(Locked) New Homepage "New Items" System

As many of you know, our homepage has long been a contentious issue when it comes to authors dominating the new items list. Most recently the issue has come up on GraphicRiver as we’re starting to bring in more and more vectors and at times they’ve taken over the homepage. The community has asked for this issue to be addressed, so as soon as we had some time after PhotoDune, the dev team began doing some research into a fix.

Now at this point, I should mention what I always say about the homepage … it’s way more complicated than you might think This is because there is a lot of caching and a lot of items flowing through and a LOT of traffic. It’s one of those things that sounds easy when you describe a solution, but in practice is hard. So keep that in mind.

How the Homepage Currently Works

We show the most recent 40 items randomly shuffled on the homepage, and refreshed every 15 minutes.

The New Homepage Rotation System

We pick the 40 most recent authors to have an item approved, and their most recent item is shown. And again this would update every 15 minutes.

If you clicked on a category, you’d then see the most recent items of the most recent forty authors for that category – so the same thing, just in a smaller pool.

The new system will be much fairer to authors in terms of exposure between authors, and for buyers will ensure that there is a real variety of stuff on the homepage. We’ll never have to worry about the homepage being flooded again! The drawback of course is that if you release a couple or more items close together, some of them will miss the homepage. That is a necessary consequence however to prevent flooding. We looked into having more than one item on the page from each author, but for a variety of technical reasons, it turns out to be actually a large amount more work, and not necessarily a better overall solution in my opinion.

We should be ready to roll this out next week, so I just wanted to give the community a heads up about the change! Hopefully this will see a lot of happy authors

Footnote: PhotoDune actually only shows 28 items due to the proportions of the thumbnails, so just a note that it’s all going to be the same, but with 28 instead of 40.

Hi Collis,

Great to hear about the updates. An alternative way to enhance an author’s exposure on the homepage, so that it shows more than one recent item, would be to take advantage of the new mouse-over display and include additional thumbnails:

This can help buyers get a better sense of the author’s style, and of course, a quick teaser of their latest items. This way, if an author chooses to upload more than one item at once, his item will still be exposed without flooding someone else’s space. Just a thought, good luck.

Dzinc said
Hi Collis,

Great to hear about the updates. An alternative way to enhance an author’s exposure on the homepage, so that it shows more than one recent item, would be to take advantage of the new mouse-over display and include additional thumbnails:

This can help buyers get a better sense of the author’s style, and of course, a quick teaser of their latest items. This way, if an author chooses to upload more than one item at once, his item will still be exposed without flooding someone else’s space. Just a thought, good luck.

Neat idea Dzinc! I suspect that will have some load time costs, so will check with the devs. Our homepage has a lot of sacrifices to make sure the load time and performance are in check as it then affects the rest of the marketplaces’ performance. Same with the item pages and search pages, that trio are the biggest pages for performance monitoring – something which we do a TON of work on!