Lately many people are complaining about declining sales especially on shutterstock and bring some conspiration theories about shutterstock messing with the search engine and so on. I think that real reason might no be so inconspicuous. For example one of my bestseller picture of London Tower is still on top of the search results on shutterstock but income was reduce to 1/5 comparing to the best years. I think this might be connected to the sites like pixabay which gives similar images for free. I have been watching increasing amount of these pictures on websites even in newspapers and other medias. I think this might be the real business killer for many people. Of course shutterstock as a company is still doing well as their tactics now is bringing more and more content and much of it is not covered by the sites like pixabay. But for example as a website designer why would I buy the picture of london tower from shutterstock if, I can have it for free and customer will not see much difference. Just look at the number of downloads of pixabay pictures. I believe it is not just from people who wouldn't buy the picture otherwise. 1000 downloads of a picture on pixabay may be 200 downloads less on paid microstock sites.