Revising 'Top Authors' Metrics for Fairness

Disclosure

The ‘Top Authors’ metric is biased toward sales volume over sales value, which suits many authors but also hinders others. I’m not suggesting a reversal. I would like to see both metrics available as a fairer way of demonstrating which authors are contributing to Envato’s success.

The Math

Counter Example

When the $100 author makes one more sale (500 total) his ‘Top Author’ status judgement is against ‘gold paw’ authors, and the current leader has ~4600 items sold. The high price of his items means he can never realistically make the ‘Top Author’ list anywhere from orange to green paw.

Caveat: You sell over 16,000 items putting your earnings at $1.6 million. Then you’re considered the ‘Top Author’ and only then.

Car Dealership Comparison

Imagine being the Ferrari salesman. Even if you had an outstanding month and sold 11 Ferraris the boss still snubs you.

Attn: Naysayers

The current sorting is rather odd anyway. Paws are given by dollars earned not items sold, but the top authors are sorted by items sold not dollars earned. Logically shouldn’t it have been reversed all along?

Aside

Conclusion

I would also love to be able to filter for top authors in a certain category.

I would also love to be able to filter for top authors in a certain category.

good idea

Definitely a great idea! Devs should look into it asap!

It’s a nice idea, but honestly I wouldn’t consider this a priority. If I wrote out the top 10 things I’d would like to see changed or updated on the marketplaces, this would not make the list.

I would prefer the developers work on things like improved search, home page layouts, item categorization, author collaboration, item cross referencing, API updates, etc…

I’m not sure it would even make my top 20 list. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea, just low priority in my view.

Edit: Item discussion areas having forum capabilities or searching might be #1 on my list.

Edit: Item discussion areas having forum capabilities or searching might be #1 on my list.

+13465894, Collis said they’re working on a solution but it’s going to be awhile

I’d like another filtering option called ‘Sort By’ with the options ‘Earnings’ and ‘Items Sold’.

Also, I want to suggest something too.

Envato, please read it -

There are a lot of features that people want to be changed/fixed/implemented on the marketplaces. But our suggestions are in different topics, so it’s hard to see the whole picture.

Can you make something like this Feature suggest list?

This is a great tool for all of us (and for developers too!) which let us to see the whole picture. People can rate each suggestion, so you’ll see some kind of priority too.

It’s very easy to implement this list into your Notes blog for example.

Thanks for the comments guys. I’ll suggest filtering the ‘Popular Files’ list by category too. While similar to sorting a marketplace category by sales, this would tell which files are selling well in a specific category recently.

@ Parallelus – That’s a fair assessment. I wouldn’t call it my #1 priority either, but it’s something I think about when browsing around. It’s also much simpler to implement than something like forums for item discussions. Bringing it up is the only way to get it into the roadmap.