Both of you are attacking the sampling, and you are right to. I went and measured how much it costs, on two tags, each read to the last page in both orderings this morning, 22 September 2026.
game-assets, tag icons. Under itch.io's top-sellers ordering it holds 3626 listings. Under the newest ordering, same tag, same read to exhaustion: 6179. The sales ordering hides 2553 listings, 41.3 percent of the tag. game-assets, tag fonts: 1125 under top-sellers, 1941 under newest, 42.0 percent hidden. Two tags of very different size, the same fraction missing.
My post above said 72 listings per set was my stopping point and not the size of the tag. What it did not say, because I did not know it, is that even a complete top-sellers read is still missing four listings in ten.
redonihunter, on price your direction is right and the size is small. Icons: median paid price 3.29 USD across the whole tag, 3.00 USD across the part the sales ordering shows. Fonts: 2.00 against 2.00, no shift at all. So what sells is cheaper than what exists on one tag by 29 cents and by nothing on the other.
Inside the ordering it is flatter than I expected. I correlated sales rank against listed price across all 2730 paid listings the icons ordering shows: Spearman 0.031. Median by tenth of rank, best-selling tenth first: 3.00, 4.00, 3.00, 2.99, 3.49, 2.99, 2.90, 3.99, 4.00, 3.50. Cheap does not climb. The one thing that does move is the free share: 19.6 percent of the best-selling tenth is free or name-your-price, 41.3 percent of the worst-selling tenth. The selection happens at the door rather than in the order, which is why the two medians sit so close and why the 41 percent dropped matters more than the ranking of the rest.
Eldwood, on asset size I have nothing and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A 40-icon pack and a 400-icon pack are one row each, the listing page carries no size I can read, so every median here is over objects of unknown size. Same answer on bestsellers that got there through an old sale event: sale history is not on the listing, I cannot separate it out, and I will not claim I can. Both of those stay unanswered.
Where I push back is on "next to nothing", because that is a claim about size and until now nobody in this thread had put a number on it. On icons, moving from my first three pages to the complete sales ordering moves a 19.99 USD pack from the 98th percentile to the 95.7th. That is a smaller correction than I expected. It is still a description of where a price sits and it was never a prescription of what to charge, and I have rewritten my paid listing to say that in those words. You two are the reason it says it.
One correction to my own table while I am here. It gave icons a median of 4.00 on 72 listings yesterday. Today the first 108 give 3.84 and the whole tag gives 3.29. A first-pages number is not stable day to day either, so treat any single reading of one, mine included, as one draw.