Has the Tuts+ Marketplace been Forgotten?

Hi everyone! Having started out with my first items on the Tuts+ Marketplace, it holds a special place in my heart. And even though I no longer get the majority of my marketplace income from the Tuts+ site, it’s still the one that I wish I could focus on, and a marketplace that I think holds truly amazing potential.

7 months ago, I made a post about low prices on the marketplace (which has been corrected as of a few months ago, F’ yeah guys! Awesomely done! <- that’s my happy face!), in which I also showed that the sales on the site was dwindling. I did a little graph showing the total sales of the 29 best selling items on the site, over the course of the last 12 weeks. http://marketplace.tutsplus.com/forums/thread/the-item-price-on-tuts-should-be-upped-long-post-and-statistics/51214?page=1 This is how it looked:

Sadly, since then, things haven’t gotten any better. I decided to go through the numbers once more, and this item focus on the top selling authors. Over the past 14 months (ignoring June, since there was the Tuts+ sale going, meaning abnormally high sales (not necessarily income) for that single month), I have collected the total sales of the top selling authors for each month, while ignoring the #1 selling author of each month to get closer to a median. This is how the sales have gone over those 14 months:

Not exactly a pretty sight, is it? And keep in mind that many authors have uploaded many more files doing this timeframe, so per-item sale has gone down even more. So let’s have a look at our Tuts+ #1 alltime best seller, our very own JeffreyWay! Jef’ has only added 3 new files (out of his total 25) over the last 14 months, so it should be pretty consistent, or have gone up a little, right? Lets see how his monthly sales have done over the last 14 months.

But maybe that’s a fluke? How about andrew8088, the current #3 alltime best seller. Now, Andrew started out with 11 files, and added 2 more over the last 14 months, so he actually added almost 20% more content. But how is he doing? (blue indicating sales, 3 indicating content)

Granted, a bit more steady, but still downwards, especially considering he should have gone up 20% in that time, but actually went down a little bit.

Then how about me? Over the last 14 months, I’ve started with 2 files, and now have 15, so I now have 7.5 times more content than I started with! I also did absolutely 0 advertising for my products the first couple of months, and now do it daily. (blue indicating sales, 3 indicating content)

Pretty much the same as Andrew, even though, purely theoretically, my sales should have gone up 750%. Instead, they’ve stayed pretty much the exact same.

Now, I should add that last month Tuts+ changed the pricing model for several tutorials, giving many a slightly higher price. However, looking at higher priced tutorials over the course of time, that shouldn’t effect anything, and as you can see, it has been a current trend over the last 14 months.

Now I really love Envato, and the Tuts+ Marketplace. It’s given me ideas for my future, I’ve started making money in ways I didn’t think possible, and I am truly grateful for that. So I don’t want anyone to think I’m trying to just whine and b*tch about Envato here, while enjoying their great service. Not at all. But it saddens me a little bit, to see many of the other marketplaces, like ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, ActiveDen, and CodeCanyon grow, and even new marketplaces come up like PhotoDune, and at the same time see Tuts+ drift away into the background.

At the same time, it also makes me worry about spending time creating content for Tuts+. With the way things are going now, it simply doesn’t look like it will ever turn into a viable income source, unless I perhaps quadruple my current items, and even then I ask myself “but I’ve done that before, and it didn’t change all that much”. I also worry that with the dwindling sales that Envato will at some point simply decide to remove the marketplace alltogether, in which case I’m f’d. It also worries me that this might lead to fewer sales, so less new authors will join and current authors won’t make new content, which in turn makes the marketplace less popular, and it all becomes a vicious cycle downhill.

And that of course worries me, as well as saddens me. I think Envato has an amazing oppertunity here to make a truly huge website, catering specialized learning of a high quality, in a variety of topics, and it seems to be slipping away.

So I suppose my open question to Envato is: I don’t suppose you could give a little update? Perhaps say what your plans for the Tuts+ Marketplace is? What you have in mind? Maybe just calm my fears a little bit?

http://www.mentalmirage.com/tutstopsales.jpg

Broken

Reachground said
http://www.mentalmirage.com/tutstopsales.jpg Broken

Missed it in the upload, it’s there now, my Nordic friend

Some great effort you put into that.

Are you promoting your items anywhere?

quickandeasy said
Some great effort you put into that. Are you promoting your items anywhere?

Luckily I inherited the “beautiful mind” gene from my dad, meaning I’m an absolute nut about curves and statistics I do this stuff in my free time! XD Though it does worry me now and then when I sometimes go over to my dads apartment and see walls plastered with numbers and curves

On advertising: Yep yep and yep. In fact, later this month, I’m getting my next referral badge, meaning over 1000 referred members! Now granted, I don’t only promote my own items but also select items from other authors on the marketplaces, but yes, I do spend a significant amount of time each month promoting my own items, on various sites such as YouTube, various design websites, Adobe Marketplace, and so forth. At the moment, a complete guestimate would be that roughly 50% of all views on my items are from my promotion of them.

It’s very important to note here, that I’m promoting my items FAR MORE NOW , than I was at first. So without promotion, my sales would have dropped much much further over time. I didn’t promote my items AT ALL the first 3 or 4 months. Or rather, the first 4 months had a total of 1002 referral clicks, with a grand total of 14 deposits, and that’s also spread out over my 4 or so GraphicRiver items I had at that time.

Zeplix said

Reachground said
http://www.mentalmirage.com/tutstopsales.jpg Broken

Missed it in the upload, it’s there now, my Nordic friend

Haha just saw that. Hej på dig

Well with promo stats like that it’s a shame not to see growing sales.

Selling tutorials must be a tricky business. You’re caught between those who are newbies and don’t want to spend / can’t afford to, and those who’re professionals and don’t need to buy.

Plus the huge amount of tuts websites out there.

quickandeasy said
Well with promo stats like that it’s a shame not to see growing sales.

Selling tutorials must be a tricky business. You’re caught between those who are newbies and don’t want to spend / can’t afford to, and those who’re professionals and don’t need to buy.

Plus the huge amount of tuts websites out there.

I would have agreed, if I hadn’t seen otherwise. If you look at the numbers above, it clearly shows that it did indeed work out at first. The large number of books sold on these topics also show interest, as well as several other website (some for groups, some for individuals) that also sell tutorials that seem to do pretty well with it.

Take a look at this for instance. For my first submitted tutorial (I won’t name or link it, to avoid any trouble in this thread), this is the sales of it’s first 3 months, compared to it’s latest 3 months (not counting this current month):

It’s first 3 months: 57, 32, 24

It’s last 3 months: 25, 17, 12

Let me show you the trend for another tutorial I uploaded in my first month, about 2 weeks after the above one:

It’s first 3 months: 19, 26, 27

It’s last 3 months: 17, 6, 5

Especially the graph from JeffreyWay shows the downward curve quite amazingly. I might add if we go back even further, he has even greater sales (but I wanted them all to be the same timeframe).

If I could hold the average of the first 3 months for all my tutorials, I would have no issue making enough

Very interesting stuff Zeplix! This is kind of shocking to be honest. I did always seem to think tutsplus marketplace had lower sales and it also seemed to get new items the least, once every week or so. I think the main reason for this is like adam said. There is ridiculous competition in the tutorial business and even with the tuts premium itself. Anyways, thanks for this info, really helpful!

Good luck

It’s great to see a well thought out post with some figures rather than just some angry rant. I also like the Tuts+ Marketplace, I think it has a lot of potential.

A problem I see with your figures however is that you are suggesting that your files should maintain sales over time and therefore your sales should only ever increase as you add more files.

How about andrew8088, the current #3 alltime best seller. Now, Andrew started out with 11 files, and added 2 more over the last 14 months, so he actually added almost 20% more content. But how is he doing? (blue indicating sales, 3 indicating content)

Granted, a bit more steady, but still downwards, especially considering he should have gone up 20% in that time, but actually went down a little bit.

It is surely logical that a file’s sales will decrease over time (unless it is an exceptionally good file being updated). The ‘new file’ buzz is gone, it is no longer on the front page and there are just less people that haven’t already bought it.

To me it is no surprise that Jeffrey Way’s sales have gone down if he has only added 3 files in 14 months.

Your graph looks a lot stronger, and if anything there is a general upward trend, but you have added 13 files in the same time period. I think it is unreasonable to expect an increase of 750% percent though.

Just some things to think about.