When did you sign up there? SS has a honeymoon period for new contributors that expires after a while. Then, it's just marriage.  You'll have to keep feeding the beast regularly after that, or sales might go down by 50%.

December 2006. Does that mean my honeymoon is over? 

I can't say I've seen a pattern between lower IS earnings and TS opening in my numbers. My April was amazing at IS and May & March were good. It's only been June and July at IS that have been low. SS has been low as well those two months, so I'm thinking more of a slump. It could be more, but so many things have changed in the last year at IS. I can't see how anyone could pin an explanation on any one particular cause.

Quote from: cthoman on July 30, 2010, 16:23

Sweet! I just hit gold, so this is like a double raise.

Congrats on gold Cory!  I love your illustration style

Thanks. I saw your big milestone the other day and thought I'd at least pretend to keep up. Congrats to all the other newly minted canisters as well.

Hopefully, this change lasts. I remember back a few years ago the upload limits used to change weekly.

I can't say I could really single out DT for anything. They all have the same problems with rejections. I think if they let you in as a contributor, they should accept your images barring any major flaws or mistakes (hey, we all make them). To avoid garbage, just be more picky on who you let in or cull non selling images every few years. Maybe, even kick people out that are just taking up space. To avoid similar images, they should just group a series under one image. So, only one or two images show up in the search, but buyers can see the rest from a link or lightbox on that image.

A lot of these agencies seem to have evolved very little. Their solution was just to reject more, rather than try to actually solve their problems. It would be nice if we, the contributors, had a little more say on how our images are sold because I'm thinking we could probably make both the agencies and us more money if they gave us more control.

Why waste your time?

You could probably say that about most queries for artwork or freelance, but you still have to answer them to find the occasional good client mixed in. 

The site design looks nice. The "info" page was a little light on details. Image formats available (tiffs, vectors, etc.), using your own url, IPTC friendly, and is there a size limit for those 5000 images were just a few questions I had.

BTW, the student wrote me back and said that she contacted someone else who was happy to let her use their images for free. 

So all is right with the world. 

Text book case.  All you can tell people is that you run your business in the way that you have found works for you and stick to it. You can't match every price out there (especially if that price is free). Hopefully, they'll respect you for it or recognize the difference between your work and others. If not, then I guess you can't please everyone.

You mean you don't get at least one of these a month? I thought request for free stuff was pretty common. I always just politely refuse.

I thoroughly agree with this. Nobody can really predict anything. However its funny how since 2-3 years (my "age" in this business) the subject "oh man, the end is near!!" is constantly brought up on the table on every stock board.

I can't claim to have been in this industry for as many years as others, but I think the only thing that doesn't change is that someone is always going to be saying that this or that will destroy the industry.

Still, ShutterStock originally was an advocate of photographers and graphics designers.  They severely lost their way...

You're not invited to the party and you don't get any cake. 

If you make your illustrations in Illustrator, none of your gradients should rasterize in eps 8. I save all my files in eps 8 and have never had any problems. I've heard that Inkscape rasterrizes gradients, but I don't know a lot about the program. To check for any raster elements, open the links palette in Illustrator.

Interesting stats. I knew most contributors didn't do well, but that seems like it's even worse than I thought. I guess the only thing that isn't necessarily factored in is the money. A photo could outsell my vector file 10 to 1 and we'd still make the same money. What is the average photo sale on IS? Did that go up since the exclusive hike or are most of the top contributors not exclusive?