Looking through my things although the highest sellers do seem to tally the rest of the portfolio really seems to have nothing in common with the SS popularity and usage ratings at all.

As someone says above, the "Get it now while its hot!" style comments look more to be a psychological nudge.

Given they don't actually define what the words or meanings actually are then its probably not illegal.

OK so January is over so the full scale of the SS level reset can be seen.

For reference i finished the year on levels 5 images and 4 video to give it context and finished January on levels 4/2.



Firstly the earnings graph (actual figures removed due to T&Cs etc etc).
Can see (i) how brutal the reset is and how similar it was to last years as well.  Download numbers also near identical.

Now for the RPDs:


Actually seeing an even lower image RPD than last year although video is *slightly* better.

RPD a mere $0.32 per image (2021 average $0.72) and for video $7.35 (2021 average $12.42)

Unexpectedly given the time of year Adobe provided me with a best month ever in earnings and just over double what SS provided.


In short as expected the level reset makes for a fairly horrible January.  Will see what Feb brings as i slowly crawl back up to where i was before.

2 x 0.25 for the same clip on same day currently....

Not sure i follow what's going on here...

I have a photo in Lightroom, my keywords are always pasted from a .xls in priority order.
On export the "Tags" field shows them in alphabetical in Windows.  In Bridge they also show as alphabetical.

On upload to AS its showing as priority order - can you confirm exactly what exif fields its reading/writing to here as the difference between Bridge and LR seemingly hidden is confusing.

To confuse matters, if i add priority order into Bridge by pasting in (my normal workflow) and upload then it ignores the Bridge changes.

I often import images into LR using non-stock keywords (a persons name, specific location, sometimes a pets name) and the subsection of images i use for stock get re-keyworded after the editing stage so this could affect me.

Im happy that AS  can read keyword order from LR now as it should in theory simplify my workflow but not if its taking ghost keywords that no longer exist...

But mainly my question is, what field is LR writing to and AS reading that i cant see looking at the metadata itself?  (Ive just uploaded 150 images in a batch today so looks like i need to delete, re-export,re-upload).

Im showing almost exactly the same rate of sales (in terms of number of downloads) as last January (with a 8% bigger portfolio).

Im also seeing an identical 75% loss of revenue as last January due to the level reset and time to go back up through them.

SSTK is making money, they are losing money on the majority of 10� downloads. Especially from the 750 packs. How can that be? And personally my downloads volume is down, which means besides making less for each one, I'm getting less volume.

This just doesn't add up?

I suspect they're making money on the 10c massive subscription packages purely because a large number of buyers don't download their full quota every month.
So they get all the package revenue but only pay out for the images sold.

Contrast this to IS who calculate payments based on what was actually bought and sold.

There are 2 ways of looking at this.

If you shoot content specifically to sell on stock than all the equipment, time spent and so on has to be balanced against that so a time or RPD becomes relevant.

However, if you shoot content for elsewhere as part of a day job etc and also upload that to stock then a lot of the gear, time and so on is already invested outside stock so RPD is less relevant and the money is the only useful metric.

Im lucky (or was pre covid!) in that the things i put on stock are almost all obtained and edited as part of the day job so the extra resources needed to upload and keyword are minimal.  So for me theres no real negative shovelling the stuff on even if RPD is low.

Interesting results.  The levels do seem to make a huge hit initially at least.
My portfolio has only increased by maybe 1000 images and 300 video in the last 12 months (covid related lack of work) which is treading water and sinking slightly.

Ive just worked out Adobe in terms of revenue has pulled in $1000 less than Shutterstock *but* due to not having editorial means my portfolio there is smaller.  Its also grown year on year whereas SS has shrunk.  On current trends 2022 could be the year Adobe overtakes SS for total annual revenue.

I was sticking to RPD for my calculations to try to factor out things like portfolio size changes etc.  Firn is of course right that ultimately the actual money coming in is likely the most important provided it doesn't take excessive extra time to produce.

In terms of raw download numbers, 2021 was above average for both images and video - the drop in RPD was the main issue.

Just run through my yearly SS figures so the first 12 months of the level system.

Firstly, January as expected was a huge drop.  Over 80% decrease in revenue.

One thing that did surprise me for video in particular is just how random the RPD for video was regardless of level.  The graphs are all over the place throughout the year.  So many special offers/giveaways and so on the thing varies by a factor of 3 from month to month despite actual volume remaining fairly constant.
Both do show a shallow increase throughout the year which makes the reset even hard to stomach.  Somewhat surprising of an increasing average despite constant levels though.

Data set is likely large enough to not have huge fluctuations from individual freak sales.

Overall average for year RPD for video $12.40 and images $0.72
(Contrast with roughly $19 video and $0.98 before the new system).

"They do check, I don't know how much, but I had a rejection for "this image was accepted in error" last year."

Ive seen that where things such as national trust properties and certain buildings got through and then a routine search (or complaint later) means they do.

There was a huge purge years ago when the UK National Trust when full gestapo against stock agencies.  Quite a few people had that reason for removed content.

Contributors are not employees.
They're non-exclusive suppliers and can walk away at any time.
All this talk of writing to politicians and unions is rubbish - the truth is as a supplier its entirely your choice whether to accept the terms or not.

Anyone seeing any video upload problems?
I sent a load last night and they didn't appear, tried again today, those haven't appeared either.

There's no sanity checking of SS keywords.
A few times over the years i've accidentally incorrectly tagged entire batches due to CSV or copy/paste messes.
Not a single one has ever been rejected for keywords despite literally not a single word being relevant or in any way related to the content.