Daily Facts - Day #50: The 3 most profitable digital products to sell

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

5 years ago

Nowadays we can buy almost anything with a few simple clicks.

And most of them are digital products. With the click of a button, we have access to books, music, lessons, tutorials, graphics, photography, blogs, themes, software, games, etc, etc.

And no wonder, there are 10s of thousands of ecommerce websites out there ...

But here's the truth ... Not all of them are profitable ...

Why?

Well, the most common problem many people encounter ... is not knowing if their product will be profitable.

Hence the logical question: what are the most profitable digital products?

So I've made a quick research ...

And I found aout that the 3 most profitable digital products are: ebooks, graphics and web elements.

Let's take a closer look at each category ...

1. Ebooks

I'ts a rock solid fact: the most popular digital download goes to the ebook.

That's it ... We are living in a "new" ebook-era ...

Most likely an endless era ... Device and platforms like Kindle and Kobo, professional best selling authors and influencers, self-published authors, etc, etc

Here are a few stats provided by PublishersWeekly. These numbers speak for themselves ...

• Self-published books now represent 31% of e-book sales on Amazon’s Kindle Store.

• Indie authors are earning nearly 40% of the e-book dollars going to authors.

• $2.99 and $3.99 are currently the pricing sweet spots for most e-book bestsellers. In general, authors who price their books modestly earn more than those whose average price is higher.

• Readers prefer longer e-books. In fact, bestselling books tend to be over 100,000 words.

2. Graphics

We all know ... A photo is worth a thousand words ...

And finding nice, relevant images isn't easy at all ... Not to mention the copyrighting issue ...

This is why sites like Shutterstock, Photocrati, iStock, etc are so successful and profitable ...

In fact several sources are saying that the stock photo market (especially for pre-shot commercial digital imagery) is expected to exceed $7 billion next year ...

Sounds incredible?

Check out these Shutterstock (2017 full year) stats:

• Paid downloads increased 2% to 172.0 million!

• Revenue per download increased 9% to $3.13.

• Images in their collection expanded 46% to 170.1 million images!

• Videos in their collection expanded 47% to 9.1 million clips!

• Revenue increased 12.7% to $557.1 million.

3. Web elements

Here's another fact: people are paying a LOT of cash for pretty much anything web related you can think of ...

Themes, patterns, brushes, wallpapers, logos, all kind of web templates, forms, banners, social media packs, vectors, etc, etc.

Just a few theme-related examples from ThemeForest (according to Freemius):

• From a total of 28K+ templates and themes on ThemeForest, 8K (or 28%) are Wordpress themes.

• Since 2008, ThemeForest processed a total transactions worth more than $360 million. Out of those transactions, more than $280M are exclusively for Wordpress themes.

• In other words: while only 28% of the themes on ThemeForest are Wordpress themes, they are driving 80.5% of the total revenues!

• The top 20 Wordpress themes are responsible for 14% of the total annual sales! The best selling theme crossed the $16,000,000 in gross revenues in 2016!

I'd say that the possibilities of web elements that a graphic designer or an affiliate marketer could sell online are literally endless ...

Bottom line ...

Digital downloads is a multi-billion dollar industry.

And the best part: it’s really simple to get started.

You can create your own ebooks, graphics, etc. You don’t need manufacturers, suppliers, packagers, shippers and all the other operational pains that come with physical products.

Or simply pick some well-converting affiliate products, set up your ecommerce store, and start selling!

Your thoughts?