While at PressNomics, I heard interesting stats from both Envato (proprietors of ThemeForest) and the MOJO Marketplace, which has was acquired by hosting giant EIG in April 2013.
You can catch some of the numbers from Envato from this WP Chat thread. This post focuses on MOJO, which I presume is the lesser-known entity. I also think that JR Farr — co-founder of MOJO — really brought some interesting bits for us to digest. Here are some of the bullet points from my notes:
- They get 1,000 new users per day.
- They launch 25,000 new WordPress sites per week.
- Bluehost users have to use MOJO to install WordPress. I’m not sure about other EIG hosts. I imagine this is the cause for 1,000 new users per day.
- The top seller on MOJO is making $65,000+ per month (I believe HB-Themes is that user).
- With their new MOJO Services segment, 8,000+ services were sold in the first 6 months.
JR also talked about some challenges from their choice to sell to EIG. The primary one was their desire to continue to be a flexible startup within a 4,000 person company — which is quite the big ship.
It was also a goal to maintain their passion as founders, and also to not give up too much control, vision, or final say on the direction of MOJO. These things sounded awfully ambitious to me.
Listening to JR, I got the feeling they’ve partially, but not fully, met their goals with the acquisition. It does, however, seem like they have a heck of a lot more exposure inside of EIG that outside. The trick is whether they can keep being MOJO inside of EIG.
I don’t have any grand takeaways. MOJO has a long way to go to catch up to Envato — if that’s their goal. Envato’s 2014 in review reveals some staggering numbers. One direct comparison is easy. Envato’s most popular theme is Avada, which now sells $100,000 worth per week; that’s more than 6x MOJO’s most popular shop.
