MicrostockGroup

There is a tendancy that contributors with large ports, etc, will take it as a breeze, marching into SS, DT or FT, this is far from the case. The SS, reviewing, DT and FT, as well is today, far tougher then the IS reviewing and has been for a couple of years now.

A massive successful port at IS, is great, got one myself but its no guarantee at all for some sort of automatic acceptance at other top sites.

Dont!

Well, SS just sold my first video! 12 days after having my first video online. Not bad.

Thank you!
I enjoy the 22 Dollars but as a passionate istocker I am also sad that this is a file that is still in the istock queue, uploaded long before I uploaded it to SS. Because it is a holiday video, it won´t reach istock customers before early next year. So obviously the decision to quit exclusivity for video has already paid for itself.
Also love the map that shows you were your file was downloaded.

My little video agency battle is currently istock/SS  1:1

Yes, 2012 will be very interesting indeed!  

I will, I promise.

I do miss views and having lots of private lightboxes to link files. There are also less statistics than on istock.

But if they know how to sell...well...off to make more videos...

You make a great advocate for SS, but not everyone has such positive experiences at SS. Maybe they should give you a signing bonus. For a bit of objectivity, if you do not already have a large established port on SS the odds that your new uploads will have good sales are limited by technical issues and the probability that you will have good sales with a new membership are dimming every day that SS does not fix its serious technical bugs.

What would you say to those who are experience significant issues with newly uploaded images. As someone else mentioned in one the our threads one of the top 10 microstockers has stated that he will no longer upload images to SS until they get a handle on the problem. http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=114196

To be honest I havent got a clue about videos, etc, BUT, since you are a very nice person, I hope you sell WELL!

I've heard about some of the bugs with new files on SS's forum. It seems like it hasn't been discussed much here though. I can't claim any personal experience though because I haven't uploaded anything new there for a year.

Short sited as it may be: my guess would be that many who participate here have large established ports with older files.  Thus they may have good sales if some of the nastier bugs are not impacting their own ports too much. Not everyone at the SS site has been hit by the bugs, so why upset the cart and risk the ire of the site itself if the bugs plaguing others could also be a benefit to overall sales.

The recent complaints in this thread -- about recent pictures not showing up -- made me double check my port, and I don't seem to have been affected by it.  I have never noticed recent additions to my port not showing up.  What I have noticed is that starting several months ago, my recent pics didn't dominate my downloads like recent pics used to do... I'm sure that's been commented on here... must have been a default results switch some time ago.  Even that change didn't really affect my sales... they have been steady.  

And as for rejections, I have no complaints there either.  I think I see one or two rejections a year out of around 1000+ submissions.

In general I think that other than the "New" search SS has always favored files that sold. I think a year or more ago they lowered the boost that recent images that sold got. This tends to make the "most popular" search closer to all time sales rather than just sales/time. I am not sure what goes into the "relevant" search - perhaps a heavier weighting to the title? This also might have been around the time they went from indexing new images a few times a day to almost continuous indexing for the new search but then they would take a while to show up in the general search.

I think the problem more recently with new files is when the "new" search doesn't show them they get permanently buried with almost no chance of a later sale unless the search is very specific or the sale comes from a portfolio search. I have had a few files that seemed DOA but then a bit later started to collect a few sales, so maybe there is hope for new files with no sales (or maybe they are just obscure enough to show up in searches with only 1 or 2 pages of results).

My sales have continued to climb this year, but I have a lot of older files and semi-obscure ones that are keeping me at the level I am accustumed to (low but continuous sales). I am a bit worried that most of my new images for this year will be essentially wasted on SS.

The real problem isn't that these agencies are changing their ideas of what they want and will accept... it's their lack of ability to communicate their new requirements.  Or maybe it's just a lack of interest - and they're now so intoxicated with "crowdsourcing" that they believe that no matter how inconsistent or incomprehensible their rejections, or how low the returns, there's still an endless supply of new material.