With 20 million images to choose from:
Best sellers of photo, illustration, and vector (not including video) from 2012:  13,968

With 30 million images to choose from:
Best sellers of video, photo, illustration, and vector from 2013:  11,340

Hardly a trend that new files aren't selling as well, when the best sellers are such a minute percentage, .004% of the total files vs a higher number .006% for 2012, to start with. It's like saying by counting unused straws you can figure out how many soft drinks are sold at McDonald's.

Relative decline is insignificant, not 20% - more like .002% while choice for customers increased 33%? If you were in business and your competition increased 33% and your market share dropped .002% would you call is suspicious or free fall decline?

Quote from: tickstock on April 03, 2014, 19:42

Without even including videos for 2012 the best sellers had 20% less sales than the best sellers from the previous year.  I don't know if that means best sellers are punished or there is something else at work but a 20% decline seems significant.

Sorry. Not convinced there's anything suspicious going on, or best sellers are being "punished". On the contrary, they seem to be holding up against the competition pretty well.

The illustration from 2012 looks a lot more impressive to me. Of course that has nothing to do with what makes a best seller, but I agree it is hardly a freefall considering the increase in the total numbers. Looking at the number of sales from the top 1% of files would be a lot more informative but I guess we only get the info they reveal.

Quote from: luissantos84 on April 03, 2014, 16:05

I guess that deserves another snip, sorry to say but that was the most pathetic thing I have ever read in this forum, it is just unbelievable looking at all the moaning you do regarding the devaluation of stock photography, Jon should pay you in peanuts!

It's funny the price of a pound of peanuts is similar to what Shutterstock is paying, 27 cents a pound but in December it was 50 cents, I know not everyone makes 27 cents per pound:
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/pnpr0114.pdf

I wish I could get peanuts for .27 per pound. even .38/pound would be a bargain.

Very important on Alamy.

"In order to return the most relevant images to customers, there are three keyword fields carrying different weights � Essential (50 characters), Main (300 characters) Comprehensive (856). The search engine views each Keyword field in descending significance with the Essential keyword field having the greatest relevance."

Do they care about the actual order within the separate fields? I seem to recall somewhere reading that if the words were next to each other they would be ranked higher in a search for those 2 words.  eg it the keywords are "hand high five" that would rank higher for a search for "high five" then if the keywords were "high hand five".

As I understand it, the "sensitive use" is more than just sensitive use, but is mainly the large $ SOD sales. I am opted out because of a few kid and other people pics (Why SS doesn't allow opt out on a model or even per image basis is beyond me). They have requested I allow it for a few images (turn on for the whole port 'til it is dled). which I have done I think 3 times. One resulted in a big sale. All were for images that had nothing to do with sensitive uses. I still get SOD sales w/o opting in, but they tend to be single digit or low double digit sales.

I probably should just deactivate those images that I don't agree to "sensitive" use for and then turn on my port.

SS if you are reading, allow sensitive use opt-out based on model releases or per image or something similar.

Quote from: DonLand on March 17, 2014, 18:16

So the question I have is if FotoSearch or GoGraph sell and image for $40, how much do we make?

https://www.canstockphoto.com/payout_schedule.php

so 20% or 8$ for a 40$ sale? How old school IS. (which was pretty lousy too).

Can someone explain to me how some contributors alledgedly only have been overpaid by less than 10$? It doesnt seem to fit into the the numbers and that it was indeed a problem with imagespacks and EL's being wrongly marked.... Sounds fishy to me.

I presume I fall into that category. I have only a few images left on IS and PP, so I think there was only one sale reported for more than .28 during that time - 3.98 or something like that. I was disappointed when everyone else was talking about great sales numbers, but now I suppose I actually got a mini - bonus from them. Of course it probably only amounted to getting 50% of one sale or something piddly like that.

It does seem like a rotation system. I was on subs 'til last weekend, off the last 5 days and finally one sub today. To be pessimistic, my credit download on period will be over the weekend... I am around 15% of a normal month now, but if the tap turns back on that can change quickly.

I've heard the average share is held under 30 seconds.

to get off topic. I think it is pretty clear that SS changed the search order last year. If your images were previously in a good search position it hurt you, potentially a lot. I don't think that SS has sold less images since that search change, so presumably someone else is getting those sales. We can speculate on what exactly changed in the search and why that was done. Those drastic changes should be put over the overall trend of image numbers going up faster than sales numbers.

I think that the search change dropped images that had been at the top of the search order for years. It certainly hurt my best selling image sales. Since my sales there are mostly of older images still, I presume that this search change would hurt people who started before I did and had even more older long running best selling images. I also saw a jump up in my $ from SS near the end of 2011 (mostly due to more higher $ sales I think).

One other change that potentially will have hit individual contributors differently is where you are located. I recently changed my address on file from the east to the west in the US and I have noticed that I tend to get a larger percent of my sales later in the day now. If they are pushing "local" images in the search that could really hurt you if you aren't local enough to places that buy lots of images of the type in your port. I don't know when they started doing this, but that could also account for some ports suddenly performing a lot worse than they had in the past.

I think it might be a bit of a stretch to say that SS did this purposefully to move lower paying images to the front (although they might have seen that as an added bonus of more recent images selling). I certainly don't think they have a method where they push images from the top tier down lower in search (although if they do, I'd love to see proof of it). As for the new contributor boost - I'd like to see some concrete info on that too, but I certainly don't expect to get any.

I would hate to have SS start to do the abrupt and massive switches to search that IS is famous for. It seemed like each time they did that my sales plummeted and only recovered after I uploaded large numbers of new images.

-edited because of a typo that changed the meaning of a sentence.

Its the same on Alamy for that matter. I sold a Medium RF image, list price �180.00 for 1546 x 1058. My cut, $13.69

When I asked them about it they said:

Quote

Our price calculator lists the �shop front� pricing. Customers we actively go after, contact us about specific needs or key customers with large spends and image requirements may negotiate on price; which always starts with our shop front pricing.

The license details of the images sold are available in your summary of items sold page. We cannot provide you with any further information.

So they decided to discount the image from $250 to $27 but cant tell me anything about it.

At least Alamy does tell you how much the image sold for and how much you get.

heading off topic here - but more of a comment on the FB deal:

It does make you wonder if one could open up a freelance cooperative design company and purchase a subscription (or more) and then for a small fee designers could join and get subs from SS. As long as that small fee was less than the cost of a SOD it would be attractive to them. Not as good for photographers (but still maybe a higher percentage than a normal sub), and probably very unpopular to SS. I am guessing if it isn't outlawed in the TOS it would be soon if it became popular.

There are things Getty could have done to make this much more palatable. (like set it up as some sort of streaming buffet - you pay and then you can pick which images to have shown on your web site).

I think Sean is probably much more realistic with the $ numbers when they do make some $. just a few cents for many many views. now multiply that by .2 and that doesn't leave much for the artist. Multiply it by .8 and 35 million and it might be a nice chunk for Getty.

My guess is that artists see nothing for a while as they don't show ads or anything like that in the hopes that it becomes more popular. Ideally (for Carlyle) they get massive participation and can sell it for big $ without having to try to place ads. Then the next sucker tries to monetize it and it annoys the bloggers enough so that they take them out (perhaps).

There is nothing in their track record to make me optimistic about this move other than the fact that their IT can be so poor that maybe it will fail because of that.

Quote from: Shelma1 on March 07, 2014, 16:43

Photographer's blog post about the Getty deal (warning, foul language ):

http://paulclarke.com/photography/blog/im-a-photographer-getty-me-out-of-here/

Nice article, loved the foul language!
I am not a SEO specialist, but if a gazillion sites embed links back to Getty wouldn't that propel them right to the top of search results? That would be a very tangible benefit for them.
And I don't know if anyone mentioned this yet, but for photographers having their images plastered all over web - wouldn't that reduce the sellability of the image instead of increasing it? Just one more point on "how Getty screws photographers" list...

If Google feels that a site has too many links boosting it's SEO unfairly they can always hammer it down, which could happen. Or maybe Getty will only show up for the people searching for free images.