Are WordPress theme designers balling outta control?

avatar33

avatar33

e-Hustler
Dec 5, 2009
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Calgary, AB
So I usually buy my themes from ThemeForest, which I find awesome for its large selection and quality themes. It was never really a problem for me to shell out $30-$50 for quality theme since I believe the designer should be rewarded for their good work.

Today though, I've been looking at the amount of downloads (sales) each theme has, and thought to myself: Why the fuck am I NOT in this business?

elegant - files | ThemeForest

Most themes have over 1,000 sales, with many of them having more than 10,000 muthafuckin sales! I just bought one that has 7,841 sales (the top one in the above link) at $35 each, that's $274,435 right in the theme designer's bank account. How much do you think this theme costs to develop? $5,000 AT MOST? Do you see the mothafuckin profit here? Madness.

Oh... and I'm only counting people like me buying the regular license at $35... god knows how many people are buying the extended license at $1,750

MY MIND = BLOWN
 


http://www.veniceracket.com/images/mind-blown.gif
avatar33 said:
MY MIND = BLOWN
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mind-blown.gif


No way they keep all that, ThemeForest definitely gets their cut. Plus a lot of those themes have ongoing support and updates. But are some of them balling? Surely.
 
OK Let's go crazy and say ThemeForest takes 50% share, which I highly doubt. That's still 274,000 / 2 = $137,000 in sales for the theme I just bought. Again, do you really think it cost them more than $5,000 to develop that theme?

EDIT: ok I just saw the link above my post... they take 50%-70% depending on profits made from theme... but STILL. There's some huge numbers flying in this marketplace.
 
avatar33 said:
OK Let's go crazy and say ThemeForest takes 50% share, which I highly doubt. That's still 274,000 / 2 = $137,000 in sales for the theme I just bought. Again, do you really think it cost them more than $5,000 to develop that theme?
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Well, it actually tiers upwards. So if your making 274,000 in sales you actually get charged the highest tier bracket which is 70%. Which leaves you with $82,200, it's still a nice chunk of change but there is going to be homeruns in any industry.
 
Actually I think it's the other way round, more sales = higher cut.

I was literally looking at these sites the other day, and I thought that there would be hundreds of files that have 0 sales (sort of balancing out the big players), but I checked and there are only 4 files with no sales, and they begin to mount up pretty quick from there.

All Categories | ThemeForest

There's definitely money to be made.
 
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The other crazy thing is that once you've launched a "homerun theme", you can simply re-adapt it and create dozens of new themes using the same "engine" and same overall look & feel... by just changing the text, colors, images, move around boxes and BOOM, you got a new theme in minutes that is probably gonna rack in over $50k again...
 
tencentpiece said:
Well, it actually tiers upwards. So if your making 274,000 in sales you actually get charged the highest tier bracket which is 70%. Which leaves you with $82,200, it's still a nice chunk of change but there is going to be homeruns in any industry.
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You got it all wrong...
New authors begin at the 50% level and as sales volume adds up, so does the commission percentage. That means the more you sell, the more you earn!
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This dude's their top earner: OrmanClark's Portfolio | ThemeForest - taking a record of $47,000 in sales in 1 month recently - Orman Clark breaks all time Theme Forest monthly sales record and expands team | WPCandy.

But you've got to take into account the massive amount of time and effort involved. You can't just pay to get it dev'd and let it go. You have to keep it updated with the latest versions of Wordpress, add in new features to keep sales coming, respond to support queries every day, etc etc.

That's not to say you can't make decent money from doing it though. It's just a lot more ongoing than getting say an ebook written and pushing it constantly.
 
Yeah some of them make stupid money but Themeforest takes 40%+ last I checked. Still they can make a lot if they sell well.
 
You have to understand that without providing the marketplace alot of these guys wouldn't make shit with their themes. Same as any other large market place. If you don't like it compete with it.
 
Why don't we group together and make a marketplace. We can use affiliates to do the marketing which will lower our overhead. For example:

40% to designer
30% to themeforest knock-off
30% to affiliates


Thoughts?
 
Yep I'm down... I've wanted to get in the WordPress game for a long time. This CMS is seriously becoming huge and I don't see any sign of it slowing down in the future. I own a bunch of tech-related sites that are just sitting there doing nothing, I could thrown in some link juice.

We should set up a skype meet up or something with a few interested people.
 
Pb.com said:
Why don't we group together and make a marketplace. We can use affiliates to do the marketing which will lower our overhead. For example:

40% to designer
30% to themeforest knock-off
30% to affiliates


Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Perhaps you are not good at math but you're already charging more than themeforest.
 
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They only pay 30% of the first purchase or deposit to the affiliate. Generally people are going to be coming back for more especially if they deposit.

They pay the designer 50%-70% if they sell their themes exclusively on ThemeForest. 33% if they sell the same themes that are on ThemeForest elsewhere.

So, you could offer a higher base payout to designers, but you would have to have a user base to work off otherwise they are not going to sell to you and lose exclusivity with ThemeForest and get lower payouts.

I'd be interested in talking with people about this. Skype me.
 
Lets set up a private skype meeting. Send me an invite: jkthedesigner

I think we could rape the game.
 
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