Some developers used to make some money, but that all crashed this time last year with the announcement of 5.7's incompatibility and various related events. Marketplace sales have not recovered and do not look likely to do so in the near future.

Most non-trivial marketplace addons are spin offs from real customer projects. A customer required it and it was developed specifically for the customer. The developer then put the extra work in to get it into the marketplace. The original customer pays for the development, but gets the benefit of support costs being covered by marketplace sales.

Other reasons to release stuff into the marketplace:
- simply because its a community thing to do.
- a developer created it for their own convenience and thought others might find it helpful.
- a developer has a bit of free time between customer projects.
- as a marketing exercise for development services.
- to enable provision of further development services.
- its a school project or corporate training program.
- a third party supplier wants to provide integration of c5 with their service.

But if you are thinking 'marketplace sales could be a nice little business', you will be sorely disappointed.

Some general guidance is available in
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/get-an-ad...
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/why-do-ma...

Thanks for your reply. More or less what I suspected since there's not too much going on in the marketplace, which is a pity.

What could be the reason for this despite the hasty release of 5.7? Too little end users that create their sites themselves and have a need for pre coded addons that provide a certain functionality? I could think of some useful addons for this demographic, but of course I would be interested to earn some money also, if that is morally acceptable ;)

Might be a chicken and egg situation, no end users, no addons for end users.

(I could start a a WP comparison here, but I won't)

Not sure what kind of WP comparison you had in mind but I'll say that I think to compete with WP we need minimum 1,000 free addons. And to me that's the key to driving adoption of C5, which in turns drives the need for marketplace addons. The ratio in the marketplace needs to be 80% free, 20% paid.

The model we're doing at Razor Commerce is similar to WooCommerce in WP, our core product will always be free. We hope to have significant adoption, and develop the market for premium ecommerce themes and useful extensions.

Not sure I fully agree with you on that John.

Yes, 5.7 is the first version we've ever released that wasn't backwards compatible. Certainly a painful step, but one we needed to make and don't plan on doing so again any time in the foreseeable future. There certainly was a slump in marketplace sales as we did that, understandably as people have wondered which version to use or just to wait.

It also appears that some of our one click installer friends haven't got 5.7 installing correctly. This is obviously a huge issue which we're working on solving with 5.7.4's upcoming release.

All of that being said, gross sales of some of the themes in the 5.7 marketplace since we launched it are:
$6,120.00 gross
$2,080.00 gross
$2,160.00 gross
$3,940.00 gross
$6,490.00 gross

While you're not going to retire to a desert island on 6k, but I think that's a pretty decent return over what amounts to 4 months (we launched late fall, most of these came on around the holidays when times are slow).

Probably the best and simplest reason I can give you to build themes for 5.7 is the exact reason you're looking at WP. Put something good looking in there that has great sample content - you're a big fish in a small pond that's growing. The total marketplace sales grew 12% last month alone.

well, that is some good news at least, things are catching up on your end.

That would be even greater to work up some official stats say, on the download link, the number of sites connected etc…

and even better, could you have those figures update in real time ;) ?

Thrilled to bits to see those numbers. Why not post sales numbers in the marketplace, both for free and premium items? I think this is more motivating than demotivating. Sure if the numbers were disappointing across the board, the top selling item brought in $12 then it would probably have a demotivating effect. But I think any items that have over $1,000 in revenue creates a motivating effect. Like you said it's not retire on an island money, but if a developer thinks in terms of long-term residual revenues... $100/month per products sounds good because having 20 addons total built over a number of years is achievable. So let's post the numbers, Envato style, and even allow sorting by the numbers as these sales numbers also provide a bit of a gauge for the quality... when combined with feedback at least. The rating of an item bought by 500 customers certainly sounds more meaningful than the rating of an item bought by only 2 customers.

Agreed.
I don't think we need to add any more operations infrastructure tasks to our overflowing plate, but I'll work up a blog post with some details so people aren't in the dark.

Posted some more thoughts to the blog.

http://www.concrete5.org/about/blog/concrete5-sightings/some-growth...

Those are pretty nice numbers! Care to share numbers on normal add-ons too, instead of themes only? I'm quite interested to see what those do too. And seeing how much an add-on has been sold could be something good too. Because if an add-on has been bought 100 times but no one posted reviews, one could think it is not a good add-on for example. So if you see the real numbers, a potential buyer can be motivated to buy anyways (if no reviews for example).

I published my first add-on a few months ago but only sold one so far. I'm selling it at $15,-. It's the type of addon that's useful with most websites so I had expected to sell more. On the other hand, Concrete5.7 is still very new and it will take some time before a decent number of websites have been developed and demand starts to grow.

To answer your question : If direct profit is your only motivation, developing an add-on for Concrete5.7 is not such a good idea BUT : It might start to pay off in the future and contributing to the community by creating such an addon is also a good reason to do so. This way you invest in yourself and Concrete5. Depending on what type of addon you are developing, the amount of time required to develop is reasonable so you're not risking a lot.