Two observations.

You have 600-ish images on SS and 1,000-ish on FT. It would be a more useful comparison if you had the same numbers on both.

You should check your spellings on images with words - It's laundry not laundery, sugar not suger (it has the word alert in there too which is why I assume it's supposed to be English) entrepreneur not entreprenour

Thanks for posting that link. Always interesting to hear the stories people like to spin about themselves

A week ago I saw this story about SS getting added to the S&P SmallCap 600. I can only imagine that increases the pressure on them to keep investors happy

http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/30/why-starz-schnitzer-steel-industries-and-shutterst.aspx

I found this quote interesting:

�We have always distinguished ourselves by providing the highest quality content, best search experience, and simplest pricing structure. It all adds up to superior value for the customer,� he said.

It's revisionist history. At the beginning (at least when I came upon SS in late 2004) the library was rubbish by and large. Search was functional but nothing special. Simplest pricing was true. At the very beginning subscriptions were unlimited downloads, but that changed pretty quickly to 25 a day

Even in 2004 SS didn't accept everything - Jon didn't want more beaches and sunsets - so there certainly were rejections even then, but  they were after growth more than "highest quality", so a lot of stuff got accepted. After they had a large enough collection, they did start being more selective, and for a while, they really hit a sweet spot. Great images, large selection and search really did become very good.

The fact that they had such awful spam is something search can't entirely mask. Even today, they're not doing anything about keyword spam (or nothing like enough) Do a search for beautiful woman sorted by new and see vector rings and T shirts, bags of oranges with a hand visible, a background of bangles and beads without a body part in sight. And that is for decent images; there's always the mountains of image spam that they're trashing the collection with in some lunatic race to 100 million images.

Another interesting observation was that only 10 percent of revenue comes from video and music combined. We'll get the latest quarter's results on August 4th, so perhaps that will provide an update, but given how much more expensive video is than images/illustrations, the volume must still be pretty low.

I uploaded using the web uploader about 7 hours ago and it was working fine (couple of JPEG files). I think the problem is either temporary or something your end, or possibly the browser (I use Chrome)?

I'll add a quarterly chart 2004 - 2016 - the flatline in the middle is when I was exclusive at iStock (I changed the colors as I was finding their color choices too hard to follow)



I've seen two fall-off-a-cliff declines - one before I left for iStock and one since. Each time, when I saw things drop I uploaded a bit more (with things that I know sell as they're selling elsewhere) and when things just kept dropping anyway, I suspended uploading as a waste of time.

In the first dropoff, Achilles had responded to a forum post where there were complaints about sales declining saying that it was odd to see as my portfolio had gotten better (but he didn't offer any sort of explanation). I know people have posted about DT's model of sharing the wealth by rotating who gets sales when, but who knows what they're doing.

What I can see is that images sell at some agencies or don't at others. My income grows at some agencies or doesn't at others. If my images were crap they wouldn't sell anywhere. Bottom line is that I think the decline is entirely down to problems at DT.

The other observation is that for all their pricing games, I had a better Q4 in 2006 than I did in 2014 (for revenue). The complexity of pricing hasn't helped them or me IMO.

You can resubmit on Shutterstock as long as you fix whatever the problem was stated to be - people can and do upload what was rejected without changing it, but if they notice and you do it a lot, you may get a warning.

I think you need to consider what people use stock images for and try to avoid uploading images that have very little chance of selling. To pick an example of something I can't imagine a commercial use for (and which I'm very surprised SS accepted):

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=427349176

Compare that with something like this (and look at the keywords on this one compared to yours too - I've noted keywording next)

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=151170485

Not only is this a lovely image, it could be used in many ways. See examples in use here, here here and here

Bear in mind there are 23,000+ images of dry stone walls on Shutterstock, so this isn't an underserved category.

Keywording: If you upload images of places, make sure you identify location in detail - whether the place is for tourists or business conventions or something else, making sure you have city, country, area or region within the country as well as details about any significant buildings. Your keywording seems very sparse to me - you must not spam, but you should try to make sure you've covered all the things you see, place/location information and variations, such as house and home, shovel and spade and so on.

Shutterstock's review process isn't the best - they aren't predictable or consistent, so it makes learning difficult. Once upon a time, I'd have said that iStock was the best training ground given their inspection criteria but I don't think that's the case any more. Other than their rather bizarre policy on similars, Dreamstime is probably the least random of the current agencies.

And upload more as noted above!  Good luck

... but i only can see whining and crying without any proper explanation.

Why would you ask people you characterize as whining and crying for their opinions? You clearly don't think much of us/them/whoever you're criticizing...

Just curious, are you a shutterstock staff member?


died from overdrawn

No. Have never worked for them or any agency. Why would you think I was staff?

After Scott Braut left, SS  doesn't come here any more

Of course it's possible that sales don't show up - we place a huge amount of trust in the agencies to do what they say they are doing. However, if they ever got caught deliberately not reporting sales, the blowback would be huge, so I'm guessing that for the larger agencies all we will see are (a) mistakes because of software failures or (b) delays in reporting because of varying timetables for updates.

I think the image stats says it's updated once a day, but may not always be that frequent. With the iOS app, I see that when an image sells for the first time, it shows up in the day's sales, but if you click on the thumbnail to look at the details (upload date and number of downloads plus a larger picture) you will see 0 downloads.

You'd think the app would add the sale it's reporting to the total from prior days, but it clearly doesn't. I don't know how quickly those stats update.

SS said in its last quarterly report that it was revamping all its software, so possibly these quirks will go away once they're done. Or like the forever-in-beta image stats feature, it'll just lumber along unchanged

... Some people thinking abilities shock me.

I think you're missing a lot of context and history and looking solely at your drop in sales.

I'm not sure as I don't sell at Fotolia any more, but I thought that you could not separate DPC sales from sales through Adobe Stock or Fotolia's own site except for guesswork based on the amount of the sale. If that's the case, while the drop is not in dispute, the cause may be.

As far as the history part of it, the toxic part of DPC, which is wholly and completely different from the introduction of microstock back in 2000 (ish), is that DPC was designed to undercut other players by swiping customers and did not expand the pool of buyers in any way.

Microstock changed the sourcing of images (larger group of contributors from a much wider circle geographically), the platform for selling them (the internet with largely automated platforms open 24/7/365) and the prices - small businesses, non-profits and other groups who couldn't possibly afford the big-budget prices of Getty, Corbis, Jupiter Images et al. flocked to the micros and expanded the market for purchase of stock images and illustrations.

Subscription were not new with microstock sites, but the model that they offered was a commitment to a high volume of images on a regular basis - 750 a month, initially limited to 25 a day versus whenever you liked - $199 a month but only if you committed to that for a year.

DPC gave away the content for essentially no commitment at all - all that transparent rubbish about limit who could "join" was pathetic marketing sleight of hand. No new buyer pool, no innovation of any kind. Just a hope to draw away buyers from other sites.

Your DPC cash (if that's what it was) would have dried up anyway - if it hadn't been DPC being shut down it would have been when the next DPC-like scuzz buckets undercut DPC using similar tactics. Any boost in your income was inevitably going to be temporary as this thieving of other sites customers by cutting prices is truly not a sustainable business long term.

Fortunately, other people saw DPC for the cancer it was and tried (with some success) to cut off its blood supply - content for the collection. Millions of images left Fotolia when they foolishly said at first that was the only way to opt out of DPC.

So yes, some people's thinking does shock me too - just not the same thinking that shocks you.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but your keywording is really awful as well. You have many that bear no relation to the image they supposedly describe.

To take one of the few actual images in your portfolio as an example, you have bicycle, jogging, chair, cardio, city, couple, building as keywords and those items aren't in this image of a park. You do have park, but not trees, or sun, or grass or other things that might actually be useful to buyers.

https://us.fotolia.com/id/102642911

Assuming you decide to change what you're uploading to things that might have better sales potential than all those words and fake flag-like things, having good, accurate, descriptive keywords is important for buyers to find your work.

I don't see a link to your portfolio in your original post, just the main site, so without any idea of what you shoot, here are a couple of suggestions - which are slight variation's on Sean's advice to think about what else you might shoot.

Assuming your technical skills (shooting and post processing) are where they need to be, think about some subjects you might consider shooting. Use Shutterstock for a site to research with because for the moment, for the microstock agencies, it's probably the best and largest collection. Search the site using some likely keywords for those subjects. How many results are there? What do you see in the first few hundred?

If there are 100 or 200 total results, you're probably looking at a low demand subject and unless you think something might change, there is probably not a lot of reason to try to add to the content. An exception to that? A few years back I got Bell's Palsy. I didn't see much in the way of images on Shutterstock so thought that might be worth shooting. It has been - not a mega seller, but based on seeing images of a skin condition sell well a few years before that, I concluded that when there's something you can't easily fake and various businesses who deal with that situation might need the images, it was a reasonable bet (and only cost my time versus any cash outlay).

Another exception: if you think there's a small demand, and none of the stuff already there is all that good, *and* you can add some content for no cost and very little time, then give it a try. You can build up a number of modest niches (especially if it's a subject that will age well - i.e. not anything dependent on technology or clothes/hair styles) that can keep the income growing.

If you see many thousands or tens of thousands of results, you have a possible candidate, but you have to look at whether you can do something better or different or local to carve out a niche for yourself. Perhaps you have a friend who hikes or climbs or builds boats or ... who might be able to give you some good shots. You can consider shots with a person in them (which need a model release) but show only their hands or just in the distance (i.e. not their face if there are concerns about having images of themselves for sale).

If you see hundreds of thousands (and your keyword isn't woman) then probably there's not much reason to try and add something as there's so much already there.

Good luck

...Replying to every single one of them would be quite a long task

I wasn't expecting something handcrafted for me. I was expecting that they'd pay enough attention to the words in the generic e-mail to have them be appropriate.

It's the lack of any attention to detail that bothers me, not any sense of personal entitlement.

My soul cries!

^^ The one phrase that spammy scum doesn't have