My mixture of stock photos, vectors, sound effects and videos worked well on Envato Market since 2011. I was in the top 200 photo contributors (now somewhere around the 300 mark I believe). But then two big changes came along.
- In 2017 they made a huge change and deleted around 80% of their entire stock photo catalogue. This of course meant a lot of contributors with nothing left in their portfolios. Mine shrunk to a little over 350 photos instead of around 5,000. Additionally, they removed size variations and left only one size. This meant those who were used to paying $1 for a tiny web image now were faced with perhaps a $5 fee for the same image. These changes irritated not only contributors, but buyers as well. Many left, and I doubt will ever return.
- Envato Elements. While they promised Elements would not eat into the Market earnings, inevitably it has and they continue to advertise heavily for Elements on the Market itself, further shifting buyers across. Photo sales dropped dramatically.
2019 has seen my earnings on Envato Market drop to around 50% of 2018.
But there's more to the story than just that alarming figure. Envato Elements certainly is growing. In fact, if you combine Elements and Market together, Envato has accounted for one of my highest earning agencies for the last few years.
One of the keys to this is being included in the Envato Elements ‘Contributor Bonus' payments each month. Around September 2019, a change was made so that you will only get this bonus (and a smaller share of it than we used to) if you have a certain number of new assets uploaded in a 3 month period.
This wouldn't be such an issue, except it is getting harder and harder to get new content accepted. If this keeps up, I expect my earnings to drop considerably.