What are Envato's plans for ThemeForest?

Whats the benefit of USA move ? Only change is the deduction of author’s percentage.

5 Likes

Advertising Envato Studio through themeforest was fine as it is not author’s competitor. It is a service based venture whereas authors are product based.

Now, if you advertise Envato Elements through themeforest, that is a big problem as it is author’s direct competitor. Authors can compete with each other but they can’t compete with Envato.

Please put your manpower in improving themeforest. There are many issues in themeforest as a platform, but why they are not given the attention it needs.

5 Likes

When I try some keywords related to magento theme and other CMS platforms on google, I can see they stopped ads for themeforest, doing for Envato Elements now. This is a really big disappointing behavior Envato.

8 Likes

So sad :frowning:@BenLeong can you please keep promoting Themeforest… you can increase Fees but keep the promotion.

ROFL. Seriosuly?

You get this ad, because you have accesed elements site many time, i was curios and searched for keyword “magento themes”, ads from themeforest was first.

5 Likes

When I use Portland IP, I get same result as your screen. But when I use San Francesco ip, I get Elements Ads.

Ofc, cause elements are been sold as Number 1 in USA, you can check if you do a quick look for the elements site, in number of different resources

Any official answer today?

3 Likes

“Early next week” for Envato is Wednesday.

Yes this is very important. I was already mentioned this before (marketing ThemeForest on Google SERPs) , and thanks a lot for making it “visible” again.

Is coming to an end… when can we expect this?

1 Like

Thanks, nice bla-bla-bla in your update! :innocent:

1 Like

Hi guys. Sorry for the delay - we hoped to get an update out yesterday, but it’s hitting the forums a little later than planned.

You can find Xavier’s update here - it primarily focuses on the future plans for Elements, but also addresses most of the major concerns raised for GraphicRiver, ThemeForest and the other marketplaces.

Thank you, @BenLeong.

Now, I have to make a new plan for my future.

3 Likes

On april 2015 I joined Envato as author, I published EventOn Slider Addon. I got a good success, I was very very happy to found Envato, finally I was found the company I would love to working for.

So on may 2015 i started a big project for Themeforest due, after spent much time of analyze the market, the average number of sales, and the work required to create a theme and a HTML template we found ThemeForest was the best market of all.

Unfortunately in the meanwhile the Themeforest market has been destroyed, about 4 months ago the HTML section is dead, but I was not too worried due HTML section has never been a section for a full time job, the earning has been never very high, although now is completely dead.

But the Wordpress version until 15 months ago was fantastic, an average earning of 3 sales/days (100$/day) for 80% of all items. Unfortunately my big project required 15 months of work and now that is completed and we have published it, is too later, the market is dead also for Wordpress.

My item (Y) sell better of 80% of the other themes, but unfortunately, with the current average sales, sell better is not enough, only 1 sale/day is nothing for a project of 15 months of work!!

If the item have lower quality of other items that sell better I can understand, but the true is that Y have features similar to X, is bigger and with a better quality, anyway for various reasons is completely impossible that the item presentation or quality or support or any other thing is the problem.

We already know that X(for example) do a very big marketing, but I think X authors stay on envato because also envato can generate a minimum of sales. I was sure of this, envato must give to X min 12% more sales that without envato, due the min percentage that envato take from every X sale is about 12%, so again, I was not worried, the 12% of 900 sales/week is about 100 = 3600$/week, more than a good result.

But wait, my item is online by 6 days and my sales are only 25?? how is possible?? Again can not be the quality or the features. So what is the problem??

My conclusion is that envato truly give to X min 12%+ sales BUT for these reasons:

  1. X do big marketing so X stay always on Wordpress popular items page, envato promote this page, users go to this page
  2. X do big marketing so stay always on top pages in general.
  3. X do big marketing so sales are big so envato promote more this item.
  4. X is a featured item.

In short the conclusion is that Envato help to promote only the items that have success, but now, only (again ONLY) the items that do marketing have success. No marketing = no success (does not matter if you have the best item of the planet). Anyway I understand Envato, authors that invest money and time, create great affiliates programs, and help envato to have more success with the marketing is correct that are helped more by envato. You help me = I help you. Ok correct.

But we also invested much, we invested 15 months work 13/h day, every day!
For receive what? almost nothing. I understand that without Envato I would not earned nothing, but I believed in him and wasted 1 year and 6 months not for my errors, but only due the visibility for the single items is dead, you not belive me? First day Google Anailycs registered 2000 vistors, Second day 1000, third 800, now 200. I sold 18 items the first three days, now I not sell nothing.

is a incredible bad thing, trust me, another frustrating thing, I not even received the featured badge, and my item have all the requirements, but themes like X, that before starting already have budget of half million of dollars, have received it, is very very very frustrating.

Thank you

3 Likes

I do understand your frustration. You build a good theme that maybe a year ago would have sold 24 times in a day, but your theme is not unique on the market. You offer 12 menu styles. So does the majority of the big themes. You have 70 components, most of the big themes have a lot more. You have 6 templates. There are a lot of big themes that offer over 100 complete demos with different inner pages. The name is also uninspired. I think you made a wrong decision here. I didn’t click on your item in the first day because I thought it was an X copycat. In the future, give your theme an original name.
About the X theme: there is an entire marketing team behind it. They spend a lot of money promoting it. This is why it’s in the top sellers. These days you cannot have a lot of sales without investing a lot of money into promotion and of course some help from the search engine from Envato :slight_smile:
In the end I want to tell you that 24 sales these days are a very good achievement, so congratulation. The pure fact is that when a theme goes on the second page, the sales drop dramatically and it will only get worse.

2 Likes

Hi,

About the menu, yes all big themes have this, about the others features I not agree. There are very few themes with this number of components, and anyway we don’t know any theme that have components of the same type, there are a set of innovation not available on any other theme that I not explain here but you can found the infos on the website.
Also the template are a different story, all themes’s templates are the same, change only some feature like boxed, no header, full width… every template of Y is completely different, background slider or video, complete indipendent engine, like the full page template that is a complete fullpage system for create websites.
About the demos I agree, there are other themes that do this, but not many, our demos have 700+ pages, there are very few themes with this number, but the design can be improved for some skin, but sure is not unique. But the main problem is show to the user the true value of a different theme, in this case the true value are not the demos but the innovations of the Hybrid Composer and of the lists.

Currently there is not any page builder on the market that have features like the recursive nesting, the insert everything into everything concept, the direct editing.

There are not any theme that is truly thought for custom designs and for create other themes, only X.

The list engine is also a very big improvement. It change the way how you build, show and menage the post types like the blog or the portfolio giving you a power that truly any theme on this market can currently give you without installing complex plugins like types or ACF, also with these plugins the features of the lists of Y are very better.

These are not small details bug big features that truly improve the way a user develop a web site. The difficult is to show to the users these features, also you, that you are a TF author and developer, focused on demos, but this is not the true value of the theme and show to the user this require a big marketing that 1 year ago Themeforest was able to provide.

About the name, some of the most famous themes have name like: K-Theme, BeTheme, X store, X | The Theme, Y Theme. I not think is a big problem but I agree with you that in some situation like your can not be good. This is a risk for us, but from another side this similarity help users to understand immediately the product typology.

About X and the Marketing I completely agree with you, there is no more to say, we need to do marketing.

pls Authors, we can do one thing to save ourselves… just DONT UPLOAD ITEMS ON ELEMENTS… PLS DONT… and whoever did it before please just delete them…same with me…i did a big mistake uploading items on ELEMENTS and now i am paying for it as my sales dropped to -70%… and i won on elements 50$!!! so if u care for THF(site templates) please don’t upload any theme there…

10 Likes

I think telling people to boycott is a mistake. People will upload there and keep uploading if they make a significant profit. I personally believe that in the long run, Elements will negatively affect us all, but this is business and people will do what they can to earn their money. Just like we came here and accepted to sell out items for pennies, accepted to eventually give some for free, accepted to offer discount and so on. Like someone once pointed out, Envato is a victim of it’s own sucess, and we are part of it.

I have 5 items there and I’m not happy with my earnings and definitely not happy with the lack of transparency regarding the ammount of times an item is downloaded. My GR sales dropped and referral links are completely dead. On the other hand, I feel like I’m one of the few Elements author complaining. Everyone seems to be happy with their earnings.

I’m urging to see Envato cut it’s exclusivity agreement. This will set us free and we won’t feel so dependant on their services. Big players like ProteusThemes are leaving, and I hope Envato makes one good move towards the right direction before it’s too late.