I'm a young contributor, and I started uploading to fotolia (those were the days) and istock before I turned 18. This means that I had a good couple years before I could get onto shutterstock. When I finally did get on Shutterstock, I uploaded almost 1,000 images over the course of a few weeks to get all the photos up. It's been almost a year, and shutterstock hasn't been growing very quickly - I still make almost 5 times as much on adobe stock than I do with shutterstock, even though my portfolio is larger there than on adobe.
Should I expect shutterstock to pick up over time, or did uploading so many photos at one time bury them all in the algorithm?