it’s not only the “price” thing, this looks problematic anyway)

  • Also, what will this new approach’s effect be when it comes to the “piracy”? Thousands of items will be on sale for a very (unbelievably) cheap price?

  • An item included in “Elements” will also be sold on the Market at the same time, as usual (with Regular / Extended Licenses), right?.

  • If we understood the pricing model, with each new subscription (i.e. $45), YOU get 50% of the $45 and the rest is shared between the participating authors? Please clarify. (if this is the case, then this doesn’t seem good for authors. If possible, please clarify the pricing/shares with an example)

  • Let’s assume the “Elements” subscription will be $45… That’s the price of a WordPress Theme and now the “ElementsUser” will have access to (possibly) thousands of files with the same price instead of buying a single theme. This really doesn’t look good.

Please clarify; Thanks very much for all your patience @matthewcoxy

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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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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.
[/quote]

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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.