MicrostockGroup

Have you noticed it? Is it their version of B/M? I hope it works better than on other sites that have it (catastrophic on IS and FT)

By coincidence, when you posted in the other thread about Yuri's keywording tool being down. I tried the first one suggested, and all I saw was how the particular search I tried was far more badly spammed on Shutterstock even than iStock. Strangely, when I then tried the same search in the tool Leaf suggested, it was a 'clean' Shutterstock search. i'm guessing that Leaf's suggested tool automatically puts quotation marks around the search term.
Really, BM2 was working well on iStock (spamming was penalised) until they started denigrating best match in favour of pushing A/V (spamming was ignored in favour of A/V).

Maybe unrelated to your subject but I did notice that "Most Sales" is not necessarily "Most Popular" on SS.  It seems their "Most Popular" is based on a ratio of Sales to Views?

Not sure but do see that a new image makes it to the front of Most Popular as soon as the first time it sells.

That's how IS and SS weight their popularity rank, which throws some people when they see their images sinking.

On SS it's a honeymoon, on IS they screwed our rank in the search, when it's the same thing. Odd how perception alters reality?

Since we can't see the rank dropping as much on SS and we do see the immediate boost in sales, they always come out looking better. Don't get an initial sale on IS and blam, it's down the pages in a week.

Yes, the automatic is based on downloads in the last 30 days, so 1 in 0 is a huge number, and when the images get re-ranked, 4 in 30 makes them fall. I lost my notes on the default, but I did track is a few years ago, and that's where the Honeymoon came from, plus a small collection of buyers who appear to download just about everything new that's half decent. That's also where the feed the beast comes in, they are looking at new and see our old stuff, and grab that along the way, if it's attractive. Nothing new, the files drop and drop further into the depths of the other millions of images.

Alamy's boost is smaller and similar, but everyone new gets a rank of The Middle and you can go up or down from there, but you don't start out last, trying to catch up.

Since I don't work with other agencies, I gave up looking at how they fudge the facts. 

SS, have got the best search engine of all, always had popularity and it pays all the way. Closely followed by DT.

Only reason IS, dont dare to use Popularity, is that independants would score as much as their exclusives and thats in their opinion "unfair". i.e. they put private matters before business.

I have an image on page 1 of most popular (for martial arts) that hasn't had a dl in 6 months.  So that's weird.

I can't find several pics in my portfolio with search engine...

what do you define spamming? I have quite a few shots of teens, who are very obviously not women but young teens, but always I do insert "woman" a... and voila, they have been downloaded for "woman" again and again.

Unfortunately sales support your opinion:s. No improvement whatsoever since filter implementation.

If you're referring to the image 69519853, it comes up first in both the popular and relevant search results. Summer's coming...

^^Yeah I noticed it, I'm glad it's not there the way it was set up