Years ago, many of us believed that recency of upload gave an image a slight advantage in the algorithm on istock. What are the current thoughts on this these days?

Probably true to some extent. Early years, it was verifiably true. We could see our images ranked and then as days turned to weeks, if no downloads, they dropped down in the ranking. I haven't tracked or searched or watch my images on IS for years, so I won't say it's true now. Just that it's possible to be somewhat true.

Another part of that. Say there were 200 news images a day back in 2008, and now there are 2,000 images a day. The boost would be less noticeable and less of a difference, and won't last as long, as it once did.

I have a question, that's mildly related.

When I look at my portfolio, what's the difference between Best Match and Most Popular? What does any of that mean. Mine don't seem to be arranged by most money or most downloads except a few of them, scattered along the way with others of questionable "Most Popular" status.

Is this some kind of iStock mystery sort or what is going on?

Quote from: Uncle Pete on May 22, 2023, 12:12

When I look at my portfolio, what's the difference between Best Match and Most Popular? What does any of that mean. Mine don't seem to be arranged by most money or most downloads except a few of them, scattered along the way with others of questionable "Most Popular" status.

Most Popular - these are the works that are bought the most.
Best Match is a sorting of works according to istock, i.e. those that are the best in terms of istock.

Mine are identical? Does anyone else see different pages when they switch between Best Match and Most Popular on the portfolio view?

I think that Istock,unlike other agencies,controls anything much more,this also includes the position it occupies in searches.

I say this from personal experience,since I had a content in pole position among about a million similar contents after only 2 months,and it stayed there for about a year and at that time it still hadn't sold enough that particular content to be first in searches,it is clear that it was the agency to put it there,the Istock team or whatever�

personally i don't really like istock,first of all because they let you believe that you can upload whatever you want but then you don't,and they are unclear about it,i have seen people who suddenly had their license agreement terminated with crass excuses,people accused of having stolen files from free sites in their portfolios or other nonsense in which I have personally verified that this was not the case,other people who have had thousands of contents deleted for other nonsense reasons.

may be a good agency to start in microstock,but too much bad communication and then I think it's not an agency that rewards much in the long run,and that does not know how to adapt to changing times.

this is my personal non-exclusive point of view.