They aren't going to change the legacy stock business other than tweaks to the contributor commission and the pricing. When they changed the commission structure a couple of years ago, despite noise from some contributors, nothing changed. The database continued to grow and SS continued selling stock. So don't expect anything good but don't be surprised if commissions change for the worse.

For a new CEO, diversification will be the name of the game. They need to get into emerging technologies and trends and they need to find high margin business.

My guess - and it is a guess - is that he is taking the money and making a run for it. SS stock has done very well over the past two years and Pavlovsky is worth somewhere north of $10 million as a result.

He may feel that he has taken SS as far as he can, that the results and the stock prices aren't going to get better. So preferable to leave on a high and with a serious chunk of money while leaving the challenge of running the business to someone else.

I would not be surprised to see him resurface somewhere else and maybe to do something similar. Take a business with a stagnant stock price, wield the axe on costs, get the price up, make more money and move on again.

Stock is a commodity business. Volume and margin are the name of the game and the only way to drive volume is through being price competitive and the only way to drive margins is by cutting costs. Unfortunately, contributors represent the biggest cost and Pavlovsky's successor will probably want to look at that.

"Laughing in the purple rain" is in the same league as "Money won't make you happy".

Money won't make you happy but it can buy you a better quality of misery.

I wasn't going to post this, but just for fun. Here's how to make a rejected focus photo into a passing photo. And I agree, for a dime, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to please some computer. I used Irfanview. Open, resize, saved with a new name, uploaded again.



Not worth more time or worrying for 10 cents.

I didn't know that magic of better photos was so simple? Just use a faster shutter speed. over 50 years wasted trying to learn and understand exposure, and all I needed was a fast shutter speed? 

Do you resize the pixels or the Megabytes or both?

Because they have too many images, and they don't care anymore. It costs money to do realistic reviews. This way they just keep the grinder running, photos in, and we keep trying to get things accepted against the odds of a real review.

Rejection reasons (1)
Focus: The main subject is out of focus or is not in focus due to camera shake, motion blur, overuse of noise reduction, or technical limitations of the equipment used (e.g. autofocus searching, camera sensor quality, etc).

It doesn't matter what anyplace else does or that they accept the same images. SSTK has gone insane. They have a Hal 9000 system doing reviews now.

383,327,819 stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free.

The system is so screwed up that they can't even complete the intake of new images properly.

Agreed. It's become ridiculous. I made a special effort with a couple of recent shots - tripod, cable release, focus stacking - and they still got rejected. Fortunately, Adobe accepted them.

In the past, I've generally been able to understand rejections but, recently, anything and everything is getting tossed out. And there is no logic to it.

I'm at the point where I'm not sure it's worth uploading to SS any more. More trouble than it's worth.

Big organizations aren't going to be trolling the internet for 'free'. When they need images or video, they need it timely, they need quality, they need to know it's legal, they need to be able to find what they want quickly and they need to be able to modify as necessary. So they will have a subscription to someone like Shutterstock because that is the most efficient solution. In the grand scheme of things, the cost is peanuts.

Okay, with 3.5 days to go in January, this is where my sales are in comparison to January 2021.

First, January 2021 was my worst month of last year by a long way. So we are starting from a low bar.

Anyway:

Size of portfolio ......  + 18%
Total downloads .....  +57%
Total revenue .....  +136%
RPD ..... +47%

This January (2022), despite the reset to level 1, has been better for revenue than five of the months in 2021.

AS is tracking normally. Slightly behind target but nothing to be alarmed about. RPD at AS is three times that of SS but downloads are almost eight times less. So total SS revenue is about 2.5 times greater than AS revenue. Of course, my portfolio at AS is quite a lot smaller than at SS.

I'm not at level 2 yet but I have double the downloads I had this time last year. Unfortunately, so far I have the same RPD as last January which is $0.19.

Just one sale on Adobe so far for $0.33.

I may be the anomaly, but the reality for 99% of contributors to SS is that they earn money from being on SS... and 100% of those that aren't on SS, don't earn money from SS.

If you think that there's been some kind of, or will be some kind of, mass exodus of buyers from SS due to a relatively small percentage of contributors leaving (or that lost earnings from SS will automatically be made up elsewhere), then you might be the one who is being naive. Sure, my earnings might dwindle over time... they might at any agency, and that can be reviewed on an ongoing basis, but in the meantime I'm earning money from the time I'm spending uploading, so nothing will come back to bite me. And they're not dwindling now... I made a decent amount more last year then I did the year before.

And if you think my post was 'talking up' SS then... well, that's just strange.

I don't think you are an anomaly and I agree with your post.

I don't particularly care about SS, Adobe or any of the others. I use SS because it serves my purpose and when it stops serving that purpose I will move on.

The reality is that I still sell more on SS than any other site. I also made more in 2021 than I did in 2020. Not much more - 3.38% - but still more. Adobe did well for me last year too although still not as well as SS.

In addition, the absolute number of downloads I got at SS increased last year and at a greater rate than I added to my portfolio. So that suggests that the buyers haven't gone away.

Quote from: Jaggy on December 20, 2021, 14:37

I don't get fixated on the 10 cents for an image thing. What matters to me is the average RPD over the year.

Unfortunately, this year (2021) I'm looking at a 33% drop in RPD compared to 2020. That is largely due to two factors. The first is that the first four months of the year were terrible for revenue as I fought my way through the levels. The second is the absence of any ELs (2020 I had two) and fewer SODs.

When I look at RPD for May through December, it's at the same level as 2020 and better than 2019.

So, while I have made marginally more revenue this year (+2%) it has taken 52% more downloads to get there.

So my prediction of May 2020 has come true. More downloads to stand still.

You must be still getting a lot of 10 cent sales to even make it worth it to upload, you really need volume now it seems.

Six of my last 20 sales have been at 10 cents.

However, you are right. It is all about volume now.

I live in a tourist town. On Shutterstock, if you type in the name of my town, you get 22,686 photos. However, when I started to scan the pages and pages of photos, I discovered that there were quite a few things in my town that had been neglected. So I photographed those things and they have sold 168 times in two years. 

Quote from: cascoly on December 17, 2021, 19:20

my SS port this year has had RPD of $.60-.80 each month ...

You create images and videos?
In SS account there is no way to see the downloads and income of pictures and videos separately? Or is there?
I have not found anything in my account.

You can see it on the iphone app when a photo is sold. It shows you how many times it has sold and for how much.

You can also see it on the 'view all top performers page' but you may have to scroll through a lot of images to find a specific one.

Shortly before the middle of the month.

December 1 to 13, 2021 compared to December 1 to 13, 2020

At AS
Downloads: - 7%
Revenues: + 21.8%

For SS
Downloads: - 25.1%
Revenues: + 50.5

AS vs. SS
Downloads AS compared to SS: 76%
Revenues AS compared to SS: 125.2%

For SS, So far, I'm about even on December 2020 in downloads but have already surpassed all of December 2020 in revenue largely thanks to a rather good SOD.

For AS, I'm also tracking pretty much at the same level as December 2020.

First week of December was terrible but things have picked up a bit this last wek.