What happened to Most Wanted contests?

I was going through my badges and it reminded me of the “Most Wanted” contests and how fun they were and that they produced cool items for the marketplaces.

Are there going to be any more Most Wanted contests in the future?

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It’s true we haven’t been running them for a while. I don’t know if we will ever run them again, but you’re right they were fun :smiley:

The same thing that happened to our sales, mate:

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I would like to participate :slightly_smiling_face:

I haven’t heard of any plans to directly re-use the “Most Wanted” contest format as it was previously used, but those badges might be used for similar content-creation events in future.

The original Most Wanted contest series filled a different kind of need for Envato Market to what we see in 2020. At the time, we needed to kickstart content growth by rapidly assembling a large catalogue of items in many different categories: building up to the critical mass that drives the marketplace today. Without enough content in a category, you don’t get enough customer purchases, which means author earnings are down, stalling further content. On the flip side, a large marketplace benefits from network effects when the income from customer purchases can drive more content creation.

There are definitely a few new and emerging niches that need that kind of content growth (see our Commercial Demand guidelines in the Author Help Centre for some examples), but many of the established categories on our marketplaces have well and truly hit the mainstream now. That means we shouldn’t be pushing for mass growth in those areas: content in an already saturated category will just dilute author earnings for that type of item. It becomes more important to have systems that reward increasing the quality of items there, instead of the quantity.

TL;DR: Targeted growth in content creation is still important, but is being handled differently to how it was a few years back. I’ll make sure the Content teams know the badges are still available if they want to run new contests, though :slight_smile:

Hi @BenLeong

Can you please check my ticket (removed by mod)?

I really appreciate it if you can help with my ticket.

Thanks.

That means we shouldn’t be pushing for mass growth in those areas: content in an already saturated category will just dilute author earnings for that type of item. It becomes more important to have systems that reward increasing the quality of items there, instead of the quantity.

The quality of items seems to have degraded over time in the marketplace, mostly because the popular items are older items that still sell well, most of them having an outdated codebase.

Maybe the marketplace should have a “garbage collection” functionality (either automatic or manual) where old items that are no longer up to the current standards should be completely removed from the marketplace. I would first let those authors know that their items are no longer of a good enough quality for today’s standards, and if they don’t update their items in a few months they will be removed and will have to resubmit them in order to keep them visible in the marketplace.

I’m an online creator who is interested in supporting alternatives to YouTube. I think it’d be good to get some competition going, since right now YouTube has a monopoly on the online video market and can essentially do whatever it wants.