Field notes · August 2026 · nine marketplaces
We wanted to know what digital files people actually pay for, so we stopped reading roundups and opened every product page ourselves. Here is what the numbers said — including the eleven things we believed at the start and had to throw away.
This is the part most write-ups skip, and it is the reason ours changed our mind.
Marketplaces expose different things. Some print a real unit count. Some only show ratings. If you mix those two you will confidently rank a shelf that does not exist. So every figure below carries a grade:
A the platform prints the actual unit count — Gumroad
sales_count where exposed, DLsite dl_count, Envato "N Sales".
B ratings × a measured multiplier. Useful for sizing, never for ranking.
C raw review count. Not comparable across platforms.
Buyers on one platform rate 12× more often than on another — before any difference in demand exists.
Envato's rate measured 0.71% (Clean PowerPoint: 20 ratings against 2,819 true sales). Gumroad's paid median measured 8.61%. Etsy's is unmeasured. Every "X is dead, look at the review counts" conclusion we had written was comparing a C against a B. We deleted them.
Grade A only — every row is a unit count the platform itself printed, not an estimate.
| Product | Format | Units | Price | Gross |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avada (WordPress theme) | PHP/JS zip | 1,068,400 | $69 | |
| Videolancer Transitions | .aep | 41,500 | $59 | ≈ $2.4M |
| Kisaki ASMR (single SKU) | binaural WAV | 38,020 | $7.90 | ≈ $300k |
| Realistic Embroidery action | .atn | 20,112 | $12 | |
| Ultimate Realism brush pack | .brushset | 18,667 | $29 | ≈ $541k |
| Massive X deck | .pptx | 18,661 | $15 | ≈ $280k |
| Blender Secrets | PDF + EPUB | 13,395 | $52 | $696,540 |
| Clean PowerPoint (501 slides) | .pptx | 2,819 | $143 | ≈ $403,000 |
Look at the last two .pptx rows. Same file format, same mechanism, same
"overtype the placeholders" workflow. One sells at $15. One sells at $143 — 9.5× — and has
moved 2,819 copies.
Nothing in the artifact justifies the multiple. The slide count and the price tag do it alone. The $143 listing carries twenty ratings, which on Envato's 0.71% rate is exactly what 2,819 sales looks like — but it also means almost nobody has tried standing there.
The crowd anchored on $15 and stayed. The shelf above it is thin, and it costs one listing to find out.
The best-selling page we found has no copy on it at all. BLVCK PARIS Johns: $5, a 1.46 MB payload, 3,703 verified-purchaser ratings — and the product description field is completely empty. No feature list, no bullets, nothing. It outsold almost every carefully written page in this survey. Its sibling listing, whose description is 100% install instructions, has 1,874.
More items now reads as filler. Gal Shir sells 8 texture brushes at $18 → 651 ratings. Beside it, a 2,000-brush megapack at $15 → 348. Two hundred and fifty times fewer items, a higher price, roughly twice the units. The same seller who went from a 9,000-prompt pack (408 ratings) to a 20,000-prompt pack lost a third of his buyers (282). Doubling the count subtracted.
Free is not ranking currency. We believed the folk wisdom that $0 downloads farm the ranking. One seller's free SEO pack has 441 ratings; his five paid $50 packs have 456, 476, 510, 525 and 560. The paid items outsell the free one — same shop, same audience.
A fifth of a shelf can be an apology. Of 412 Etsy template descriptions we read, 81 (~20%) tell the buyer they will need a free Canva account to use what they just bought. That is a fifth of the shelf shipping a link into someone else's account system, and apologising for it.
And one seat is nearly empty: Anki decks (.apkg, a zipped SQLite file) —
226 listings platform-wide. A Spanish ECG deck of 88 KB has 1,005 verified sales at $4.
Two verification passes, one adversarial. These are conclusions we had written down and then had to delete.
All 421 rows — product, platform, URL, price, and the evidence sentence for every number. CC0. Check our arithmetic.
421-products.json · 293 KB