Yesterday, Envato released their official WordPress plugin, and today they announced the acquisition of the stock photo subscription service Twenty20.
The plugin (Envato Elements WordPress plugin) which has been in beta since August, already boasts over 50,000 active installs, many from first-time Envato users.
While the company has been a long-standing contributor to the WordPress community through its market leading ThemeForest and CodeCanyon marketplaces, this is the first time Envato has built its own plugin in-house.
The plugin provides users with more than 2,000 free templates drawn from the company’s global creative web design community and covering a full range of niche interest areas, from restaurants and small businesses to creative portfolios.
The plugin also provides access to 670,000+ high-quality stock photos for Envato Elements subscribers, allowing them to easily browse, import and license photos directly into their websites without having to leave the WordPress dashboard.
With a one-click import system and support for both Elementor and Beaver Builder, Product Manager Aaron Rutley said the plugin team wanted to make the process of building a beautiful website with WordPress, as simple as possible.
“Page builders for WordPress are getting better and better, but websites need creative design and images to really shine. That’s where Envato, and our community of creatives, can really add value.”
📸 Exciting news: our Envato Elements WordPress plugin now gives Envato Elements subscribers access to over 680k Premium Stock Photos from within #WordPress! https://t.co/qFUqMhgO1K pic.twitter.com/1xM5rpNxQV
— Aaron Rutley (@AaronRutley) April 9, 2019
“Until now, Envato was a collection of websites you went to, to buy and download creative assets. Now, you add the plugin to your WordPress install, and you can keep your site visually updated without ever leaving your dashboard,” said Rutley.
“From a technical point of view, we’re very proud of initial integration we’ve been able to engineer with the WordPress Core Media library and the Envato Elements Photo Library. It’s definitely a challenge to integrate the two, but we’ve had positive feedback on our efforts so far and we’ll continue to refine and improve our offering from here.”
The initial beta launch taught the team a lot about what the web design community expects out of such a product, said Rutley.
“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so far, with a 4.9 out of 5 rating on the WordPress plugin directory. We’ve seen a lot of demand for Elementor and other page builders over the last 12 months or more, and we have been keen to continue to explore this space.”
“We know our author community is awesome at content – we’ve got more than 2,000 templates already part of the plugin – so our focus has been on finding new ways to help website creators in their quest to get their projects from an idea to ‘done’ as quickly as possible.”
Twenty20 – a new member of Envato family
Super excited that Envato just announced our acquisition of the beautifully candid and authentic Twenty20 photo subscription, Collis Ta’eed, co-founder and CEO of Envato, wrote today on Twitter.
Super excited that @envato just announced our acquisition of the beautifully candid and authentic Twenty20 photo subscription!! 🙌 https://t.co/nbYc2sbd2P pic.twitter.com/aZwkbE8P5H
— Collis (@collis) April 10, 2019
For seven years, the team at Twenty20 have been helping leading brands and agencies get a fresh, authentic alternative to traditional stock photos. The library of millions of images is by turns, beautiful, bold, candid, raw, and natural. That’s why creatives from companies like Google, Hulu, Vice, and more have been regular clients of Twenty20 for many years, Envato stated in the official press release.
How much money Envato gave for Twenty20 is undisclosed information and it’s not revealed in this announcement.
According to the official release, later in 2019, Envato will make the Twenty20 subscription a part of their market-leading Envato Elements creative subscription – an offering that has just passed 1,000,000 templates, project files, and stock media.
Twenty20 authentic media library will give Elements subscribers even more ways to get their creative projects done, Envato stated.
Introducing Twenty20 to Envato’s ecosystem also means we’ll be welcoming a whole new cohort of creative photographers to our community. Many of Twenty20’s photographers have joined through their Instagram presence, are users of the Twenty20 iOS app, and shoot both royalty free and editorial photography.
We have an immediate earnings boost for Twenty20 photographers and the prospect of much more to come as they join the cohort of creatives earning from Elements’ subscriber-share revenue model, Envato said in the press release.