Quote from: Artist on August 16, 2017, 14:30
Skrill will be my last choice always, pathetic service with too many charges.
Payoneer is good for those countries who do not have paypal in operation.

I think currently I will stick with paypal

Biggest difference between Paypal and Payoneer for me:
a) Prepayed Mastercard connected to Payoneer account - If I remember Paypal have something similar but for US citizens only
    You could use your card on any ATM but If you are using Mastercard for buying products, services and paying bills you can minimize withdrawal fees.
b) Virtual US bank account so US clients could pay directly to your US bank account number which is also important to me because microstock is just a part of my photo/video business.

In short: NEW IMAGES ARE NOT SELLING BECAUSE SS SEARCH ENGINE IS CONFIGURED LIKE THAT.
Explanation: It was a part of SS fight against spam, there are exceptions from that rule like new contributors not older than 6 months.

Comments on comments:

"Is same happening with you guys?" - Yes

"No. My new images sell in around 3-4 days. Some sell almost instantly" - How long are you on SS with your current account?

"I just rely on the fact that my new images will become old and they will begin to sell" - Yes if your profile doesn't have high ammount of "spam points"

"Would be interesting to know if the sites push down new images from people that are on higher commission tiers" - Yes managers at SS called that KPI indicator

"It's been variable - some new images sell right away, some almost never and many others seem to take a couple of months before they get discovered" - new images sells right away if the buyer search exactly enough so you don't have high concurrency, rest of them sells after couple of months and even more.

"I suspect their search is shifted to new contributors to lower payouts and increase profits (earnings)" - Exactly, main KPI indicator is to raise profit, so they must cut their expenses.

"Uploaded yesterday and sold today, but generally it's slow going at first" - Editorial photos have different search engine rules, if this is editorial photo. In case it's not than buyer probably search exactly enough for you to be on first pages.

"content does not sell as a whole , but there are always outliers, or exceptions" - Yes, keep in mind that search engine rules (parameters) are very complex and could be changed on daily basis so it is very hard to recognize "patterns". Business intelligence engine with data mining could automatically change search engine parameters every single day based on daily analysis what is currently most profitable  search engine strategy, for stock holders off course.

"If something new sells, it sells for a couple of times and then usually disappears; never to sell again" - Your were lucky that buyer searched exactly enough.

"The upload age doesn't matter as much as what is the image! New and old sell if buyers want them" - Yes it matters, new content is not selling except in a few exceptions like new contributors or specific content or exact buyer search, etc...

"The same image on different sites with the same keywords have a different behaviour" - that's normal, even in a fair play buyers are not the same.

Quote from: Pauws99 on July 10, 2017, 06:25

Quote from: derek on July 10, 2017, 06:01
None of this makes any sense at all. How do you explain the incredible drop of exactly 50% straight down the line and almost to the penny hitting everyone I know that joined about 10 years back and all with commercial high-value portfolios including myself of course.

No not a conspiracy but certainly the search is manipulated killing off many contributors and aiding some other sections.

I'm still not sure whether you consider SS geniuses for being able to construct such an amazing algorithm or idiots. I reckon if they can  manipulate the internet market like that they should be nominated for the nobel prize for economics. is it exactly 50% over the same period?

Big words, in reality they "manipulate" only with their own search engine to achieve their goals, financially related goals like maximizing profit and non-financial related like fighting against spam.
Btw all our newly uploaded images in compare to older ones are currently treated like a spam by SS search engine until proved otherwise (you have to get some sales to deserve non-spam ranking), which is the main reason why new images are rarely sold since 2016. Exceptions are new contributor's images and images which are very specific.

OK, time for data mining part 2:
Q:What is the reason of capped income?
A:To keep largest possible number of contributors satisfied (with dimes).
FACT: Despite the strong words, 99% percent of contributors will be satisfied with any income no matter how small it is.
COMMENT: Comrade Stalin wasn't stupid at all, he figured it out without computers and fancy search engine algorithms.

p.s. I'm doing just fine with monthly variation of income less than 2% for the last 12 months. May was exception and up because of two huge direct sales at the end of the month (last two days) but June was down for exactly the same percentage, and both combined had variation of less then 1% from monthly average.  This is still good source of income for me, but I'm just a little unsatisfied because I'm not in control of anything anymore if I want to play legally. Just like * casino.

Agree, there is no need for a new thread because algorythm could be changed constantly.
It also could be tested locally on some "samples" (read: contributors and/or customers) and then applied globally.
Maybe it will be better to open "Data mining for dummies" thread if there are enough members interested in that.
As example:
After association rules learning (which is for example contributors behaviour), anomaly detection task kick in every time when something unusual happened.
That unusual could be contributors unexpected income which is treating like a data error and must be corrected in according to association rules.
In short, for every unexpected sales, most of the time you will be punished in the next period.
End of lesson one.

Quote from: Pauws99 on June 13, 2017, 13:35

Quote from: angelawaye on June 13, 2017, 13:24
Congrats! That is very good news to hear.

In a recent thread there were conspiracies of "capped earnings" - when you reach a certain point they turn your port off.

Let us know how the rest of your June goes so we can help prove or disprove these theories Will sales keep going great or fall off the cliff.

I think people carrying on believing what they want to believe.....good sales = "I'm a brilliant photographer" bad sales=  "SS have a vendetta against experienced/high earning/American/new content"

Angela, I like your stubborn artistic style, really. I'm not a conspiracy theorist of capped earnings, I'm highly paid IT engineer, specialist for BI and data mining. I am trained to recognize those patterns because my daily job is to do the similar things for some big internet retail companies.

Btw, in case you didn't read his answer here it is from another thread:

"i scraped bme, but 85% of my earnings happened in the first 12 days, the other 15% of the earnings took 18 days. absolute car crash, not complaining i made bme, but had the rate of the first 12 days continued then i would probably have doubled my bme. they tweaked the search in the first part of the month which benefited me, and then it was switched off again. probably a test or something. i remember an old thread where people came in happy reporting a spike in earnings and ss came in and said it was a mistake, an algorithm went live that wasnt supposed to go live, so there you go"

Quote from: niktol on June 01, 2017, 13:17
It is not mathematically possible to earn more monthly than the market value produced by a contributor per month. That's your cap, right there, everyone's got one, and everyone's is different. Unless you consider the market value of your every image/pic/clip infinite. Then we are talking about a different kind of cap altogether...

Regarding cap, this is not my direct answer on your comment but I would like to share something special that happened to me these days.

Ok, story goes like this, seems like two of my buyers forgot to spend some money on images before the end of the month. They are from two different continents, they are buying different content and there is no chance that they know each other. On Tuesday 30th of May one of them from Europe targeted directly one of my sets bought huge number of images, actually more than my weekly sales from all customers. I had sales of big licences in the past but never so much downloads in one day. On Wednesday 31th of May happened something very similar, another customer from a different part of the world targeted directly my images bought even bigger amount of images from a few different sets but there is obvious consistency between those images and I was very happy because that looked like a legitimate sale and I was also happy because those two almost doubled my monthly sales on Shutterstock.

But most interesting things happened yesterday and today. Before that I would like to explain someting about my sales. I'm selling a lot of images, for years I didn't have a day without sale, mostly because of good diversity of regional and niches coverage. For that reason big holidays, weekends, seasonal fluctuations are not hurting ma sales too much. Even on a worst day of a year I'm selling at least dozen of images on Shutterstock. Ok let's get to the point now. Yesterday on Thursday 1st of June after 2 consecutive days of huge sales I had 0 sales. That happened on Thursday which is statistically my best selling day in a week for a years on Shutterstock. I'm writing this on Friday, it is 5pm in Europe and I also have 0 sales today. I tried to calculate probability for this to be happened accidentaly but I stoped when it passed 1:1.000.000.

After this if you are still not convinced that search engine cap exists then you'll never be. Search engine recognized huge deviation in my sales caused by those two customers and now it is trying to "fix" that during next period.

p.s. There is a possibility of some technical error on Shutterstock servers for last two days but nobody reports it so I assume that I have a problem with search engine because of previous "unexpected" sales

Quote from: Anja_Kaiser on June 01, 2017, 01:25
Super interesting read, mb! Thanks a lot!

Quote from: mb on May 31, 2017, 14:46
Keep an eye on that I am expecting that to be changed in next few months and I'm expecting that contributors which are not posting at all to go down even faster when that happened. My advice is: don't be lazy, keep uploading and keywording but don't publish them until new stuff will start to sell again.

Does that mean that the search algorithm actually "reacts" to *uploads* rather than images someone gets *approved*?
Say, if I'd upload and keyword them, but don't send them to the review team, they'd still positively influence the placement of my port/active images?

I think that search algorythm reacts also to uploads only but it is so not important factor.
That is a part of measurement on contributor activity which also has influence of your ratings.
If you are not active rating of your files will become lower, but it is not simple and linear for all files.
It depends on a various things from files "history".

Not sure about this, but my expirience also is that there are some "thresolds" for inactivity. If you are inactive for a certain period of time you won't experience constant drop of sales, but at some point there will be a huge drop and after that if you continue not to publish your files you will have another period of  constant sales on that lower level until next threshold.

More important why I said that is that because current solution of a spam problem is not viable in a long term. There are millions on new files every month which are not selling at all. IT costs raises and there is no income from new content to cover those costs. Algorythm must be changed in next few months, new files from old contributors will probably get higher priority and when that happened it will be good to have a lot of new files prepared for immediate publishing.

Quote from: Anja_Kaiser on June 01, 2017, 01:25
And wouldn't those images be already buried (due to their older image number and date they were uploaded) when I finally publish them later on?

No they won't, approval date counts for "new image" status, not upload date or image id.

Quote from: LDV81 on May 31, 2017, 23:22

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11

About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month.

I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.

For those testing Ghost VPN works excellent, you can jump quicky from one country to another. Also new anonymous browser session will get rid of a cookies from previous session.

Quote from: LDV81 on May 31, 2017, 17:08

Hmm, around 2011 I deleted and tried to re-upload 1 photo, because it hadn't taken off and I thought it was a good one and deserved more downloads. What happened then: the photo was rejected because the system recognized that it was re-uploaded and I got a warning.
I don't know how they treat this these days...

Back then, I think a second or third warning meant you were a goner.

All you have to do back then and now is to change file name and file checksum. There are very simple utility programs for batch processing names and check sums of your files. If you change the name and content for 1 single byte file is not the same. I also batch changed some exif data but that is not necessary.

Quote from: LDV81 on May 31, 2017, 17:08

As you write, you don't intend to re-upload them, but I don't think having more images in the portfolio can hurt your video sales... It would make no sense. Why should the algorithm reward contributors who delete their stuff? How does it benefit SS? Correlation does not mean causation.

If that was helpful, people would just delete their stuff to game the system and grow their earnings. It would make more sense to penalize people who regularly delete their stuff.

I didn't said that, I replied to Video-StockORG comment with this:
"Depending on their behaviour and behaviour of their buyers some users will notice cap for the number of monthly downloads but I didn't find that downloads of photos and videos are related, so it probably won't help but if you delete your images and keep the same cap of monthly downloads than great for you."

As you see I also wasn't sure that would help because I wasn't tested mixed photo/video content at the same time. But if Video-StockORG really suffers from downloads/period cap it could help to delete photos because videos have greater value per file.

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
Your post is really interesting and I believe that something is true.
But the whole line of reasoning has no commercial/economic sense at all.

About financial reason, if SS intention would be to reduce the money monthly payout to contributors, why some months ago they gave opportunities to lower the minimum payout? At the contrary they should increse it. Now they have to pay people that earn 30$/month only. Why?

There is a lot of reasoning but you have to think like a Shutterstock management. Keep in mind that I didn't said that they want to keep contributor's money as long as possible. Collecting debt is not good for a "healthy" business. They just wan't to sell as more as possible while paying to contributors as little as possible. One example is by proritizing contributors with lower fees/rates.

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?

Sorry I can't tell you that exactly, lets say that I was playing with a portfolio of 5000+ images in a different period of time testing different kind of exposures depending on my status, on my content, on my uploading behaviour, my buyers behaviour...Sorry I can't tell you anymore.

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?

Does those images have similar relative position if you search for them with more specific keywords?

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
I think that all is connected to number of new files uploaded.
Number of file makes day by day harder to be in good position, simply this.

That is not so simple but in general, yes it is true.
But I think that only images which have at least one sell counts.

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
Obviously, for sure, there are search algorythm adjusting: and it's absolutely obvious that sometimes new contributors could have good rating, because they give more money to the agency. But giving this as a normal rule would expose the agency itself to a great risk.

So what you are not calculating in your statistics is the risk of the agency to give its buyers low value images. And this is still a point for big buyers (surely not for a single buyer)

There is some period for a new contributors to establish their sales and rules for their images are different during that period. Best approach for "newbies" is to prepare thousands of images in advance and than start to publish them with high frequency and high rate, as example 100 images every day.

Quote from: angelawaye on May 31, 2017, 12:50
I don't care what your theories are mb, I will never spam my images. It isn't in my blood.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to you or anybody else that you should spam Shutterstock.
I'm just explaining existing reality and off course I appreciate your attitude.

Quote from: angelawaye on May 31, 2017, 12:50
I'm not sure if this is entirely correct. I was uploading more in the beginning of the year and my sales actually went DOWN. I have stopped uploading and my sales are stabilizing - but never like before the crash in 2016. I'm still down 35-40% of what I was making but at least my earning are not going down past that ....

If new images are not selling at all there is very little you can do to raise search engine positions of your images.
If you didn't change your marketing approach, fluctuations of your sales mainly depends on a periodical market fluctuations and current market conditions for your type of images.
In short I don't have enough information but there is a reason for that behaviour and if you continue not to post your images until the end of the year it will unfortunately continue to go down.

Quote from: angelawaye on May 31, 2017, 12:50
I appreciate your input though. You are right about new images not selling at all.

Keep an eye on that I am expecting that to be changed in next few months and I'm expecting that contributors which are not posting at all to go down even faster when that happened. My advice is: don't be lazy, keep uploading and keywording but don't publish them until new stuff will start to sell again.

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on May 31, 2017, 08:52
We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock. We had hundred of images for half a year and they were just crushing down our video sales. We will see what the next few months will bring after we deleted them.

Depending on their behaviour and behaviour of their buyers some users will notice cap for the number of monthly downloads but I didn't find that downloads of photos and videos are related, so it probably won't help but if you delete your images and keep the same cap of monthly downloads than great for you.

Not directly related to your comment but it is related to deleting:
As far as I know deleting images won't change anything significant in a search position of your files.
Btw until those search engine changes were implemented in the second half of 2016. newly uploaded files had high priority.
That was the old search engine logic "customers wants new content" so prioritize new content.
Problem with that logic was that it could be easily exploited by contributors with massive deleting and adding the same files again and again.
Using that perfectly legal spam technique it was possible to significantly raise your income.
Among other spam pratices that was also "fixed" in the second half of 2016. so new files now have minimum priority.

No selling of new files (for most of the contributors and most of the time) looks confusing because it is not related to financial results but it is Shutterstock method of fighting against different kind of spams.
Other methods and campaigns so far were unsuccessful and other potential solutions costs too much.
Spam sells very rarely, so they prioritizes old stuff which had sales.
Algorythm is a little bit different for brand new contributors but it equalizes after a few months.
It is very rigid now and I expect some refines because it is almost impossible to sell good new stuff these days.
My expirience of that behaviour is that sells only stuff directly targeted from buyers by very specific keywords, artist id...
Everything else newly uploaded is a collateral damage of spam wars.
Some contributors which stops uploading are partially right because that stuff will never sell well even if they refine their algorythms.
But on the other hand they are wrong because lower intensity and frequency of their uploading activity counts also in search engine ordering.
So how to fight against that?
How to upload new stuff which will never sell with minimum effort?
Answer is: become a spammer (to keep frequency and intensity with minimum effort)
Because it is a paradox and they will become aware of that if they are not already, treatment of a newly uploaded stuff must be refined in the future.

Quote from: derek on March 22, 2017, 19:16
I simply have to share this just to see if anybody have experienced the same. To me it seems very very odd indeed.

Last week. thursday.  $. 43.02
                  friday.           43. 93
                  Monday         44.34
                  Tuesday.       43.77

It just seems very funny to me. Is it some sort of a machine haha! determing how much we are going to earn?

Yes exactly, BI machine which prepares input parameters for media database search engine.

I thought I will never post again anything about microstock but here I am first post after 5 years and also first post here on microstockgroup.com forum.
Better late than never, but time has come to bust some myths.
Before my comment let me introduce myself: 8 years in stock, mostly photo and a little bit of video. Photography/videography is not my full time job, that is my hobby and microstock helps me to pay my travel and new photo/video equipment.
My main profession is IT related, BI analytics, data mining and creation of algorythms related to that.
For fun I did a series of experiments during 2016. and 2017. on Shutterstock.

In short, despite a lot of input parameters and dynamic nature of their algorythm it is very clear there is a BI machine which process and analyze sales and feed search engine with those results for every single image in a real time. Goal is obvious and it is not to help to contributors or buyers. KPIs of BI machine are set to maximize Shutterstock profits and other secondary financial parameters.  Most important non-marketing related tool for that purpose is their search engine.

During experiments I tried a lot of things, some of them are illegal by Shutterstock rules and terms of usage so I won't explain them here.

Your small sample of financial data based on a things that I analyzed tells me that you and your buyers were very predictable for BI machine in a previous period of time. No big deviations from expected behaviour. So the sales are in according to that.

In general if you and your buyers are predictable (posting and buying statistics) and you are selling a lot of images every day you will see figures like that. If you continue to act like that in a long term figures will decline slowly which depending on a lot of factors. Most important one is a total number of images in Shutterstock database. Decline could be masked in a few different ways so it won't look the same but if you are persistant and predictable and sales a lot of images everyday you could predict your decline very precisely on a yearly even monthly basis if they are not messing around with parameters which they do from time to time.

I read all comments from this topic and based on my learnings I could give explanation for every behaviour if I have enough informations and time for that.
Some things are not obvious, because machines still can't control humans so if buyers are searching for exact things(artist, picture number, very specific keywords) search algorythm must show your images. There were some reports that in a case of a very specific keywords images were removed from search results but I didn't manage to proove that the images are completely removed from search results. Also contributors and buyers could act unpredictable but BI machine is permanently trying "to fix" that unpredictable behaviour with lower rating of your images.

It is not simple to understand but in general if you are statistically significant seller changing in your sales is directly related to changing your behaviour/status or your buyers behaviour/status or even other contributors status/behaviour with which you are competing for a position in a search engine order.

All of you are probably interested in an answer is it possible to beat their BI machine to get more income with less work instead opposite?
From everything I learned so far the answer is Yes but a) it is not legal, b) it can't be done permanently, c) it is complicated/time consuming
If you want to play legal I think you will have better chances in a casino.

p.s. Sorry for my English, it is not my native language.