I am wondering how the ratings/reviews at iStock come about.  I have 92 pics online (yeah, I know, not enough to be taken seriously but I am working on it) and 32  reviews/ratings and I thougth that was pretty cool but I noticed that there are people out there with portfolios of equal size or even smaller with way more reviews. Who rates what?  What roles do the ratings play in the search algorithms.

Thanks for your input.

Tina

Hi Tina,

The most ratings I get are when an image gets accepted and it is one of my better images. I get a lot of ratings from people who just seem to see it under new uploads, people I do not know. Then I get ratings from my CN. There is a section where you can see what are the newest uploads from the CN members.  After the image is online a month or two,  it allmost never gets a rating anymore.  Ratings does not seem to improve the showing up under the "Best Match" search. The only thing which improves is, when you search files according to their rating. But for whatever reason buyers seem not to use that search tool. Where your file shows up in the best match is the most importent criteria for getting downloads. Rating used to improve the best match search. But IS changed that, because people formed "rating gangs" as thesentinel said. So yes you do not have to bother about the rating..

I still think rating does not affect the searchengine for best match search or only very minor. I have one image with 42 ratings. Search for penguin and it will show up on just the 9th page, while I have plenty other penguin images showing up much higher in the search engine with less ratings.

I rate when I think an image is really special and I do very little of that these days. High ratings will get you in the highest rated list which does mean more exposure but doesn't guarantee sales. A lot of really pretty, art shots get a lot of ratings but these generally don't sell well. Of course, there is always the exception.

I've just done a 'quick and dirty' analysis on my iS portfolio comparing ratings with downloads ...

For my 10 highest rated images
Average rating = 5
Average number of people rating each image = 8
Average Downloads per month = 1.2

For my 10 best-selling images (in Dl/Mo)
Average rating = 2.5
Average number of people rating each image = 2.1
Average Downloads per month = 6.2

For 10 randomly-selected images
Average rating = 2.5
Average number of people rating each image = 1.2
Average Downloads per month = 0.7

Seems to show that ratings have a small effect on sales but won't push an image into the best-seller category.