Thanks everyone for your feedback!
As I said in the other threads, I decided to move all this in one thread, as the team has been reading these and it’s becoming a bit difficult to keep track.
I’ll add a few important points below, and then I invite you to post any questions or comments below…
1) No downturn in purchases at all… in fact, a record month! The first and most important point – there has been no drop in deposits or sales since licences were clarified and introduced. In fact FlashDen earnings went up by a very small amount, and each of the other marketplaces had big record months. The marketplaces are growing really well – a phenomenal result in this economic climate.
2) Less than 10 buyers have actually complained to us, out of many thousands per week. I spoke to the support manager this morning to ask how many actual complaints we’re getting from buyers about the new licence structure. His answer was… one complaint.
Around 20 requests for clarification, and only ONE complaint.
To give you an idea, we get multiple complaints weekly from people who haven’t even joined yet complaining that that they need to deposit set amounts of cash (something we’ll be fixing soon – see below). People are usually extremely vocal when they’re not happy about something – and we’ve gotten only one complaint from a buyer about the licences.
So I went through all these threads to count the number of actual buyers who have complained about this licencing structure and I found five. Assuming I missed a few, I can tell you that less than 10 buyers have complained to us about these licences via support or the forums. We have many thousands of buyers making deposits every week, and again our numbers indicate that the rest of them are happily buying away under this new licence clarification.
So add together the fact that we’ve had a record month AND only six complaints that I can find, and you can see why we’re feeling confident that everything is in fact working as it should be. Add that to the fact that support have gotten at least a dozen emails from buyers this week asking how they can upgrade a file they’ve already purchased to a new licence, and I hope you can come closer to understanding why we feel this really is the right move for Envato.
Having said all that, I sincerely apologize to those authors who have concerns or objections to our licence. While our single use licence was always in play, we readily acknowledge that in the past it was not as clear as it should have been and for that we really do apologize.
While I do hope you continue to buy from us, we always encourage authors and buyers to make the best choice for them. All I can say is that our files continue to be, in my opinion, the best on the web. If you are interested in protecting yourself and your clients for an extremely reasonably price, we are the safest option to ensure you are protecting copyright. But if you feel you can get a better deal elsewhere, whether you’re a buyer or author, as always we encourage you absolutely to do so. We’ll then set about winning you back with a couple of new buyer features we have coming up. 
3) Licences protect authors and their work. We get hundreds of support tickets from authors every month that their file is not being used in the right way by purchasers, so we know that many authors take licencing very seriously indeed. Without a single use licence, someone could buy your file for $5, then use it countless times or use it in an app that is sold to countless people for massive profit. Someone could literally make thousands and thousands of dollars from the use of your file, and there’s nothing me, you, or anyone else could do about it. There need to be rules in place to ensure that authors are not taken advantage of. We value our authors work and feel it should be paid for when it’s used, and make no apologies about that. The vast majority of buyers will understand that, because they’re creatives too.
4) We’re listening. One of the reasons I consolidated previous threads is because most of the team has been reading these threads and were finding it more difficult to keep up. I promise you that we always watch what’s happening on the sites, and ensure every action we take is well considered and strategized. I promise that we won’t let licences negatively affect our authoring community in the long term. It’s just not in our best interests, and it’s our jobs to make sure everyone makes money, that their work is protected, and that we run sites that people love to be a part of.
5) New features coming up. So as I said above, we get a fair few complaints from buyers that they have to deposit set amounts of funds. That’s completely understandable – who wants to deposit money they might not even use? While we feel you will always be able to find awesome files on one of our sites to spend your remaining balance, we also want to ensure those buyers who only want to buy one file have a quick and easy way to do so. We’re working on this now, and it’s just one of many steps we’re taking to make the sites much more buyer friendly. And more buyer friendly equals more sales.
So I hope that clarifies everything even more. Please give us any feedback or thoughts below!!
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