They reply in an hour now. Just expect sugestion to join SS in back mail

haha.. got it! 

I'm not guessing.

 

I suspected that income had dropped and some people did well in the early years with referral income. Too bad, sounds like you worked very hard to get 900. Leaf probably still has a good group too.

Fortunately, I didn't do much to get that number.

At first I wanted just one to pass the review and get accepted. I don't know if there's still a list, but when I could see it, there was only one. Which says something to me about the real number of working contributors vs the 75,000 number that some report.

When there were roughly 33,000 active users on record, (2012) half had 100 or less images.

Anyone can make their own guesses from that.

Out of my 900+ referrals, I think less than 10 got some images online. Only one guy has more than 500, others have less than 50 as I remember. I even don't bother about checking those anymore.

Seems like Pareto principle dominates here too. It definitely applies to my port.

It was fun but unless someone has about 1000 referrals, it's not a way to earn like it once was.

I have more than 900 referrals, but my last month referral earning was less than $3.00 (many people cannot get enough number of photos accepted). It's more or less same in every month. There is no point of referring SS anymore.

I'm referring to official sites:
Desktop: http://submit.shutterstock.com
Mobile: http://submit.shutterstock.com/mobile/

Have anyone else noticed that number of downloads per images shown in mobile and desktop SS contributor websites are different? Desktop website normally show less number of downloads than what mobile site shows.

Best Month Ever = newbie response
Worst Month Ever = veteran response

I've finally come to accept that it's virtually impossible for an ms vet to get past the dreaded wall, and here's why...

If a newbie has a port of 50 images one month, and 100 the next, his/her port size went up 100%.
In that same month, the total images on any given site went up from, say, 25 to 26 million images, an increase of 4%.  As long as the rookie's percentage rate of port increase beats the total image percentage of increase, he/she can see fantastic growth.

But if a veteran has a port of 5000 images one month and 5,100 the next, his/her port size went up  just 2%.  Compared to the 4% monthly growth in total images available on the agencies, the ms vet is going backward, and will see less money each month.

Of course, there are other factors such as monthly variations (March is always a better month than April, December is always much worse than January).  So run the same calculation on an annual basis.  Depressing, depressing results.

It's a numbers game, and once your port is a certain size, and as the agencies keep growing at an incredible rate, you WILL start going backward.  I denied this reality for a long time, insisting that I could overcome the wall by finding niches and meeting an aggressive daily quota, and I may have held back the wall for a year or two by doing this, but it ended up crushing me. 

I've got nearly double the port size I had two years ago, and I'm averaging a few dollars less every day.  And I expect two years from now to be making even less.  For the first time in nearly 8 years of doing this, I feel very negative about microstock.

Totally agree. I think everyone would be happy if SS increase their payments by ~5% for every $10,000 lifetime earnings after first $10,000. Otherwise, for veterans who has already reached $10,000 lifetime earnings, it's not fair. I think this is not a big deal for a big company like SS. Even small companies increase their employees salaries once a year (OK, we are not really employees of SS, but they cannot do it without us). We are not asking for this hard enough. Many people has changed from their full-time jobs to work as a full-time micro stock contributor after seeing the growth of income in first couple of years. However, they simply have to end up by disappointing themselves after couple of more years, after their income just freezes or even goes backward. We need to make a big shout and ask for a change.

I thought people asked so many questions from me, because they wanted to give some useful recommendations... seems not 

In terms of income:
+51% compared to April 2014
+312% compared to May 2013

In terms of downloads:
+40% compared to April 2014
+256% compared to May 2013

For stock videos 

April was OK, and May started slowly for me. Seems it's catching up now.

Why?

Because I lost some of my photos, and only SS has them at the moment. This can happen to anyone...