As well as how much material, you have to wonder how much marketing he puts in to getting the sales.
To be honest, I wouldn't be interested in the median author/designer. They're most likely putting little to no effort in to promoting their work. Discovering the level of interest you need to create to get near the top earners would be interesting.
Orman doesn't have very many themes on the site, but he does do a lot of off-site promotion on his blog (and perhaps elsewhere) and give away a lot of material as part of that. That could be a huge time-cost, but may be well worth it from his point of view given the earnings.
I may not have read it closely enough, but I couldn't work out how much of his earnings came from selling his own themes on the site, and how much came from the affiliate income he earned from selling other people's themes when the entry point to the site has included his affiliate code. That affiliate income could really add up if he's sending plenty of traffic their way.
Is it wrong I am upset that people happily pay for their visual themes (which is materialistic therefore easily justified to them) but never if ever donate to the plugin authors who are typically doing all the heavy lifting?
Go look at the plugin list in your WordPress/bbPress - when was the last time you donated to any of them?
We're charging for IgnitionDeck (http://ignitiondeck.com) and while we're still in pre-release, people seem very eager to support premium efforts. I'm not at all opposed to charging.
The wordpress plugin updating / installation system should offer the ability to donate to said developer, I'm sure many would. As for the plugin list -- zero :)
> Is it wrong I am upset that people happily pay for their visual themes
i disagree. there are so many more people who go with free theme options over paid themes. same for plugins. you can make a lot of money with both if you make something people want to pay for.
Sorry, I got the headline wrong and I've now edited it. I went from the article to read a couple of other pages from the links and picked the wrong figure when I came back to submit.
And he only got $29,140 if he was using ThemeForest exclusively. If he was selling themes elsewhere, he only got to keep $11,750 of that $47,000. ThemeForest takes an enormous cut.
Couple of years ago after seeing his work, I was so impressed I wanted to hire him to help me with a site I was building. He quoted something way out of my ballpark. Now I know why. He's really good.
Couple of years ago the same 'being impressed' stuff happened to me. We were able to afford the rate. Unfortunately, the presented design was a total rip-off of our competitor`s website (which we never mentioned), so we agreed to get half of what was paid back. It was really a shame, since this designer proved to be good with his work.
[+] [-] winestock|14 years ago|reply
The important questions for everyone else are:
How much money does the median author/designer on ThemeForest earn?
How much material does an author/designer need to upload in order to get that median income?
[+] [-] paulsilver|14 years ago|reply
To be honest, I wouldn't be interested in the median author/designer. They're most likely putting little to no effort in to promoting their work. Discovering the level of interest you need to create to get near the top earners would be interesting.
Orman doesn't have very many themes on the site, but he does do a lot of off-site promotion on his blog (and perhaps elsewhere) and give away a lot of material as part of that. That could be a huge time-cost, but may be well worth it from his point of view given the earnings.
I may not have read it closely enough, but I couldn't work out how much of his earnings came from selling his own themes on the site, and how much came from the affiliate income he earned from selling other people's themes when the entry point to the site has included his affiliate code. That affiliate income could really add up if he's sending plenty of traffic their way.
[+] [-] svmegatron|14 years ago|reply
Er, here we go, the answer seems to be "it depends": http://themeforest.net/wiki/selling/getting-paid/payment-rat...
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
Go look at the plugin list in your WordPress/bbPress - when was the last time you donated to any of them?
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinplamondon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhangen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidandgoliath|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodle|14 years ago|reply
i disagree. there are so many more people who go with free theme options over paid themes. same for plugins. you can make a lot of money with both if you make something people want to pay for.
[+] [-] jh3|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_moto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helipad|14 years ago|reply
His blog is ranked very highly (& rightly so), so it's more a of a success for him than ThemeForest I would guess.
[+] [-] bennesvig|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsilver|14 years ago|reply
Thanks for picking that up.
[+] [-] RyanKearney|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinhboy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vizzah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timmaah|14 years ago|reply
You seem to imply there are multiple designers selling more than ~800 items a month. The spotify market is really that large?
[+] [-] noodle|14 years ago|reply