Anyone noticed sudden change in SS sales pattern over last week or so? Can't say i like it...

hmmm.. can't say i noticed anything out of the ordinary.  Did you sales go down? - has it been a while since you uploaded photos?

Change I see is in exactly that - uploading new photos doesn't cause spike in buying anymore. Sales spread out more even now but became noticeably lower.

I really liked that effect of buying surge as new batch kicked in...

I have - there is a thread in the SS general forum I started. Some people see it and some don't. Not many have weighed in.

Since Sept 1, I have seen a reduction in sales, and it seems like it is a lack of sales on new images., Where I used to get a flurry of sales in the first few days, now I am only selling old images.

Same here dbvirago. I saw your thread but since there was no real discussion I decided to ask people here.

My sales had reduced a little at the beginning of September.  I uploaded some new images a couple of days ago and the downloads have shot up - mainly the new ones, but some of the old favourites as well.

I stopped uploading for about a month in July/August but to my surprise got steady sales of older images. I've been uploading about 20 images a week since the end of August and noticed that the surge for new image downloads does still exist, but not to the extent it used to. Also, the sales for older images keeps even with the new images. Could it be the new search photographer portfolio option?

It's been puzzling me, too.

P__

My sales are lower than expected, and by a lot. SS has always been my top producer, but not this month, that's for sure - IS is beating it by 40%!

Quote from: pr2is on September 20, 2007, 21:00
Same here dbvirago. I saw your thread but since there was no real discussion I decided to ask people here.

Actually, I think that thread has had a pretty interesting discussion. Perrush said that the cause is the Portfolio Search option, and it may be true. There is discussion in the sticky thread (in General Discussion) about how the Portfolio Search option may be causing slower sales of new images and more sales of older ones and Setho commented and he does not seem to discount the possibility.

I guess I can understand how the search could cause more older sales, but I don't understand the drop in new ones. With the subscription model, I would assume there are a lot of buyers who don't use the monthly quota and just look for images to stockpile. In that case, it would make sense to me that they would pop in once a week or more and look at what's new. That doesn't seem to be what is happening.

I assume that the larger and more established artists there are more positively affected by whatever the change is and they probably carry the most weight.

I'm just glad the other sites have picked up. ELs are becoming a regular enough occurence to make a difference.

I don't see either how this addded option could stop those spikes deasd in their tracks. BTW, it was introduced in July, and this phenomenon appeared just over last week - ten days.

I agree with that. But not sure what it is. If I search on a term and sort by newest, mine shows up where it is supposed to. I wondered if something happened with the number of downloads/number of days algorithm changed, but can't work that out either. For an image to show up high based on that, it had to sell at least once quickly - and that's not happening either.

lately I was surprised to how my older images started to sale,which I can't complain:) and  I didn't notice any decrease in my new submissions. and sales have been great so far.

I guess my portfol,io is too small yet to be an indicator of anything... and all tweaks in search algorithms etc always benefit some while killing others. But since I am not alone in noticing it, something did change. My experience is exactly as dbvirago's. It just never happened before that new images had no sales whatsoever when they hit their according categories sorted by Newest. Including several Christmas themed, too

I noticed it last month when I uploaded almost 200 photos of a large variety of subjects in two weeks.  My sales rose as expected, since there were so many photos and subjects, but the sharp spike never came.  In the past, I would have had over 100 sales per day between the new and old photos, and the highest I ever got was almost 70. 

Ouch.

My last 100 downloads day was 23rd July.  September is a bit disappointing but a few EL's have helped.

My first 100 downloads day was with 1,093 photos in my portfolio last November.  I have added nearly 2,000 photos since then, so I am not making much progress with them.  I think it is probably because I am not being selective and just uploading everything I can.  It is hard, as a photo of paint flaking on a wall has sold 50 times and I had an EL of a wooden fence, so I just upload everything but I can see those that only upload quality images have more sales.

Perhaps I should delete all the junk and see what happens?

I think it pays to be a bit selective, I'm sure that a lot of sales come from buyers browsing portfolios.   If you have it cluttered with a lot of almost duplicates and not so good images then the buyer will probably give up and look elsewhere.  I try to just put up the best and as soon as I get time I will go through my portfolio and delete some of the worst, non-selling images.  My sales have increased enormously since they introduced the option to search portfolio and I only upload a handful of images once or twice a week at most.
PS  I'm not saying that anyone here has bad images or too many duplicates but just talking in general

I don't have duplicates and in fact wondered whether it's a good idea, many seem to do a whole lot of them - girl moved her hand left, right, higher, lower, you know As for quality of photos, it's not for me to judge, I'd guess somewhere in the middle of the pack. Maybe there is a big demand on people right now, and I don't shoot people (no, I am not a pacifist). I hope it's just some fluke, it was a very nice "feature" of SS.

on a lighter note, little funny situation of day or two ago. At some point earlier I uploaded this fire shot

which did considerably well. So I decided to add couple more to provide some flaming variety, with different copyspace and flame configuration. I submitted two more,

and

as you can see fairly different. Second of them was rejected for not being in focus (hmm, but OK, whatever), and first - for too many similar submissions! I just shrugged and first time in my SS life resubmitted it immediately without notice to reviewer, so out there it was. It got accepted a few hours later. So I wonder, how do people manage to get gazilion shots of hedgehog over white accepted in a single batch?? (btw, whoever shot that hedgehog did a great job, I can't make my son's cat sit quietly for me more then 3 seconds).

Quote from: sharply_done on September 20, 2007, 22:53
My sales are lower than expected, and by a lot. SS has always been my top producer, but not this month, that's for sure - IS is beating it by 40%!

wow - how DO they do it

i am surprised always when people say istock is higher that SS.  My istock is lower than dreamstime, fotolia and even stockxpert    I must be doing something wrong.

Perhaps it has something to do with that i only have 500 some images on istock and over 2000 on the others... but still....

Quote from: leaf on September 21, 2007, 15:15
... i am surprised always when people say istock is higher that SS.  My istock is lower than dreamstime, fotolia and even stockxpert    I must be doing something wrong. ...

"I must be doing something wrong" ... that's exactly what I think when I read about people having high sales on DT and FT when mine are so low there.

yeah, it is an odd way things work.

I think phildate once said that fotolia was his BEST earning before v.2.  (maybe they are back on track again fro him) ...

that makes me think it sure is nice with more than one site to upload to - you never know when 1st place is going to switch with 5th.

Quote from: pr2is on September 20, 2007, 20:32
Anyone noticed sudden change in SS sales pattern over last week or so? Can't say i like it...

Yep a drop for me too - but particularly noticeable this week and towards the end of last week - about 40% seems accurate.

In the last month or so the biggest change I've noticed is the review process - its fast, but the reviewers seem to be picking a far smaller number, and I seem to be only getting acceptances on the photos I thought would be most likely to be rejected. My acceptance ratio is going up on other sites including DT and IS, but dramatically down on SS.

IS is gradually taking over as my #1 site, even though I have only 295 images online, compared to 741 on SS.

Just tried going to SS to see how I compared but can't seem to get there.  Anyone else having a problem getting to SS?

Since I started the topic, it would be only fair to post the latest observations. Pattern is still different in a sense that there is no pronounced spikes when new batches kick in - however, sales of older ones became noticeably more stable. So far so good... Now, can we have the best of both models??