MicrostockGroup

Just in from their newsletter

It looks like Fotolia is headed for a site design and search upgrade.  Lets hope things transition smoother than their competitors

Yes lets hope the search is a good one,  for all.

I'm sure the new site will address the issues of poor watermark and few credit sales. I can dream, can't I? 

They did, and the site wasn't as well established then. Sales plummeted and it was months before the site was working again. I honestly thought it was a 50/50 chance of survival.

I don't have any involvement with them any more, so from a purely selfish point of few, if they mess it up and more sales go to other sites, I can only benefit. I do realize that lots of others who still sell through them wouldn't feel that way

From personal experience, I think that they will need to do more than that.  Basically, their business model is flawed.  I do scientific photography with the microscope.  I was able to upload slightly under 100 of these images before they stopped accepting my work.  What I managed to upload sells very well; better than any other agency.  So well, in fact, that several times I have had as much 20% of my Fotolia portfolio downloaded in one day1!  When I emailed them to remind them of this and ask why they would no longer accept my work, they didn't answer the question.  What they said was that their evaluation team was "independent" from their sales team and that they did not communicate(?)  Hmmmm.   How many sales-based organizations do you know in which the company buyers and sellers do not talk to each other?  Although some of my work is still there, I no longer send them anything.

I still remember fotolia V2.0 it was a disaster, hope they will do a bit better this time...

A search change is always a #13.....................lucky for some, unlucky for others. I suspect that the last change was in March of this year when my sales dropped a fair bit and haven't yet recovered. Still, I've only got a couple of hundred images and cannot be a benchmark for anything.

A couple of 'interesting' observations on search:

Recently (2 weeks ago) I submitted a food shot. I put the recommended first 6 or 7 keywords in order of importance.
So far neither a single view nor sale (believe me, I've occasionally had almost immediate sales with no views for weeks!!!). How that is possible, I have no idea.
Anyway, more to the point re. food shot; I searched using my top (first) 3 keywords and, to give the search a better chance, I chose 'recency' 1 month. Nothing, zilch, nada. Image did not appear on any page.

Then I searched using the image title (yep, that part without spelling correction). Image turned up immediately.

Conclusions from my experiment. Putting keywords in any order of importance is bollocks and seems intended to cause a contributor to expend brain power whilst it is to little or no avail. Use a great title and ensure that the spelling is correct.
In other instances I've noticed that the use of certain words as the first word in the title attracts lots of views, whereas placing the same word second or third in the tile gets very few views (even when the 10 first keywords are identical and in the same order). This effect I noticed in a series of images before the most recent fiddling about with the search in March of this year which affected my sales for the worse and from which they have not recovered.

With the recently announced changes, I hope for the best but expect the worse.