14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, visitors of Template Monster were invited to view and buy the company's latest release, template 25000. On this occasion the company published a promotional code on its official blog that gave the first 25 users a 25% discount for the 25000th template.
This is great news for the template giant, which is widely recognized as one of the biggest trendsetters in website design out there, getting more than 100,000 hits per day. The 25,000th template is a Flash-based design portfolio and features a catch-phrase, "We are the best."
"This is a big day for all of the Template Monster community - and that's about hundreds of thousands of people. Not to mention the joy we at TemplateMonster feel," says David Braun, CEO of TemplateMonster. "[...] Over the past 7 years we've been here for our audience, and the audience has been here for us."
The company was started seven years ago in New York by Artvertex, Inc with a specific target in mind: the web developing community. At first, they've hired a group of developers that started to create fresh and professional website templates, putting them up for sale on their website. The templates looked so good that the company’s reputation grew and it soon became the biggest template seller currently on the web.
Capitalizing on its success, the company launched its affiliate program and expanded the template categories to Flash, PowerPoint, Joomla, Drupal, PhpBB, WordPress, Mambo, PHP-Nuke and E-commerce. Recently TemplateMonster expanded to other new media-related services like audio files, logos and icon sets, hosting more than 21 product types and more than 100 design-related topics.
Inspired by its success, similar affiliate programs spawned all over the internet, but with poor results. In the last few years, the Envato network has caught up with it by exploiting TemplateMonster's weak spots. For several years, web-designers and developers have tried to sell their templates on TemplateMonster, but the team was very picky in allowing regular users to upload and sell products through the website. Meanwhile, Envato has done just the opposite; after a simple registration and test, users can start submitting their artwork so it can be approved and published on different Envato-owned niche websites.