
Top ThemeForest author/designer earned $47,000 in September - paulsilver
http://notes.envato.com/milestones/ormanclark-breaks-monthly-marketplace-sales-record/
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winestock
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?

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svmegatron
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...](http://themeforest.net/wiki/selling/getting-paid/payment-rates/)

~~~
csomar
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.

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ck2
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?

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

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

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blhack
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)

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ovi256
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 ?

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blhack
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.

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helipad
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.

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

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RyanKearney
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.

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kanwisher
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

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RyanKearney
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.

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josefresco
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.

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vinhboy
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.

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vizzah
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.

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

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timmaah
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?

