On a more serious note:

There are not really nearly a million pictures of sliced tomatoes at Shutterstock.

If you sort by "Fresh Content" you will see that the vast majority of these pictures are not pictures of sliced tomatoes, but rather some pictures that contain one more more tomatoes or some dish that contains tomatoes and a slice of some sort.

For example a slice of pizza with tomato sauce.

The search engine does a very good job, though, to mainly show real sliced tomato pictures first, if you sort by Popular.

You get the same picture at Adobe.

So perhaps only 10,000 or maybe 20,000 or 30,000 are actually pictures of sliced tomatoes. You may argue that that is still more than enough. And sure, it is enough that a new picture really has to be very good in order to have a chance to sell and even then it may very likely be buried under all the other good pictures.

I would say, though, that it is not as easy as it sounds to create an appealing picture of sliced tomatoes, as it is not so easy to get really clean cuts.You kind of proofed this yourself with your own attempt (if the single picture at the bottom of your post is yours), because if you are honest, you will have to agree that it cannot really compete with most of the pictures in your screenshot.

Yes I think I pointed that out. The search is a bit general and includes everything with "sliced tomato" including a sandwich or dinner dish or scrambled eggs. It's just for fun. 1,842,869 sliced vegetables stock photos, 871,705 sliced tomato stock photos - photo only. Any wide open two word search is going to give some pretty vague and bad results. With that, are these necessary: 178,492 sliced tomato isolated on white stock photos   

Here's another one, and I stopped saving the numbers, because it's out of control. 397,021,816 stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free.

Holy Moly almost 400 million?

How many of these are enough? 19,229 sunny side up eggs?

My point is, when someone shoots these things or someone new comes and starts doing more of these, do they really expect the images to sell, when the competition has almost 20,000 variations, already in the system?

$2.13 in two years, I'm amazed it's not 32 cents. Well done eggs.



So why would I upload my breakfast snapshot? Because it's there? But not because I expect to have sales and downloads or make money. I wonder why people upload images of common things you find around the house, common foods, things you find walking down the street? Do they actually expect to make money or are they just creating filler, like I do?

Do people actually believe they can get downloads or make money from Microstock, for things that are over produced and supplied already?

Why?