@collis I would kindly ask you to address some concerns I have.
In light of recent announcements made by you and your team members, more and more authors are concerned about your goals and the way you treat us, authors. I will not speak in front of all them, I will raise my own concerns here, but I doubt I am alone in this.
The thing is, I’ve been here for 6 full years now, and all this time I see one constant: you as a company try to expand more and more; but in the process you simply ignore your foundations: authors and marketplaces.
In recent weeks/months, we are witnesses of you investing a lot of energy and resources into organizing all sorts of competitions, expanding to other countries, adding new ways to take money from authors (ie. support system for TF authors), even involving into socio-political activities (and creating a whole separate team just for that!). In the meantime marketplaces still suffer from limitations of your “ancient” technology. I can only speak from the VideoHive perspective, as I don’t use other marketplaces that much, but I can tell you that competition is light-years away in sense of easiness of use, both for browsing (buyers) and adding new content (authors). Just one of (too) many examples: buyers still have to navigate stock footage by title and small 80x80 pixels thumbnail!
Without writing too much, here is the summary of my concerns: are you going to press PAUSE on your expansion any time soon and first start patching all those holes you left in the process, or should we continue to watch the Envato bubble expand more and more until it bursts? :’(
An impassioned plea, and one that I slightly agree with. But I think you’re going to have to give some specifics if you want positive change. I mean, if they get rid of item titles all together and put the thumbnails up to 100x100, would you consider the site to be redeemed and everything to be operating at peak efficiency?
I can easily give a list of things that should be improved. Some of them are even worked on (at least that’s what has been mentioned on forums 6 or more months ago). But I didn’t want to clutter the original post with marketplace-specific lists, as I can only speak for VideoHive but my question was of more general nature.
Regarding your question about thumbnails: as VideoHIve author yourself, wouldn’t you agree that it’d be better to show at least a full frame thumbnail than a cut-off square thumbnail to the buyers who are browsing around? Take a look at the PhotoDune - none of the photos is cut off, they are displayed as they are; with videos it’d be even more elegant, to say it light that, because the majority of videos are in 16:9 aspect ration, unlike the images which can be in any proportion.
Sure, I’m not disagreeing with you… I’m just saying if you want somebody to implement change then you need to tell them what changes you want made.
For the thumbnails, I’ve never really thought about it. At least they have the small preview image when you hover over it and then a preview of the video. If the thumbs were larger, would that mean there were less items on one page? I get a bit fed up of clicking on new pages when I’m looking for something.