Images were online from the middle of october 2016 till end of march 2017.

Images were online from the middle of october 2016 till end of march 2017.

OK, so in Dec your sales fell, which they also did for me, SpaceStockFootage and Cider Apple. And almost everyone in the business.

In Feb they went up a lot. Without deleting photos...

In March you deleted your photos. But in Aug your sales fell again... Did you upload photos again?

There is no correlation here.

Are you saying Shutterstock will take away sales two months after upload, then give some back, and after three months they will temporarily give you a "normal" month, and then take away a little more. Then after deleting pictures they will take away sales for one month. Then give back the next, and a little more the one after. But then they will take away sales 5 months after deleting, and then restore and give a bonus month 6 months after.

Do you realize how this sounds?

---

This is what's happening:

Your sales fell, and you feel you have to find something to blame, other than your own portfolio, or competition. This is emotional. Not based on data, numbers, or facts.

You can take pretty much ANY action and turn it into a conspiracy theory. Just try it. Start uploading 60p clips only, and you will see that one of three things will happen:

� Sales go up.
� Sales go down.
� Sales stay identical.

And you can blame Shutterstock punishing or rewarding 60p uploads for either outcome.

I really don't believe in this cap thing people are going on about. I think if portfolios aren't up to date and experimental and you don't add new and exciting material then sales will become stagnant.

My own personal Experience:
Started on Shutterstock in 2011 with 40 highly niche clips. These 40 would make a minimum of $300 a month. Highest was $900.

In 2015 I uploaded 6000 clips and obviously my income went up. Not to the same ratio as the niche clips as these were fairly ordinary. - I saw no caps at all (in fact if there were a cap I think I should have been making a lot more when I uploaded the 6000 as my port grew highly overnight) but I saw the growth as expected.

A few months ago I started to upload some images (first time ever) They are basically stills from my 4K videos. I'm really amazed on how well they sell. From 30 images I'm making $30 a month or so. I wish I'd done this sooner really and I'm thinking of adding a lot more as I've already put the work into editing them from my clips. If anything I've seen my clip sales grow.

Looking at my graph it's an upwards trend - this is not due to upload amounts (10 clips a week BTW) but from trying to focus on modern niche content done to the best of my abilities.

I honestly think content is King. That old nutshell I know but it's true...

Well actually your graph looks a lot like mine.
For you, if you take away December, which was particularly bad (while for me dec is always good, the bad ones for me are january, april, because of Easter and august), income in each month from October to august are very, very similar, probably less than 10% variance. Then in September you had an upgrade of rank with a good 10-15% increase.

For me (taking away the 3 bad months every year) I get the following pattern: 4 months with very close sales than 3 times a year I get an upgrade with an increase of about 10% (the famous "dynamic cap"), then again 4 months with very close earning.
Please note that I am very happy about it and I wish it to keep going this way: the cap works not only on the upside, but also on the downside.

But this is not all. Even more than this is the pattern within the month that made me think about a cap at first: as an example, three days ago, the last day of September, I was way below my allocated monthly income and quite surprised about it, but I knew something would happen. In fact that day I had my BDE with a deluge of high priced sales and I finished the month exactly where I expected.
Almost every month I have twp types of patterns: sometimes I start the month very well and after 3 weeks I am almost at my MAI, then inevitably I do not get one single sale for 10 days.
Other times the month starts in a horrible way, but then a deluge of high priced sales occurs and again I finish at the same level

I pulled all my photos from Pond5 a few months ago and video sales went up.  Video sales were already going up but I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on!  My advice, everyone should delete all there photos immediately.

Actually, I had even forgot that I do have a few photos at Pond 5.
I will do a bonfire tonight :-)

I pulled all my photos from Pond5 a few months ago and video sales went up.  Video sales were already going up but I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on!  My advice, everyone should delete all there photos immediately.

Oh no! The virus has spread! 

Soon we'll be hearing that Fotolia not only decrease sales, but they actually shut down accounts of footage contributors who also upload images. It makes perfect sense!

Quote from: Brightontl on October 03, 2017, 14:23

But this is not all. Even more than this is the pattern within the month that made me think about a cap at first: as an example, three days ago, the last day of September, I was way below my allocated monthly income and quite surprised about it, but I knew something would happen. In fact that day I had my BDE with a deluge of high priced sales and I finished the month exactly where I expected.

I'm not sure if you're joking... but just in case. Any cap would serve one of three purposes. To make you more money than you would if there was no cap. To make you the same money as you would if there was no cap. Or or make you less money than you would if there was no cap.

If it's to make you the same money, then there's no point in having a cap... so we'll say it's not that. If it;s to make you more money than you would if there wasn't a cap, then that means SS are paying out more money than they are bringing in. The odds of them wanting to do that are minimal... so we'll say it's not that.

What we're left with, is a cap that makes you less money than you would if there wasn't one. If so, why would you be miraculously pushed a bunch of 'fake sales' on the last day of the month to increase your current earnings? A cap that means you earn a certain amount every month isn't really a 'cap', it's more of a base amount or a minimal earnings amount. And if they're not fake sales then they're probably real sales... sales that you would have got whether there was a cap or not.

But still, I'm very curious... taking into account what your sales look like now, with the cap, what would your sales look like if there wasn't a cap? Do all sites have this cap? If not, how do your sales figures look at other sites compared to SS? Is there some kind of visual indicator when looking at your sales figures that makes it clear there is a cap at SS and not elsewhere?

I said that a better word instead of "cap" is "monthly allotted income".
I am not talking about fakes sales at SS, rather about a sort of tap that is turned sometimes on and sometimes off. Bear in mind that this may also be beneficial for me: when my tap is on and I get plenty of sales it is also because someone else's is turned off at the moment.

The behaviour of Fotolia is very similar to SS: I get the same income at the end of each month for 5-6 months in a raw, then I go a step up in earnings (5-10% more) and then again 5-6 months at the same levels.
SS and Fotolia are certainly the most sophisticated search engines.

P5 sales are much more erratic (loads of up and down from month to month), sales are not concentrated in a few files (like SS and FT), but much more spread around. Files start to sell after a very long time (at least one year) and the files that are sold are generally ones that I consider good ones. In other words P5 behavior seems to be the most "natural" one.

VB (now SB): I had 4 sales the first month I joined (welcome aboard package), with about 50 files, then for 2 years I had 2 sales per month, every single month (with a portfolio growing to almost 3,000 files). Never sold the same file twice there and the quality of files selling there are the bottom of the barrel: if I uploaded a totally black clip it would probably sell there. This September sales went totally crazy and I sold a huge amount, but I fear that it is another welcome aboard after re branding.

The reasons beyond sales control are very widely used on the web and are extremely important in SEO (notably Google and YT search engine) and they have been endlessly discussed by SEO specialists.
Two of the main point in agencies search engines are: 1) avoiding to present constantly the same content to customers - 2) having as many contributors happy (so that they keep bringing fresh content).

Finally, the last thing in the world I am interested in is that you or anybody else in this forum believe in what I am saying. Really I could not care less.
The only reason why I am discussing this kind of thing is because I want to detect patterns in the search engine in order to organise my work accordingly. Already in this thread I have detected a couple of interesting patterns.

Trying to win endless arguments or personal fights in this forum does not bring me any money, so I leave it to others

By the way, the default sorting option is Popular in the Shutterstock search engine, making it even less likely that some results are removed when they reach a certain number of sales...

So if it's almost the end of the month, and you reached your cap, people can't buy your footage anymore?
Are your files moved a few pages down in the search results? Or do they disappear completely?
Have you tried buying your own footage at the end of the month, to see what happens?

From my point of view, this cap does not exist.