According to Alexa.com Codecanyon and other Envato markets experience huge drop of traffic starting August 2014. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7l0t5q6rqod7fnk/Screenshot%202015-10-10%2011.13.38.png?dl=0 This affects our sales, we’re experiencing decline too. Because math is simple, traffic = sales. Though we’re relatively successful authors this drop kills our capacity to grow as business. Because we need to hire support to produce new items and keep updating existing but we’re stuck with current sales rate that only goes down recent year. It’s dropped 20% compared to last year. However we can’t figure out is it general drop or only our items traffic. Another authors, please share your stats in percents
I’m sure Envato are aware of traffic problem (if there is problem) and hope they’re doing all possible. We’re really concerned and want to hear more insights from team about this situation because our future really depends on this. All we need is growing market not declining
Alexa and similar tools are useless as they need people to install their apps / widgets to see the traffic, so what you will see is either:
users of their apps visiting the website less
a lot of uninstalls of the app so there is less traffic being counted
It’s more than likely the second one, this gets brought up every so often and the consensus is that Themeforest’s traffic is still growing and sales are increasing but the number of files available keeps growing so the distribution of sales will be slowly increasing as the buyers have a lot more choice to make.
Envato would never release their traffic details but if there was a major problem then there would be a lot more noise about this.
Your slowing sales are just down to market capitalization, buyers are getting more choice and the search is weighted slightly to newer items so it’s common for items overtime to lose sales gradually, except if you get onto the most popular themes.
What can you do? release more items, improve your items or market your themes, if they have niche (e.g. restaurant) then make a landing page on your website which targets restaurant website design etc…
We don’t think our items are all slowing simulteneously. We do exactly what you’re telling, releasing more items, improving and marketing them but we strongly believe overall traffic is definitely not increasing. If it is then even with market capitalization we’ll feel difference. We watch for items in our categories and don’t see huge amount of items being released. Sudden mass unistall of Alexa tools seems not very likely for us
We want Envato to grow because our income will grow too
When sales gradually slow down I can understand that it’s due to more and more competition but when you sales go bam! 50% down in a couple of weeks I can’t believe it’s from more competition.
@Gareth_Gillman: sales are growing? Lol, starting with May I’ve seen “hundreds” of threads and even from big authors stating that their sales suddenly went down.
I’ve seen hundreds of threads even from big authors starting not long after Envato started the forums, saying that sales are dropping and it’s the beginning of the end. There’s usually only a few dozen people in that thread complaining (per month) though, out of several thousands of authors, and it’s (mainly) different authors complaining every month. So it seems more natural variation, ups and downs, than it does purely downs.
Although overall marketplace trends may be on the up or they may be on the down, I really don’t think the sales threads in the forums are an accurate way to gauge the sales of the entire marketplace.
Selling microstock works like a pyramid scheme, those higher up in the pyramid will see the most benefit, but as the base of the pyramid grows, then it becomes less beneficial at the base and going further up the pyramid, so this is probably why more and more authors are reporting less sales but does not necessarily mean overall sales are dropping, just the pyramid structure is becoming bigger and bigger. As you can see authors at the top of the pyramid are still growing in sales.
@digitalscience you sound reasonable and it’s really how market works but our main concern is that Alexa stats about Envato traffic. @Gareth_Gillman thinks it’s not reliable source for analytics (we thought it is). But if it shows real trend then it can easily explain our drop. Otherwise it’s market saturation. In first case our market efforts are not useless. In second case we’re really noobs at marketing But we saw many similar complaints recently and feel there can be something wrong on market level
Would be nice to see a chart with two or more years of data. I know it;s highly unlikely, but it;s possible that next week the traffic on the last data point will rise to match the level of the first data point… so that essentially you could duplicate your chart and put them four in a row next to each other. I.e there are ups and downs throughout the year, but overall, everything is the same year on year.
I know that’s very unlikely, but it’s hard to tell with just one year of data. I mean, run a historical 12 month report on Christmas card sales in August/September, and it’s going to show that sales have been falling rapidly for the last eight or nine months in a row. Doesn’t mean that Christmas cards are going to be extinct in a year or two.
Good discussion and thoughts here. Thanks to everyone for sharing.
I agree with some of the consensus here that there is massively growing competition and choice, and that is potentially impacting overall sales for some.
Envato wants traffic just as much as the rest of us. But they also want to make sure it’s well targeted, converting traffic. I worry less about overall numbers and more about how many of these visitors actually care about being here.
The raw numbers could fall every year, but if the percentage of buyers are growing, it doesn’t matter.
That being said, we are also relying heavily on a third party “host” to bring us our traffic - Envato. At the end of the day, if we want more traffic, there is nothing stopping us from creating intelligent marketing campaigns around specific items and sending our own traffic.
It’s a blessing that Envato does such a wonderful job constantly tweaking, testing, and implementing new ideas and strategies to make the experience here on a constant uptrend for both the creators and customers. But we can’t just rely on them to create our success. If we want more, we must make it happen.
Alexa cannot get the visitor statistics without an app on someones pc, so it’s 100% correct the likely cause is mass deletion of their app, Alexa is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot…
Very interesting discussion.
I think the main problem here is insainly big number of authors.And many of them has downloaded 1-2 item few years ago and they are still out there.
This could create a mess in which buyers will prefer to buy items of top authors instead of searching something unique all around the marketplace.
And that’s the reason why the bottom of pyramid has little sales and top has it’s great results.
not really without something on the server, best way is to create an app using the api to pull in sales numbers (bit like trackforest did) which you can then say there was 600 orders on this day and 670 on the other day
