Hello All:

I have been selling stock photos for about a year, mainly on Shutterstock. About a month ago I uploaded my entire portfolio on DT, and have about 1200 photos online.

But for the past mouth I only had one subscription sell, so I question I'm doing anything wrong. I have almost exactly the same photos on DT as on SS, but why on SS I get about 20 sells a day, but on DT I only got 1 sell in a month.

For each photo on the right management area, I checked all but the exclusive box, does this have anything to do with my low selling rate?

Thank you very much for any help!

Downloads are expected to start after a month on DT. My port is about 400 photos on SS with an average sale of 14 a day. ON DT it is 1 a day

I only have 150 photos on DT but have been with them a few years - most of my files are level 3-5 and I have sales pretty much every day despite the small portfolio ( average this month is actually >1/day). Not happy that they've added subscription sales but I get plenty of regular ones too. Past few months DT has really picked up. In fact, as of now this month I've earned twice as much there as at shutterstock (though many more sales on SS), which is usually my best earner and where I have 200 files. I'd say be patient and let your files start to move up in searches.

Stock photography requires patience but with 1200 files on DT I'd imagine DT will start to work well for you soon. Good luck!

I have more downloads every weekday at SS than all month at DT, they are my 9/10th best agency

Also, make sure your most important keywords are in your title, description and keywords.  DT search also favours those with a high acceptance ratio.

Agree with Dan & Lisa.  Another thing about DT is that less is more as far as keywords are concerned -as I believe lots of keywords hits relevancy.

Edit.  IS, FT haters I understand but why DT?  They have not spectacularly screwed contributors as far as I am aware.

Nope, only mildly (up to 50% drop in percentage for level 0 sales and 66% drop for upper level subs sales), and it wasn't hidden.

Like the avatar Red Dove. Definitely one of my favorite albums of all-time.

Very much agree with Dan and Lisa - DT sales climb with time and I've had 3 (out of last 6) months with BME or near BME sales.  In months with lower sales its usually the new stuff or more of sub sales which drag down the numbers. If only Subs didn't exist, this would be my dream site (no pun intended)

Also, make sure your most important keywords are in your title, description and keywords.  DT search also favours those with a high acceptance ratio.

Another quirk of an ms site but important to remember. Serbian once said that the search does add weight to titles and descriptions, but only a little. In any event all titles and descriptions should be constructed that way across all sites....you never know what shinnanigans ....I mean strategy....sites will massage.

For along time I was disappointed with DT. I had expected a lot more from them being my first micro stock experience as a buyer. Looking at the quarterly results over the last 3 years I see steady growth with a good, but not great, last quarter of this year.   

Going back to the OP, I wonder if uploading an entire portfolio at once is a good strategy: it will then all sink together in the search and you lose the benefit of a steady stream of new uploads encouraging people to look at the rest of your portfolio.
I don't doubt that the lack of an established record of sales will also hurt your search ranking, and if you get one sale from 1,200 files it probable does a lot less to boost the ranking of the others than if you had one sale from 12 or from 120.
I've  had 14 sales today from 4,000 uploads - the trouble is that every one of them is a 35c sub, non-sub sales seem to be becoming rarer and rarer and my RPD is dropping accordingly.

I've found the last quarter sales have been very strong with a BME for me in October and some nice credit sales this month (though many sub sales of my Level 4 & 5s too). Despite the uptick in sub sales and fewer credit sales, my income there has climbed steadily. I did get an annoying rejection of a city skyline with many buildings taken from a public street for "potential trademark violations" which shows the reviewer's lack of understanding today, but on balance DT has been a good site to deal with and sales continue to grow steadily. Notwithstanding a dismal 2nd quarter last year, income was up 77% in 2013 over 2012, with a portfolio increase of only 30%.

I also like the fact that you can choose to make some files exclusive - I've done that with a few I felt were good after they were rejected by other sites, and some of those have earned me over $100 each. Granted, my top seller at shutterstock has earned me just under $350 there, and SS earns me about 30% more than DT overall, but I find DT to be a very strong second place micro site. I'd give them a chance.

I have a small port there (under 200 photos) and built it up quite slowly (I have 3.54 DLs average per image) and my photos do well in searches despite it being so small, so the advice not to add all your photos at once may be sound.

I just applied to depositphotos and was going to add most of my micro port via FTP at once, wondering now if that's a bad idea?

After three years or so on DT and over 2,000 images - I saw my sales drop considerably after dropping exclusivity.  At least my files have "matured" with time and downloads to that the RPI (other than subs) is actually rather nice.  Been seeing 5, 6, 10, 20 credit downloads lately.

Sites like Deposit Photos and Fotolia on the other hand seem to only sell subs.