Premium theme designers are people that need to pay their bills. A majority of them never intended to make a huge profit from them, either. In most cases, they are not trying to sell you a product just to make a quick buck. Countless hours have been put into each theme, in tweaking, redesigning, and promoting it. The most recognized designers today made some careful decisions as to how they wanted to go about designing themes and distributing them (on a premium level), so that they could come out on top. Today, the market for premium themes is becoming less and less recognized for the unique themes that it once boasted.
This post was not created to address a problem that I am having, per se, but a problem that is growing and needs to be addressed by the theme designers as soon as possible. Recent traffic statistics for May, shown below, from ten sites indicate up to an 8.6% decline in total visitors, with many still growing by 200% or more. Some factors in the slight decline in several sites may be due to the economy in certain parts of the world or simply a drop in purchases during May. Across the board, many theme sites did see strong growth rather than the decline in more recent months. In a comparison, the free site (justintadlock.com), a free designer, declined in ‘people counts’ by 12.1%. Statistics like these show that there is still a market for premium themes. However, it may not be for much longer if trends continue.
From the screenshot below, an “aggregation” blog is distributing themes that normally sell for $55+. There are eight particular themes being redistributed, free of change, on this site in mention. What this shows is that people would rather commit a crime, stealing some else’s work, also breaking the license on nearly all of the themes, rather than may a meager $30-$100 for a theme that would take any “non” designer more than eight hours to complete, making the purchase more than worth it.
What theme designers need to begin doing is issuing unique license keys with each theme that is sold, so that they can track who is purchasing and using each theme. This may be a time consuming and possibly frustrating process, but it will need to be done within the next couple months. In the case of Brian Gardner, his Revolution Theme Series drives more than 258,000 visits to the site each month. Without this exposure, and if more people are presented access to the free downloads, through social media sites, these designers will end their pursuits of creating great themes, and we’ll be back to a point two years ago when all free themes looked alike with limited features. When the drive (profit/income) leaves, these designers will stop designing free themes altogether, too.
If you are designer, you can help curb this problem by using some form of tracking, so the theme does not work for users who download or redistribute the theme illegally. If you are a blogger, you can stand up for the designers who set the bar higher with both free and premium themes by reporting, either to the file sharing sites or their web hosting companies, that they are pirating digital content.
On the other hand, if you view the theme market as “evil” for trying to rip people off for themes that are just as good as free high quality themes, and think that these illegal re-distributors are good, think about your mindset after finding your work being stolen that normally helps pay for your needs.
Even more staggering is the number of searches (19/229) that people have used since our re(launch) to find a download link for the premium themes.
