How are sales going with you all?  Mine were fabulous in December, but January has fallen like a rock.  As if all customers were designing Christmas cards and stopped after New Year.  As Canva is new, I'm not sure what caused this :  growing number of images, change in search algorithm, or just a slow month.

All my Christmas images were uploaded at the beginning of October and are still not online, so I'm seeing a nice steady pace of sales

January is always lower than the go-go months of the fall - I have great Christmas sales at SS and they always settle back down in the New Year - so I wouldn't see this pattern at Canva being at all out of line

I saw income growth of 17.6% in 2014 at PhotoDune. I did submit some files, but stopped after some mass rejections (for which you never have a reason if you don't want individual e-mails), so most of that growth is from the site doing more business, not me adding images.

However, a whole year at PhotoDune is a bad month at SS

They are beating CanStock (almost double for 2014 as CanStock sinks over prior year income).

Clearly their bread and butter is elsewhere and stock photos are an afterthought. In the year in review text, the section titled Photos had text that was all about video...

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/shutterstock-looks-for-m-a-when-it-works-ceo-jon-oringer-3_lW_4d8TvSIHiPnDx00BQ.html?cmpid=yhoo

Somewhat rambling interview by Bloomberg news with Jon Oringer about the Rex and Premium Beat acquisitions.

There's talk in there about there being many more people with smartphones at events than professional photographers and his thought that SS can help those people monetize their editorial content. He also talks about the importance of the relationships Rex staff had with their clients and suppliers for editorial photos. Not clear to me that those two things can co-exist.

He was also asked about organic growth versus more M&A and he said they'd do more mergers if they found the right one, but planned to grow organically. No one asked if the BigStock acquisition was an example of a failed M&A

Not new. They've been trying to get contributors to do that one for years.

Except when they want the opposite.

I had a couple of collages of travel images that I tried to submit to DT a year or two ago. The rejection I received for those is to split them up and sell individually!

My all time favorite for an insane DT rejection was for including a model release in a closeup of a face in profile - I was told to resubmit it without one.

I should send someone there a copy of a favorite book of mine, The Death of Common Sense

Why does anyone care if someone is taking IS for a ride?  I don't condone it and sure there will be a reckoning at some point but not gonna waste any sympathy on either party.

It's less about any harm done to iStock than it is harm done to all of us if the marketplace looks - to buyers, who are the ones making this all possible - like a sleazy back alley where you never know what you're getting or who you can trust. Ideally (and I realize we're not there), it should be a fair, honest and well regulated marketplace where buyers get a reasonable deal and know what they're paying for.

The harm to the buyer in this scenario, if they buy from iStock, is that they've paid a premium price for something that should have been main collection (not cheap, but not premium). A low level ripoff.

iStock tool the first image reported down within a few hours, so they were responsive once told.

'getty' has meaning beyond Gettyimages. Paul J Getty was a famous American industrialist. There is a Getty museum. If you search for 'gettyimages' in that search, it is not as impressive as 'getty'.

I typed Getty and selected "Getty Images Media Company" from the list, so these were without the other Getty entities

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=shutterstock%2C%20fotolia%2C%20istock%2C%20%2Fm%2F01wxvs%2C%20%2Fm%2F09g6tbj&cmpt=q&tz=

Getty Images is now about even with iStock and just above Dreamstime

...I don't know how reliable this numbers are, but iStock's drop in the Alexa ranking certainly reflect my personal decrease in sales pretty well...

Look at it another way, iStock's drop from early last year to now (in global Alexa rankings) is much, much larger than the other major players. I took a Getty & Thinkstock number from after their March announcement of free linking for most images (because their ratings really jumped up after that), but otherwise the numbers are from March 4, 2014 to Jan 12 2014.

iStock has dropped 49.5%, SS has dropped 27.3%, Dreamstime dropped 27%, Getty dropped 27.6%, Thinkstock 30%

Whatever overall changes might have affected the rankings for stock agencies as a group, iStock stands out as having had a much larger traffic drop. There might certainly be situations where revenues and income were up even on lower traffic (switching to fewer, much higher priced sales, for example) but given the earnings reports I read and what I hear from departing exclusives and even a few hanging on, that's not happening.

The Nashville Business Journal article referenced in another article about Mr. Prescott's ill-advised dating choices had a couple of priceless quotes about Dreamstime and its contributors:

"Dreamstime is like an online "American Idol" television show for unsung photographers all over the globe, says Jeff Prescott, co-owner and Brentwood-based chief operating officer."

A quote from Serban there ""We run 10 times less hardware than our competitors do at about the same level of traffic," he says." and goes about efficiency versus competitors. What we see a number of years later is that inefficient old Shutterstock generates me about 5x the sales volume (and rising because DT sales are slumping) DT does.

"The company turned down a buyout offer from Microsoft two years ago because they believed their proprietary business model is worth more than the proposed buyout, Prescott says.
"We could have all walked away very wealthy," he says. "We had to delightfully decline because we thought we were worth four times what they offered."
Prescott wouldn't say how much Microsoft offered, but says Dreamstime is worth $25 million to $30 million because of its advanced proprietary software and infrastructure, intellectual capital experience and position in the marketplace.". Then there's a correction at the end saying that he "misspoke" and that buyout offers had been received but none from Microsoft

There is a more recent - April 2014 - article about another Dreamstime founder with an interesting quote at the end "...we just continue to grow our customer base and gain more of the market share,� she said. �There�s a vast market out there for stock photography and our goal is to be more visible.�

It's hard to say accurately, but I'd guess that Dreamstime's share is falling - because the market overall is growing faster than it is.

And I agree with the comment that getting involved with a publicity hound is unlikely to end well

Come to mention it, did anyone get a Xmas card from them this year?

Not this year - last year I did. I guess I must have been on the naughty list?

I posted this before I read the remainder of this thread...a bit more heat than light...

However, regarding SS, they're producing earnings for us, but I don't have any especially warm feelings towards them as an agency.

Kudos for building up a business from scratch to a profitable public company, and having it continue to grow at a rate that Getty - whose chickens are coming home to roost, IMO - would envy (their revenues are falling).

Kudos for having a site that has probably the best uptime and no-drama-software-updates track record among the micros.

But they do the least they need to in order for the images to keep coming and don't really go the extra mile for contributors. They haven't explicitly cut our earnings, but they have avoided sharing any additional revenue with contributors where they can (flat rate for ELs that didn't go up when they offered more expensive small-volume EL packages, for example) and have refused anything even approaching transparency on the SOD licenses where we're supposed to be happy about bigger numbers without ever knowing what that license is for.

The introduction of BigStock subscriptions at rock bottom royalties with no opt out - cleverly silencing those in the Bridge program by paying them their SS 38 cents - was a disgrace, IMO, and I left BigStock after being refused an opt out. I'm glad they haven't ported that royalty scheme to SS, but as far as what I read here, these screw-the-contributor moves haven't set BigStock sales on fire, so I'm not sure what they got in return for the ill will that generated.

I recently watched a documentary about George Westinghouse, an inventor and industrialist from the age of the Robber Barons who built his many companies while still being very generous to his workers - much to the consternation of his fellow industrialists. You can be fair to suppliers and workers and still build successful businesses - even though that isn't the norm now and wasn't then either. I'm not willing to give SS a woo-yay just because they have done well by competing on price with the established robber baron (Getty) and built a profitable business from which I have benefitted.

SS deserves recognition for a significant accomplishment, but I'm not feeling the "Bravo" myself.

Probaly looking at my port there Jo Ann

David, No!!

I had a look through your Shutterstock portfolio and I can assure you that none of the stuff that prompted my snarky comment above was your work

I shouldn't have have let my tongue loose, but the general point stands I think, that the impression you get when looking at any of the image categories is very different from what you see at the top tier agencies.

Old un-reviewed images - from next week we'll be working through the backlog from the back, so you'll notice review taking longer overall, but they won't be out of order anymore.

Happy to hear it. I realize it will all take a while to clear out, but things will be moving.

I think a soft rejection is the equivalent of iStock's "Can Resubmit" and hard the equivalent of "No Resubmit".  So something missing a model/property release might be a soft rejection and something out of focus a hard rejection? If the subject matter is something they don't want, then it'd probably be hard rejection as it's not something you can fix

...If you are a non-EU individual seller, a brief warning on the checkout screen to indicate that you do not collect VAT, somewhat like Jo Ann has suggested, should be sufficient for now until the situation has been clarified by the EU ...

Thanks for bringing up that the checkout page - for Symbiostock it's the cart page - should have a notice. I've added one there as well. Here's a screenshot of the two places I've added text, on the front page and the cart page. Click on the thumbnail to see full size.