Are WordPress theme designers balling outta control?

avatar33 said:
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
Click to expand...

Files submission process to Envato "human" reviewers is a pain in the ass.
Rejection rate is extremely high even for expert developers. They check every single file (code and graphics) and one single element that doesn't fit with their quality rules makes delete submission.
It took 2 years for me to get "Envato Elite" level (70% in my pockets) but i remember times when 8/10 submissions were rejected, very depressing.
The competition there is crazy, not quantity competition but quality competition, I mean that there are very very talented designers selling on that market place.
 


The abundance of content management systems has created a huge market for themes. Wordpress just happens to be the best known CMS so most people quickly jump into creating and selling themes for it. However, smaller niche CMS themes do very well.

There is a sizable market for Joomla themes, OpenCart themes, Tumble themes, Blogger themes, Moodle themes, and many more content management system themes.

The great thing about selling themes is that your customer will purchase multiple themes before being happy with just one. Many people buy a theme and throw it aside the second another theme catches their eye.
 
I launched a marketplace for music recently based off the themeforest/audiojungle layout from some devers I'm quite happy with it (you can see mine here). You can grab any of the themeforest marketplaces from these guys if you want to launch one but I agree you're better off selling through TF for their traffic.
 
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