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it's over, stock media is dead, everyone pack up your bags and go home.
i have a portfolio of 3700 images and consistent revenue for the last 3 years. In December my sales dropped to a low that I haven't seen in 4 years..down by 30%. I chalked it up to holiday season but now 11 days into January I see no improvement, in fact, I'm its sunk even further. My daily sales are about 50% down from my average daily sales for the last several years. Has something changed in the algorithm or am i just having bad luck?
I edited my earlier post to note that I now see the stupid, broken, new-and-improved image page. I've done a screen grab of one of the images I included in this morning's example to show just how buyer-unfriendly this change in "Same artist" choices is.For a sunny, summery picnic basket image you now get winter and remodeling thumbnails instead of things resembling the one you're looking at (click for full size)
Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on January 12, 2017, 18:32I edited my earlier post to note that I now see the stupid, broken, new-and-improved image page....It seems "See all" is functioning as "Same artist" and vice versa. Looks like a bug and definitely should be fixed.
I edited my earlier post to note that I now see the stupid, broken, new-and-improved image page....
Quote from: flywing on January 12, 2017, 19:59Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on January 12, 2017, 18:32I edited my earlier post to note that I now see the stupid, broken, new-and-improved image page....It seems "See all" is functioning as "Same artist" and vice versa. Looks like a bug and definitely should be fixed.I checked a few images and I think it's just blindly using the first keyword alphabetically from the image shown when you click on "Same Artist". As that is most of the time not the keyword you searched in the first place, you get seemingly ridiculous results.This bad behavior is made worse when you have one of the images where our multi-word keywords were split up by SS's ingestion process - some of my images have "bar" and "air" for the first word (it was towel bar and air duct before they mangled it)This is just good for a giggle. There's an image that showed up as "similar" to one of mine - a photo illustration of a witch! I selected that image to see its supposed "Similars" and I'm not the only older white woman that Shutterstock considers to be a witch!! Don't suppose the guy or any of the other women think of themselves as witches either...
Me too. SS in Low Earners Tier now. On 123RF I have only 1/2 of my all images and sells AMAZING this year!!! Thank you 123RF
Doesn't the similar section just look at similarity in terms of compositions and colors? That's why buyers must be getting a white-haired guy portrait instead of an actual witch. Sometimes an algorithm does a half-assed guess. It happens, deal with it. All in all, I don't think a buggy similars functionality really hurts sales that much. Where one contrubutor loses sales, another contributor gains. If buyer demand stays the same, it's a zero sum game.
Quote from: Noedelhap on January 13, 2017, 16:36Doesn't the similar section just look at similarity in terms of compositions and colors? That's why buyers must be getting a white-haired guy portrait instead of an actual witch. Sometimes an algorithm does a half-assed guess. It happens, deal with it. All in all, I don't think a buggy similars functionality really hurts sales that much. Where one contrubutor loses sales, another contributor gains. If buyer demand stays the same, it's a zero sum game.I think you're right about the behavior of the "Similar images". It's like Google's "Search by image" and I'm personally OK with its function.But I think it's not quite a zero sum game here. If the "Same artist" works right (as before), the images in the same series or same idea with different executions from the same artist will be readily seen by the buyer. And SS will get more chance of sale than the current design because those images are more related to the image the buyer initially clicked.
Is SS aware of this bug?