Getly
Ask anyone to picture a digital-goods marketplace and they will describe 3D models, game assets, maybe a font. It is a vivid picture and it is wrong, at least for the catalogue we can actually count.
Here is the file-format mix across every active listing, measured 3 September 2026. Counted by the number of products carrying at least one file of that type, not by file count — a bundle of fifty PNGs is one product, not fifty.
- PDF — 1,952 products. Forty-one per cent of everything on sale.
- PNG — 749. JPG and JPEG add another 605 between them.
- ZIP — 738. The catch-all: bundles, code, anything with folders.
- TXT — 304. Mostly prompt packs and licence notes shipped alongside.
- DOCX — 80, XLSX — 56. Templates people open in Office.
- .unitypackage — 47. MP4 — 47. HTML — 39.
- Every 3D format combined — 24. FBX 10, Maya 8, GLB 2, BLEND 2, glTF 1, STL 1.
The gap between the picture and the catalogue
There are eighty-one times more PDF products than 3D products. Not eighty-one per cent more — eighty-one times. And of those 24 three-dimensional products, exactly three ship in a format a web browser can display without a plugin.
The demand side agrees. Across ninety days of search logs, queries mentioning 3D, Blender, Unity or games number twelve — and every one of them was searched exactly once. Meanwhile the most-viewed categories over thirty days are backgrounds and wallpapers, photography templates, poster templates, Android app templates and PDF guides.
This matters because it is easy to build for the marketplace you imagine. We nearly did: there was a plan to build a 3D viewer so buyers could turn a model before purchase. It would have served twenty-four products and roughly one search a week.
What we did instead
The instinct behind the 3D viewer — let a buyer inspect the goods before paying — is exactly right. It was pointed at the wrong format. So the same idea now runs on PDF: a watermarked excerpt of the first pages, generated on demand and shown on the product page, capped at 15% of the document and five pages, never the whole file, and never at all for anything shorter than ten pages.
That reaches 1,198 listings instead of twenty-four. The rule that decides how much to show is deliberately strict: a three-page checklist shown three pages deep has been given away, and the seller would be right to be furious.
If you are deciding what to make next
Two honest readings of the same table, and they point in opposite directions.
The crowded reading: PDF is where the buyers already are, and where the tooling now works. Search, previews, page counts, format facts — all of it is built for documents first because that is what the catalogue is.
The contrarian reading: eighty-one times fewer products means eighty-one times fewer competitors. A serious 3D author lands in a category with almost nothing in it. The catch is that the buyers are not there yet either — supply and demand are both thin, and being early to a market only pays if the market arrives.
What the data does not support is the middle position: making another generic PDF because it is easy. The formats are not what separates a product that sells from one that does not — we have measured that too, and description length and image count barely move between sellers who sell and sellers who do not.
One more number worth carrying
Of the products in this catalogue, the average PDF runs to about thirty pages, the median is eleven, and the longest runs to well over two thousand. When a buyer sees "PDF" on a listing, that word covers a range from a one-page printable to a book. Saying which one yours is — in the title, in the first line of the description, in the file facts — costs nothing and answers the first question every buyer has.
