Has the Tuts+ Marketplace been Forgotten?

Also another logical and somewhat plausible reasoning behind this drop in sales might be the fact that a tutorial you buy once… if it’s a good tutorial, you don’t buy the second one, as you are desperate to learn on your own, after seeing how easy it is (as in you start not wanting to spend on a second one, even if it would make your life easier, because the first purchase seemed too basic).

If the tut is bad… well, then you don’t buy a second anyway… and in general, don’t want to call buyers cheap, but people tend to get burnt once (not even necessarily by poor quality, but rather by their too high expectancy level), they usually get burnt with a small sum, as small as can be, probably a 3-7 $ file… I can guarantee their next possible purchase only occurs months later after realizing that the said tutorial wasn’t all that bad.

Also, there’s a third possible factor that contributes to this drop : given the accessible price of the tuts, you can have quite a few one-time buyers, that just want to try it out… maybe it’s even their first ever electronic payment for something non-physical… and they just decide 7$ is enough to risk, and maybe don’t feel comfortable after reading / learning from it, and drop to the first factor.

Hence my friend, tutorials, as quickandeasy said… I just got a bit more in-depth on the reasoning for that statement, beyond the obvious PRO vs n00b vs cheapskate

Not sure if I can say anything that hasn’t been said, but I agree. I’ve been wanting to create a few new items for a while, but I haven’t just because I’m not sure it’s worth my time. It seems that Envato is focusing more on the new Tuts+ Premium right now. (I’m not complaining about this, just pointing it out; I’m actually creating content for them there.)

andrew8088 said
Not sure if I can say anything that hasn’t been said, but I agree. I’ve been wanting to create a few new items for a while, but I haven’t just because I’m not sure it’s worth my time. It seems that Envato is focusing more on the new Tuts+ Premium right now. (I’m not complaining about this, just pointing it out; I’m actually creating content for them there.)

Reading this, I was thinking that Tuts+ Premium would be the answer. There have been times when I’ve looked at the marketplace, worked out four or five items I’d like to purchase, but then thought that I may as well sign up to the premium site for less money and more of a choice.

The theory of old items is a good one, if only it wasn’t false. To illustrate, I have some more curves, focusing on Jef’, since he’s the oldest one there. They will need some explaining:

The first one shows sales (left bar), items (right bar), average sales (vertical bars), and drops (big middle bars), as well as periods of not updating with new items (colored periods). The first you can see is the massive drop over time of course. But second, do notice that there are several periods of adding no new items, or only adding very few new items, which didn’t do anything horrible to his overall sales. In fact, we can see that there is a period where he is adding more new items, and overall sales are falling, and there are earlier periods where he ads no new items, and sales are still great.

We also see when the drops occurred. Or rather, it happened at one big point over a few months, and then it stabilized for him over the last couple of months (with still dropping, but at a slower rate). My theory is that it is during this time Envato has simply delegated less and less resources to promotion of the marketplace.

Now the second image:

This one is just to hammer in the point, that while no new updates would probably hurt in the very long run, in the timespan we’re looking at, they don’t affect anything all that much. The first 6 months show a half-year span where Jef’ added a total of 2 new files. The last one shows 6 months where he added no new files. As you can see, the fact that he added very few new files before didn’t really change anything, or bring his sales down to their current level.

This is in relation to when I posted statistics on my own files, and people said that it was natural that the sales would drop. I think this is mixing it up with how the other, especially GraphicRiver, marketplaces work for some people.

Anyway, I merely wanted to point out with this, that old files don’t stop selling at a super-fast rate as some people assume, but rather (should have) a long “lifetime”. Rather it’s clear that overall sales have been dropping for everyone.

Your images aren’t showing up on that last post.

I can’t answer for the Tuts+ marketplace, but I have an item on Code Canyon that was placed on there in March 2011, it did slowly decline in sales, but then started to pick up again February 2012. Strangely, when I added a new item in March 2012, a WordPress version of the original file, the sales of this original file picked up even more and, overall, I’ve sold more of them in the past 3 months than I did in almost a year.

The thing to keep in mind is that sales shouldn’t drop off as sharply as they get older, as there are so many new members joining Envato now, and to them all the items are new.

darnit, logged in with a referral account, gimme a sec ._.’

There we go!

contrastblack said
Also another logical and somewhat plausible reasoning behind this drop in sales might be the fact that a tutorial you buy once… if it’s a good tutorial, you don’t buy the second one, as you are desperate to learn on your own, after seeing how easy it is (as in you start not wanting to spend on a second one, even if it would make your life easier, because the first purchase seemed too basic).

In my experience, the exact opposite happens. I used to (when I had more general sales per tutorial about 6 months ago) quite often sell more than 1 tutorial per buyer. It’s quite easy to spot, when within 5 minutes you suddenly sell 2 or 3 tutorials closely related to each other. I also know from comments on my tutorials that a lot of my buyers, at least used to be, are return-customers, so I’m afraid I can’t agree with your assessment there.

andrew8088 said
Not sure if I can say anything that hasn’t been said, but I agree. I’ve been wanting to create a few new items for a while, but I haven’t just because I’m not sure it’s worth my time. It seems that Envato is focusing more on the new Tuts+ Premium right now. (I’m not complaining about this, just pointing it out; I’m actually creating content for them there.)

I’ve actually been in talks with Tuts+ Premium too, though nothing concrete at the moment. If Envato wishes to stop marketing the Tuts+ Marketplace, and focus on their own tutorial sites, that’s their decision, and fair enough, but I’d like to know about it, so I don’t waste time creating content for a dying marketplace.

Moonworks said
Your images aren’t showing up on that last post.

I can’t answer for the Tuts+ marketplace, but I have an item on Code Canyon that was placed on there in March 2011, it did slowly decline in sales, but then started to pick up again February 2012. Strangely, when I added a new item in March 2012, a WordPress version of the original file, the sales of this original file picked up even more and, overall, I’ve sold more of them in the past 3 months than I did in almost a year.

The thing to keep in mind is that sales shouldn’t drop off as sharply as they get older, as there are so many new members joining Envato now, and to them all the items are new.

My server decided to go haywire in the middle of it all, the images should be there now And yes, that’s what I’d agree on, sales shouldn’t drop as rapidly as they have, especially not across the entire marketplace.

Keep in mind the very first graph I showed on the first page: those were the top selling FILES on Tuts+, so that’s even taking into account new files added, even from completely new authors, and that graph too showed a strong decline in sales over the last couple of months (since that was a weekly graph, I believe I only did it for 12 weeks).

So it’s clear that about a year’ish ago, sales were totally sustainable with the amount of new buyers, but that has changed.

Now I’m not trying to give Envato a super hard time here, I’d just like to know what’s going on. I’d like to know if this is something I should continue to spend serious time on, or if I should just throw in the hat and move on to another marketplace like VideoHive or GraphicRiver instead. I’d just like an update is all.

That’s better, I can see what you mean now.

I would be interested in knowing how things stand too, as we are just starting to make some video tuts, and need to know whether we should concentrate on Envato or look elsewhere. Envato would be good, but we need to know that they are taking the marketplace as seriously as, for example, CC or TF.

Moonworks said
That’s better, I can see what you mean now. I would be interested in knowing how things stand too, as we are just starting to make some video tuts, and need to know whether we should concentrate on Envato or look elsewhere. Envato would be good, but we need to know that they are taking the marketplace as seriously as, for example, CC or TF.

EXACTLY what I mean. I would really prefer to stay on Envato, I’ve had a great relationship with the staff and company here, I have items on other marketplaces, and overall I really like it here. But if you’ll excuse a little over-exaggeration: You don’t stay on a sinking ship, just because it’s a really pretty ship.

I do feel a strong connection to Envato, and especially Tuts+ Marketplace as it’s the marketplace that started this entire thing for me, and opened up my mind to completely new possibilities, but if I’ll never make more than I do now, no matter how many more tutorials I put up (unless I market the living crapper out of them myself), it’s just not something viable in the long run.

But most importantly, I’d just like to hear from Envato, get their input on it, hear what they have to say, good or bad.

In my opinion, it’s going to be hard to sell tutorials since there are so many free ones floating around.