(Locked) My sales are down and I figured out why

I have a file that has consistently brought in money every single day. It’s been on the popular page for 9 months or so and showed very little sign of slowing down. And then the second week of March hit and sales tanked. I mean tanked. I went from 10-15 sales a week to like 2-3.

I couldn’t figure out what happened, but then I searched around and found the file being pirated (the file was posted to the pirate sites on March 8TH).

I’ve contacted the sites that I found the file on, but the thing that makes me the maddest, and the saddest is that it’s the source code of the file that’s been shared. Meaning this isn’t the preview file been decompiled this is the source that you download when you buy the file.

I blame it on the last bundle.

Maybe ENVATO needs to come up with a way to uniquely identify files that have been pirated so we can trace the SOBs that decided to share our files.

I bet in the 2 weeks I’ve lost a minmum of $200 in revenue thanks to the file sharing.

I know others have had their files pirated before, but I never thought they’d loose sales like this.

Frustrating.

Joost said
I fully agree with you, though! Anyone have a better idea of an implementation?

... where are the Envato developers ?!

What this people don’t understand is that they harm themeselves also. They earn money anyway buy customizing and resel the file but this practice might result an author wont make enough money and the author quits uploading files, if mnany authors would do this even this people who download files wont be able to find what they need in the future (causing them to lose money also). It’s about common sense, envato can’t do anything.

jayc

Now imagine big game developers seing their games in every illegal download site that exists. Have to deal with it unfortunately. AD offers excellent files to such low prices that piracy turns ridiculous, giving 40$ for a complete website is pretty much nothing and still we authors must be put into this.

It’s nothing Envato can solve easily. And the solution is to keep tracking these links and shut them down as they come :/

Sorry guys but, if you search your files at the day they approved on AD you will see all of them on pirate websites. Ofcourse preview files. Source files gets in their hand after a few days. I was fighting with them and getting them deleted but it doesnt work cause they just reupload like “filename2” or “filename3” and there is no stop of that

I don’t think sales are dropping cause of it. But something is obvious Sales Are Dropping

VisualWorks said
It’s nothing Envato can solve easily.

I disagree .

First I think it should be a mandatory that each preview will show a little watermark maybe on the left side and we will add this to our app` (unless you have extra configuration like bit 101 atc) it’s not much but that will force them to decompiled it in the fla and try to remove the watermark and if the swf is well encrypt that will complicate things for them/on the level of impossible and it will kill once and for all those rip out there.

More from our side part instead of using external Xml on the preview set it via your class little tricky but not that hard to do if your sells are imported to you.

Final for marcfolio content the host server not the website since they share those links, work for me a few times less than 12 hours it was gone .

Also if a file is up there after 24 hours from the AD submission that’s really F*- up i must say.

I think it’s time somebody should talk/do something about out it instead closing this post and tell us contact support

marcfolio said
I bet in the 2 weeks I’ve lost a minmum of $200 in revenue thanks to the file sharing.

I used to think like that when I was new here and later realized few things and then didn’t cared much. I guess those who doesn’t interested in getting a license are not potential buyers. Also most of the freely downloaded files will just fill the hard-disks rather than becoming internet pages / components. From that point of view, putting much efforts to prevent sharing is not a worthy investment of resource / man hours. Each file has its own lifetime and it is so unpredictable the exact reason why a file / files not selling like before.

I don’t mean we should stop thinking about preventive efforts but point the fact that making new files on right time is the key for reasonably continuous sales.

Looks like the number of lockable threads are growing these days!

Totally agree with you VF..

AD has (at least used to had) its own wide (now its “small”) customers. Those who cares for license and pay for what they want instead of piracy.

But about making your preview more secure, after my first template drop on pirate sites, I’ve made a security system with a logo on my second file. So a pirate (who is not good at AS3 coding) can not copy the preview. If any case the user try to remove, alpha 0, visible false, or put any layer on it to hide it, template locks itself. You can decompile my preview to see it for yourself. It’s not the biggest change but its something I think

Why did you open this thread?

We know our files are pirated.

The files were always pirated, so your sales are not down because your file is pirated now.

I suggest Envato start giving some serious warnings to those opening these kind of threads, at least until we get private authors forum.