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Dear TpT'ers,
Margaret will be back next month with one of her supremely helpful and entertaining Seller Tips newsletters. For those of you who are new, I highly recommend that you go back into the archive of It's Me Again, Margaret newsletters, but if you don't have time, please at least read this one.
My purpose for this update is to provide a summary of 2012, give you a glimpse of 2013 and to discuss the issue of copyrights again. We also have a new strategy for our approach to freebies,  and I'll give a quick reminder of the TpT Way so we can continue to maintain the health, vitality and integrity of our wonderful marketplace for teachers. Q4 results are also provided below with comparisons to Q3.
Oh what a year!
2012 was indeed explosive. It's the year that TpT made the big leagues. We're now well into the 8 figures in annual sales, our best seller topped 7 figures in earnings and, thanks to that amazing accomplishment, the world learned who we are and what we're up to. Deanna Jump rocked it on CNN, CBS This Morning and the Steve Harvey Show and several other sellers starred in local news broadcasts about their success on TpT. Just this week we got a nice mention on the Today Show.
We love our press, but our numbers are even cooler.
In 2011 you had $3,430,000 in sales. To all of us at TpT, that was pretty amazing at the time. But in 2012 we saw growth that went beyond our most aggressive projections. Sales grew 500% to $17,880,000!
How did that happen? Well, you did it. You've been creating higher and higher quality resources at a quicker and quicker pace, and you are getting the word out through your blogs and Pinterest. The power of these two promotional tools cannot be overstated. TpT Credits is helping, too. Since its launch in 2012, we've given away over $200,000 worth of your products to buyers without it costing you a penny.
As for traffic, in 2011 our Google Analytics is showing that we had 7,368,498 visits but in 2012 that grew to 47,918,620 visits. Pageviews went from 53,407,236 in 2011 to 394,839,174 in 2012! Boy, that's not too far from a billion.
Where is it coming from? About 35% is now direct traffic and most of the rest is coming through your blogs and Pinterest. In 2011 Pinterest sent us 164,896 visits, but in 2012 your pins generated a whopping 7,960,066 visits. Your blogs drove even more traffic than that. I can't get an exact number because of the thousands of different URLs, but I estimate the number of visitors your blogs sent us in 2011 to be around 2,000,000 and in 2012 to be over 15,000,000. Every teacher you send to TpT makes us all stronger so I have four words for you: keep pinning and blogging!
This past week there has been a very thoughtful and helpful conversation on the Sellers Forum questioning whether new users were just coming for the freebies. It's true that your freebies definitely draw in new users and they help keep them coming back. 178,371 new users registered to TpT in 2011. This past year 1,001,334 teachers registered to TpT! Of those million who joined in 2012, a full 27% made at least one purchase (and on average they made 3). This is a very strong conversion rate for a site like ours with lots of free stuff. But we still want to approach freebies differently moving forward. More on that below.
What's up for 2013?
Our projection is for gross sales of over $40,000,000. What? Yep. If you continue to create and promote together, it'll happen. You may even do significantly better.
We plan to do better, too. The success we saw this past year has freed up some resources so I could bring in some real talent to help take us to the next level. They are working hard to upgrade the website from the ground up, to  create a more cohesive and advanced user experience. This is challenging work that will roll out in stages over the course of 2013. The focus is now on the buyer experience so we'll be vastly improving navigation through browse and search enhancements and importantly driving towards greater user personalization.
For one example, within the next couple of weeks, buyers will see a new homepage after login that will be personalized based on their subject area and grade level selection. It will show them recommended products, new and noteworthy sellers, new seller listings that are starting to show some sales, popular freebies, recently posted items as well as perennial best sellers... all based exclusively on their needs. As holders of seller accounts, you may not see it at first, but very soon thereafter we will roll it out to you as well. I want to give recognition to John Yoo who is leading these efforts and doing an amazing job. There are dozens of other key enhancements that John has in the works that will help to make TpT a world class experience.
As you may already know, we have launched our iPhone App and Android is just a few weeks away. We were proud to see in iTunes that we were #5 for a couple days in the most popular free apps for Education. It is still near the top of the charts today. We are dedicated to providing you with increasingly useful mobile solutions to help make your TpT experience as fun and convenient as possible. Updates will come rapidly so be sure to install them!
On a staffing note, some of you may remember that we brought in Karen Liu as Community Manager, but we quickly realized that we needed to tap her strong experience as a technology project manager more urgently where she is now doing great and vital work. So what about Community Manager? Well, we found the perfect person to fill the void and her name is Amy Borrell Berner, also formerly of Scholastic and more recently of QualityHealth where she was the Managing Editor. I know you are really going to like Amy. She starts next week and you'll see her soon on the forum, in the newsletter, on the upcoming TpT Blog (and eventually in person as we plan for the first big TpT Conference slated for the summer of 2014). Amy will be leading our efforts to come together even more strongly as a community which has turned out to be one of the best things about TpT. The connections and shared mission, the act of working together for our greater good... finding value for ourselves and our families that collectively adds up to something more because our activity revolves around helping teachers perform better in the classroom. I know that's an over-wordy incomplete sentence, but it's really good stuff! Please welcome Amy when you "meet" her. We're very excited that she is coming aboard.
Copyright and Trademark Issues
Ok, now for something more serious. We've written 5 newsletters over the years about copyright. We now make you check a box before you post an item that makes you assure us that you are not posting an item that violates the copyrighted and trademarked work of others. This Copyright Q/A resource is available directly from the dashboard. But it isn't fully working.
I don't think it's malicious or intentional on most sellers' parts. Copyright and trademark law is very confusing and grey and we are learning about it, too. And at heart we are just enthusiastic about teaching kids in the most engaging way we can, and that often includes using material with which they are familiar. Our new copyright lawyers are working on a fresh Copyright FAQ that will be ready shortly. That'll be helpful. But we can all get started using use more common sense right away.
There is a very simple rule you can follow that will keep you out of trouble:
WHEN IN DOUBT, NEVER POST AN ITEM ON TPT THAT USES THE WORK OF OTHER PEOPLE OR COMPANIES UNLESS IT IS A SCHOLARLY STUDY OF THAT MATERIAL.
Here are some examples for which we have already received take down notices. Dr. Seuss. Don't post any items that use Dr. Seuss stories or characters to dress up the resource or to create a theme for it. Please take them down. Don't post any items that use Pete the Cat. Don't post any priced items for the Daily 5 or Literacy Café (though the 2 Sisters allow free listings) or other trademarked educational programs such as Thinking Maps or Whole Brain Teaching. Angry Birds? Don't do it. You should be able to apply these examples to other characters, programs or trademarked stuff that is being used in your catalog.
Of course, you can do almost anything in your own classroom under Fair Use laws, but you cannot sell everything you create on the internet for profit.
Can you create activities for books? Yes, if it is made in the spirit of a study guide (like the 'scholarly' study of the material mentioned above in the simple rule to follow). Cliff Notes have been around for ages. They do not violate copyrights. Their purpose is to help you understand the material. Can you create quizzes and exams for books? Yes. Again, the purpose of an exam is to test a student's understanding of the material. This is ok. Novel Studies are some of our best sellers.
Those of you who have already removed such items and are frustrated that more keep getting posted, I understand you. We will be more proactively removing infringing items for which we've received a Cease & Desist notices in the past. Should you report them to us? No, not at this time. All current reporting needs to be done by the copyright owner or representatives of the copyright owners using the process outlined in our Copyright Policy. We then take items down very quickly, which is our responsibility under DMCA.
But we will no longer wait for follow up take down notices for each item that gets posted after we've received an original Cease & Desist for the group. We'll be doing weekly sweeps. Repeat violators risk being removed from the site, so it's best to be safe. We may sometimes take an item down and you will disagree and want to stand by it. In the Copyright Policy, there is a procedure for issuing a Counter Notification which is like an appeal. Feel free to use it.
If you have questions about your items, please don't send them our way. You can ask other sellers on the Seller Forum here. Or you can hire an attorney to advise you. We cannot give you specific legal advice, only general principles like I'm providing here.
And don't freak out! This is new territory for us all and we are learning as we go. Let's just get on top of it.
Freebies
With so many free resources now available on TpT (over 70,000), we think it's time to encourage you to keep them short and sweet. Many sellers have noticed that there are more and more very long and elaborate free resources that could easily be priced at $5 or more. We think that keeping your freebies under 10 pages is a good rule of thumb and that 2-5 pages is ideal (for the meat of the resource). There are of course exceptions to all rules, but it's a good general guideline.
New language is already on the newsletter submission from about what will be selected for the 10 Free Downloads newsletter moving forward, and the new approach has also been added to the Posting Form under the free or not pull-down.
10's of thousands of short and sweet freebies is really fantastic for our users. We don't need to give away the whole kit and caboodle, and we don't want to begin undercutting each other or starting price wars or anything. TpT is already famous for being a good value and we have to remember that we are businesspeople now (who work hard on our stores), and that this new approach to freebies is better suited for long term success for everyone, and that's good for our buyers.
In Summary
Oh what a year it was and what a year it will be, all thanks to our collective efforts. It's a great honor to provide this service to you, our honeybees!
Warm regards,
Paul Edelman
Founder, TpT
The TpT Way
We are proud professional educators.
We love to develop resources of the highest quality and we continuously strive to hone our craft.
We see TpT as a way to empower our careers and lives in collaboration rather than competition with our fellow sellers.
We always express ourselves originally in our products.
We respect the rules and never use media we aren't sure we have the right to use.
We take immense pride in developing our own style and voice.
We are small business owners who aspire to the highest standards of professional ethics.
We don't spam others or attempt to inflate our ratings.
We are pioneering teacher authors.
We are changing the rules about what it means to be a teacher and showing the world our true value.
Q4 Results
Total seller earnings: $5,513,161.97 (Q3: $4,763,914.31)
1,329 earned more than $500 (961)
827 earned more than $1,000 (646)
490 earned more than $2,000 (393)
348 earned more than $3,000 (271)
268 earned more than $4,000 (217)
218 earned more than $5,000 (184)
186 earned more than $6,000 (152)
155 earned more than $7,000 (133)
130 earned more than $8,000 (111)
107 earned more than $9,000 (101)
97 earned more than $10,000 (91)
51 earned more than $15,000 (52)
37 earned more than $20,000 (37)
24 earned more than $30,000 (28)
11 earned more than $40,000 (15)
6 earned more than $50,000 (10)
5 earned more than $60,000 (7)
4 earned more than $70,000 (4)
1 earned more than $279,000 (0)
Note: I think that the significantly higher numbers at the beginning rungs is very encouraging for new sellers. Lower numbers of sellers at the highest rungs is I think due to the fact that some sellers have catalogs highly targeted to Back to School (Q3) success. Or it could mean that success is being democratized contrary to fears that the best sellers keep getting the majority of the sales. I don't see that happening. Overall, amazing results and incredible growth across the board!
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