Top ThemeForest author/designer earned $47,000 in September | Hacker News Reader

Top ThemeForest author/designer earned $47,000 in September

notes.envato.com

58 pointspaulsilver36 comments

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Congratulations to this guy for earning so much.

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?

All good questions! I'd also like to add: what percentage of that $42,000 does he or she get to keep?

Er, here we go, the answer seems to be "it depends": http://themeforest.net/wiki/selling/getting-paid/payment-rat...

It's actually $47K. Here is the math $47K x 0.7 = 32.9K

He is in the markets for less than one year, and has 1000-1999 referrals. As a CodeCanyon member, most signed referrals deposit money. Let's assume the average deposit per user is $30 for Orman. He gets $9 per user.

1999 / 12 = around 150 user per month. 150 * 9 = $1.35k

Not much compared to the actual sales, so most of his sales comes from traffic ThemeForest brings.

The figure quoted is take-home earnings, according to:

http://twitter.com/#!/collis/status/123630165199831040

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.

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.

This question comes up all the time on the Themeforest forums, but I haven't seen a satisfying answer. Most authors seem to think that if you have to do significant outside promotion, it isn't worth giving 30-50% of your sales. At that point, you might have better luck selling direct, like Thesis.

The problem with selling direct is, if people don't like your themes, they'll go searching elsewhere and you get nothing. If you're in a larger site, if they go elsewhere and you've sent them to the site with your affiliate code, you get a chance of a sale after all, even if it is less than you'd make off your own theme.

Whether that's worth the 30% you're giving away, I don't know. I do know it means the designer/author hasn't had to program (or pay to have programmed) any payment gateway, doesn't have to deal with refunds, isn't a higher target for being hacked as they're dealing with e-commerce, etc etc.

Basically, if you have a small number of themes and don't like programming, my gut feeling is you're better off on a large-ish site who is getting traffic independently from your efforts. If you can make a ton of good themes and handle all the programming and marketing, being on your own starts to make more sense.

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?

Time to start charging those plugins :)

Maybe those plugin guys should start charging for their work, so users see their output as having financial value.

Except the FSF and open source movement has trained everyone to expect/demand that all software is free all the time.

Yeah, and the FSF and open source coders are totally okay with this.

Geeks are a strange breed. We'll code our fingers off because it's fun. Seeing somebody use our code (they like me! They really really like me!) is better payment than dollars.

(So long as we're being fed and can keep the internet from getting shut off due to non-payment)

Uhmmm, nope, please do not propagate that attitude. It's demeaning to the rest of us software guys. Some may even say it's because of this we're sometimes patronized and taken advantage of.

Call me shallow but I like some of the nicer things in life. And I want to buy a fast car too. If a hardware engineer can do it, is it wrong for me to want to do it ?

I'll promise not to call you shallow for liking the nicer things in life, if you promise not to hate me for considering "the nicer things in life", seeing people use code that I've written.

This isn't necessarily an open source thing, either. I'm not a part of an OSS projects, but I am part of projects that cost me money, that I see almost no financial return from, and that make me happy simply because people use them.

The people who buy themes are, in my opinion, definitely not the people who will be donating to a plugin. It is unfortunate.

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 :)

This is the problem. WP recommends getting all plugins from the official site to avoid malware and spam filled code, but offers no way for authors to get paid for downloads there.

Yes. It is wrong. If you want to make money on a plugin, sell the plugin. People aren't donating to the Themeforest designers.

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.

> 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.

Orman Clark is PremiumPixels.com, and he gives away free PSD files all the time, so I imagine he's generating most of these sales himself.

His blog is ranked very highly (& rightly so), so it's more a of a success for him than ThemeForest I would guess.

He made $47,000 in September beating the previous record of $42,000.

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.

Sales and lead generation is huge, I buy quite a few themes from ThemeForest, you seriously going to hunt around the net to 100 different sites where each author has 10 themes. Marketing has a cost and keeping an audience is very valuable

I've purchased a few themes as well, however every time I've gone to do it I usually contact the author via email first and offer to buy the theme directly from him for 30-40% off. I save money, they get more money, we all win.

Rather sneaky, that.

Ethically borderline IMHO if you used the marketplace to find the theme first. If you found the author first, and saw they offered themes in a certain market after, it would be more acceptable to contact the author directly. You're essentially cutting out the marketplace from the transaction which damages their business model.

I do like the use of the word "only" to describe a $29k monthly income! ;-)

No, he got $47k, according to Envato. That was how much he made, not how much he sold. Evidently he sold somewhat more.

No. He took home $47,000. This was after the cut.

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.

Thanks for picking that up.

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.

By the way, this is actually less then Shopify theme designers make. http://themes.shopify.com

less in total or less per theme?

What kind of sales numbers does that site pull?

You seem to imply there are multiple designers selling more than ~800 items a month. The spotify market is really that large?

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