It’s the end of the year, and we’re taking a look back at some of the most exciting moments for Envato in 2016: More than a million items sold. 3,000 Tuts+ tutorials translated. 1 million items sold. 16 meetups around the world.
We’re proud of the creative ecosystem of sites and services that make up Envato, and we’re looking forward to see what 2017 brings. Here’s our recap of some of the most memorable milestones from the past 12 months!
Our goal is to enable our community to earn a living doing what they love. We measure our success by the success of the community, and in 2016 are pleased to have reached almost half a billion dollars in lifetime community earnings. Our sellers regularly update us on what they’re doing with their earnings, ranging from supporting their families, travelling, or just enjoying the independence of being their own boss!
Co-founders Collis and Cyan Ta’eed are passionate about diversity in the workplace, the tech community and society in general. At Envato we’ve tried hard to make our workplace a diverse and inclusive place, and we’ve made more progress towards this – we even hired a Diversity and Inclusiveness Specialist. We were proud to accept the Coolest Company for Diversity award from JobAdvisor this year, and look forward to making more progress in this area in 2017.
Some other things we’re proud of this year are being acknowledged in the top three Tech Pioneers 50 for AU/NZ, we won the Australian Exporter of the Year Award and made the top 20 Best Places to Work in the country. We released our diversity figures for this year, which is something we’ve been doing since 2014.
Ten years ago, Envato launched our very first marketplace. We’ve grown a lot since then! Here’s a timeline of what we’ve been up to. We celebrated with special offers on Envato Elements, Envato Studio and Envato Tuts+, had an Author Fee Free day, a community t-shirt design competition and even did a Facebook Live Envato HQ Tour.
The Envato community are incredibly welcoming and supportive of one another, and a number motivated members have run meetups around the world – a total of 16 in 2016!
These were hosted across Europe, USA, Melbourne, Asia and more. They provided a place for our creative community to get together to share experiences and help solve any common issues that may arise.
We also held an Envato staff meetup in Denver, with 35 team members joining over four days in August. People from all over the business, including reviewer, help, community, quality and growth, were present – many meeting other team members in-person for the first time.
This year we launched the Envato Famous Five, a weekly series uncovering Envato items used by famous brands, celebrities, in films and TV shows. Over the last twelve months we’ve seen items used by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Kanye West and by brands like Uber, Nike and more. It is great to share the high calibre projects our community are involved in creating!
Envato co-founder Cyan Ta’eed has been on a mission to inspire women into the tech industry, and leadership more generally. Since winning Telstra Victorian Business Woman of the Year Award in 2015, she has taken on a multitude of public speaking roles at corporate events, festivals and education institutions. Cyan has recently spoken at the Committee for Economic Development Australia on the future of work, at the Australian Institute of Company Directors on attracting, maintaining and measuring talent and featured on Sky News discussing diversity in technology.
This year Cyan won the Victorian Woman in International Business Award and was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence, the overall winner in the Business Enterprise category. Cyan has been a speaker for several topics, including innovation, technology, the future of work, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, women in tech, and leadership.
In September, we launched the Envato Blog (our design team wrote about the design process for launching this publication). It’s a space for us to write about, curate, and highlight the things that we’re interested in at Envato – everything from creative inspiration, design trends, and interviews with people we admire. And we’re on Medium, too!
Image: watercolor map
A few stats about our marketplace and community growth this year:
- In 2016, more than a million items were sold
- 2 million customers purchased an item from Envato in the last year
- Almost 8 million licenses sold by designers & creators from 170 countries
- At peak times, we sell about an item per second
- 1 in every 1000 people in the world is an Envato community member
At Envato, we have a top tier of creators called elite authors, who have earned over $75,000 in sales on the Envato marketplaces. The number of people joining the Elite ranks continues to steadily grow, with these top sellers providing inspiration to the rest of the community. This year alone over 300 new authors have reached Elite status, and we have 19 new Power Elites exceeding $1 million in earnings.
In total we currently have 1,500 Elite Authors from 101 different countries around the world, and 77 Power Elite Authors who’ve each made over $1 million in sales.
In August, we launched Envato Elements, a subscription service for designers and marketers with a need for frequent, top quality assets. Items in Elements – from graphics and fonts to web templates – are created by a global community of handpicked, independent designers. It’s the first unlimited download subscription in the design space and has pioneered the ‘subscriber share’ method of payment for contributors. New items are being added weekly, and we’re really excited to be able to provide contributors with a new, fair way of being paid for their assets.
We first announced our expansion to the U.S. late last year, and in 2016 proudly opened our first Envato USA Inc. office in San Francisco! With the U.S. being a key market for our business, it made sense to have a presence in the States, and luckily we had Envato co-founder Vahid Ta’eed on the ground to get things running smoothly.
In July of this year, GraphicRiver designer SevenStyles passed a significant milestone, becoming our first Australian designer to earn over a million dollars. Our community team sat down with him for an in-depth interview discussing how he went broke, nearly went blind and came out on top as GraphicRiver’s highest earner.
We also learned that one of our AudioJungle music-makers is a Grammy award winner! This year AudioJungle introduced a new PRO (Performance Rights Organization) policy that saw a whole slew of authors reveal their true identities in order to claim royalties when their work is broadcast or featured in films. The unmasking of one in particular, Studio Monkey, caught our attention, as they were revealed to be a Latin Grammy award winner.
Over the past two and a half years Envato Tuts+ have been working towards getting as many tutorials as possible translated into as many languages as they can. In 2016, they hit a massive milestone; over 3,000 tutorials translated! These translations spanned 42 different languages, and were made possible by the work of 664 multilingual community members.
This year saw Envato Studio rise to new heights, with our global community of freelancers completing creative jobs all over the world. Customers came from 116 different countries, and we paid out earnings to service providers from 80 countries across 6 continents. Service provider earnings has now reached well over $5 million since Studio was launched. One of these service providers completed over 1,000 jobs this year alone!
The Envato Studio site also got a makeover, with updated service pages and a shiny new homepage.
We’re lucky to be headquartered in what’s frequently called ‘the world’s most liveable city,’ Melbourne, Australia. This year, nearly a dozen Envato community members and creators made the trip to visit us in the office. Our general manager, Adrian Fittolani (center, all photos) snapped selfies with almost all of them.
*Estimated number. Possibly less. Possibly many more.
2016 was a year of product development for Envato, with the team working on new sites to help more people join our community.
Envato Sites is a new website builder, currently in public beta. Specialising in single-page websites, it offers a quick, simple experience that doesn’t skimp on quality. Envato Sites was created for those who need a website but don’t want to spend time fiddling around with code, with a number of ready-made templates to choose from. We have a few other new products & services in the works for 2017 – stay tuned!
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