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At the same time my portfolio has grown, the sales have diminished. This month I think I will be lucky to sell 60 images.

1/01/2007   195
1/02/2007   187
1/03/2007   399
1/04/2007   215
1/05/2007   141
1/06/2007   106
1/07/2007   76
1/08/2007   89
1/09/2007   85
1/10/2007   174
1/11/2007   101

I'm finding exactly the same thing.  SS great and IS slowly dying.
On SS I made 50% more this November than last November and on IS I made 50% more last November than this November.  For the last 3 months I have made considerably more on SS than IS whereas IS always used to be a clear winner.

I have 600-700 images, and 20-30 sales every day except for weekends. Monthly 800 downloads....

Exactly. SS's search highly favors newer images so you have to upload constantly to see increasing revenue. At IS it is not as drastic but you will still see decreasing revenue if you don't upload because the growing collection dilutes your share of the collection, which translates into a dilution of your earnings.

October: 325 sales
November: 225 sales
December(so far): 39 sales

And iStockphoto and Dreamstime are the ones that are increasing. I still upload around five to ten images per week at Shutterstock, and still the sales seem very sluggish. I'm just going to blame it on the holidays.

But hey, I've only sold two images this month at Stockxpert so Shutterstock is far from being the worst when it comes to sales.

SS all depends on the amount you upload. Lately I have been doing a lot of uploading so my sales there have picked up quite a bit. Last month was just $10 shy of my BME. SS is still easily my top earner, with about 45% of income, but IS and StockXpert are gaining ground. SS used to account for around 60% of income.

In my case shutter is being a surprise every day, since last week DLs increase each time I see them. Today has been my BDE with more than 30sales with a portfolio of 97 pictures.

I´m in the other agencies with the same photos, but the day I was accepted in Shutter (nov 23th) I had more sales than in the other microsites together in two months!

I know my portfolio isn´t the great thing, but it seems shutter customers like it, but the rest of the world seems to hate it   

Take a look if you want to my Shutterstock portfolio

SS is dying for me as well, in spite of weekly, and sometimes daily, uploads. There are two problems with SS:

- To start with, they were the only subscription site. They are not any more, and with the competitors, customers can switch between subscription and regular downloads, more or less from month to month. For photographers, that means that subscription sales will be spread more thinly between many agencies.

- There's a real risk that SS long-term is over-saturating its own market. Those who have had subscriptions for a number of years, build their own picture archives, so a subscription will, after a certain amount of time, be less interesting. One of the reasons for the high earnings at SS, is just that: customers download images that they may need in the future, as long as they have quotas left to do so.

As long as the market increases among agencies that pay more, I'm not worried, but I doubt we'll see SS being as dominant in the future as they have been up until now.

I was thinking the same thing six months ago, but at the moment, my old images are selling better than the new ones, and sales are down in general. I had my BME's in March and May, and haven't even been close since then, even if my portfolio has increased by around 30%.

I am seeing huge oscillations from one day to the next:  I have super-crappy days with like 8 downloads on a portfolio of over 500 and the next day I have 23 by the time I get up in the morning. It's not just weekends that are bad but there is also no consistency as to which weekday is good or bad.  'tis the season, I am guessing (hoping)

yep,

I constantly upload, about the same amount each month but declining for me

sept $680, oct $540, nov $432 and so far dec is at best looking to equal november

Just thinking aloud...... SS could perhaps one day be a victim of its own strategy.

Customers download many more pictures then they actually need.  So if a customer downloads huge numbers of Christmas images this year, perhaps he won't need to buy any next year or the year after that.

According to compete.com, whereas the other agencies have been seeing healthy unique visit increases, SS is showing a sharp decline since the beginning of October.

I like SS.  But if I've said it once, I've said it a million times - in my view, SS has the least repeatable long term earnings and the fastest image decay of all the agencies.  I always give SS my lowest votes in the polls here at Microstock Group because I don't regard it as an 'investment'.

Still, there is something happening. Last year, I had a BME at SS in December, in spite of low sales the last week.