Mind you, thinking about it, I guess that downloads per month is probably quite heavily weighted into the algorithm, so I guess it's to be expected!

Recently the best match search seems to be giving a huge advantage to exclusives.  My sales have dropped by 50% there over the last few months. It's the only site where I won't be getting a best match this month.  I've gone from selling over 40 a day average to just over 20 at IS. This time last year IS was by far my best earner wheras this month I am making double on SS and 1 of the other sites have overtaken IS putting it in 3rd place.

whats new with istock? they have been tweaking that monster forever....

Seren, thanks for posting this.  I have been of the opinion for several months that the best match is increasingly weighted toward exclusives, so your report doesn't come as a big surprise.  But it is good to see it confirmed by someone who has experienced both sides. 

Don't know what to tell you except that as you build your portfolios on other sites your istock sales will become less important to your overall bottom line. 

That's interesting.  I'm sorry your dls have gone down so much but I find it reassuring that it isn't just us non exclusives as we suspected. The drop has been so dramatic lately that the obvious reason seemed to be that best match weighting. Thanks for letting us know that and it would be interesting if any other exclusive would let us know how they are doing.

Quote from: fotografer on February 25, 2008, 04:28

Recently the best match search seems to be giving a huge advantage to exclusives.

I'm exclusive and my downloads have gone down drastically this month (down 60% over last month)!

It always amazes me how much people are willing to extrapolate their own experience to the general population. You can't draw general conclusions from anecdotal evidence (well I guess you can but you shouldn't). I'm not saying that exclusivity doesn't play a part in the best match, because it probably does, but I very much doubt has a significant effect.   

Thanks for your input Susan and sorry about your best seller, I've had that happen a couple of times.
 I think that they must have changed the best match again in the last couple of days.  Yesterday was my best day for ages and in the last couple of days I have sold 7 images that have never sold before and several that had only had 1 or 2  sales previously.

I guess I must have been caught in both a best match change and my lowered rankings due to lowered d/l per month!  Double Whammy!

I wonder if they don't have some kind of 6 month rotation.  Has anyone had a hot seller for more than 6 months?  I have some that would sell daily or several times a day and when they hit six months they fell off the map.

Right now I'm seeing more sales in my older files than my newer ones. It's true though, if you have an image that doesn't start selling right off the mark, you can pretty much kiss it goodbye.

We've all be the recipient of changes in the best match search engine. I had an image that when you typed in the word "vineyard" it was on the first line of the search for like six months. Made a ton of money off it it, then some best match tweaking and 1.5 years later, maybe 3 downloads.

This is curious about the 4/5 rating. The IS zealots will tell you that ratings have no impact on best match searchs, but in your case they did. I remember having several people rate an image of mine about a year ago and it quickly zoomed to the top of the search for that object, but over time it has slowly slipped down the best match search results. So, I think there is some type of time thing to promote newer images.

It wasn't a change in the best match positioning that slowed sales down - the file was number fifteen on the highest rated in the last three months (actually highest rated ever!) page which really givs it lots of exposure - but the way that istock calculates ratings ordering is that 183 fives and one four is outrated by a file with just one 5... So if someone wants to get rid of a file on that page (or make sure that the image of the week never makes it onto it), all that they need to do is rate it 4 rather than 5, and it will never get the exposure. And it really does make a difference to the sales - my file dropped off temporarily while some other image was rating higher and my sales went down, until someone gave another of the top fifteen a 1/5 and my image went back up into the top fifteen again and its sales picked up.

I must confess that for the first few months I guarded that exposure jealously and sitemailed anyone that rated it less than five, politely asking whether they meant for their rating to bump the image off the highest rated page- and all the people concerned changed their ratings  to 5s for me!

Yes, Yuri is quite a phenomenon.  I would not judge istock's best match performance by Yuri though.  He is the exception to the rule. 

I suspect that people may actually come looking for Yuri's portfolio, so he may be a bit less reliant on the best match than some of the rest of us. 

Lets get a few things straight about the best match, because its not unfair and its not rocket science.  Here's my understanding FWIW:

The last best match change happened many months ago and it was quite a radical change which limited a non-exclusive to having a max of four files in the first 100 of a search, and an exclusive to 8 files.  The limitations were imposed due to the discovery of a 'rigging gang' of three photographers who were systematically buying a copy or two of every one of their new uploads within minutes of approval; this created a huge dl/month number for all of their files and guaranteed first page placement in any best match search.  They were discovered due to the large number of files appearing on first pages and the similarity of the pictures (two of them were using the same camera, studio and props and may in fact have been the same person).  These two accounts were both exclusive.

The limitations of 4 and 8 were imposed in order that such rigging could never happen again.  I think its only fair that exclusives should have a higher number than non-exclusives.  Apart from this, there is no preference to exclusives.

EXCEPT......

There is another factor that influences the placing in the search; it isn't best match but the faster approval times.  Let me explain: the main component of best match is dl/month.  This is calculated not from the approval date but from the upload date.

Now imagine this situation: a non-exclusive and an exclusive both upload a highly commercial file. The exclusive image is accepted within a day; the non-exclusive takes a week.  Both files get a first download one day after approval.

The non-exclusive file gets an immediate dl/month number of 4 (because the upload was a week earlier). The exclusive file gets a dl/month number of 31 (because it was uploaded just a day before).

This explains why it appears that exclusives get preferential treatment in the best match.  But the only advantage is gained by files that are highly commercial and attract immediate sales; over time, the 'time advantage' gets diuted away.

I hope all this makes sense.  It is of course just my own understanding of how it all works.