Lately many people are complaining about declining sales especially on shutterstock and bring some conspiration theories about shutterstock messing with the search engine and so on. I think that real reason might no be so inconspicuous. For example one of my bestseller picture of London Tower is still on top of the search results on shutterstock but income was reduce to 1/5 comparing to the best years. I think this might be connected to the sites like pixabay which gives similar images for free. I have been watching increasing amount of these pictures on websites even in newspapers and other medias. I think this might be the real business killer for many people. Of course shutterstock as a company is still doing well as their tactics now is bringing more and more content and much of it is not covered by the sites like pixabay. But for example as a website designer why would I buy the picture of london tower from shutterstock if, I can have it for free and customer will not see much difference. Just look at the number of downloads of pixabay pictures. I believe it is not just from people who wouldn't buy the picture otherwise. 1000 downloads of a picture on pixabay may be 200 downloads less on paid microstock sites.

I don't think such website are any reason for decline.
People are sharing images under CC license which flikr, davientart and many others have been doing from years.
Such websites usually have a complicated licensing option.

SS the other end, has a huge customer base of 1.4 million people in 150 countries which still makes it too far from the catch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutterstock

Pixabay offers public domain, CC license is complicated you have to attribute and it's mostly for nonprofit use. And finding suitable picture is much more easier on pixabay than on flickr. 

As previously mentioned in numerous threads here by various people, I also think declining sales are a result of many reasons, one of which is sites stealing images and then giving them away, as mentioned above. A couple of other reasons, off the top of my head: lots of new people contributing because they think they are going to make an easy living; lots of people willing to accept 1 or 2 cents for an image (seriously, is free so far away from 1 cent?). Sometimes the same people complaining about the free sites are the same people who think it is ok to contribute to istock!


So yes, free sites erode sales. So do thieves and people who are willing to take "a penny an image, because hey, its better than nothing." So does having millions of contributors submitting millions of photos daily. The list goes on.

Nobody is going to invest in a shooting with modela,mua etc...and put them on pixabay. And simple images of flowers,pets,holidays etc...always had to compete with free images available elsewhere.

So no, i don�t see the free sites as competition.

Companies buy from SS or getty because they know the files have been checked, model releases read etc...

Lack of sales comes from oversaturation.

Quote from: salparadis on May 04, 2017, 05:23

Lately many people are complaining about declining sales especially on shutterstock and bring some conspiration theories about shutterstock messing with the search engine and so on. I think that real reason might no be so inconspicuous. For example one of my bestseller picture of London Tower is still on top of the search results on shutterstock but income was reduce to 1/5 comparing to the best years. I think this might be connected to the sites like pixabay which gives similar images for free. I have been watching increasing amount of these pictures on websites even in newspapers and other medias. I think this might be the real business killer for many people. Of course shutterstock as a company is still doing well as their tactics now is bringing more and more content and much of it is not covered by the sites like pixabay. But for example as a website designer why would I buy the picture of london tower from shutterstock if, I can have it for free and customer will not see much difference. Just look at the number of downloads of pixabay pictures. I believe it is not just from people who wouldn't buy the picture otherwise. 1000 downloads of a picture on pixabay may be 200 downloads less on paid microstock sites.

Maybe some effect but the fact is sales for shutterstock are Growing how many more pictures of the tower of london are there now than 5 years ago? a few I bet.

Actually there is around 73 000 pictures of London Tower on shutterstock, but that number doesn't matter that much. Two years ago it was maybe 50 000 and 5 years ago let's say 30 000. But the sales were highest 2 years ago with significant drop only last year, so it doesn't correlate with the trend. What matters is if a picture is good enough to keep between the most popular results on the first page. And it is still there on the second place. So the reason why the sales are declining is probably something else.

Quote from: CrFx on May 04, 2017, 06:07

I don't think such website are any reason for decline.
People are sharing images under CC license which flikr, davientart and many others have been doing from years.
Such websites usually have a complicated licensing option.

SS the other end, has a huge customer base of 1.4 million people in 150 countries which still makes it too far from the catch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutterstock

Pixabay offers public domain, CC license is complicated you have to attribute and it's mostly for nonprofit use. And finding suitable picture is much more easier on pixabay than on flickr.

Well, actually the license could not be less complicated. All the images are CC0 public domain, so you can download all you want and do anything you like, even resell and redistribute, with no attribution. There are no complications - maybe you have a typo and we're saying the same thing.