However, the diagram about the earning per agency and year clearly shows that until 2015, the majority of sales come from just two agencies, Shutterstock and Getty/iStock. In 2017 Adobe Stock joins the club. Only in 2016 the earnings are mor evenly distributed. Also the share of the medium and low earners diminishes over the years, again with the exception of 2016. in 2022, the three leading agencies earned more than three quarters of the overall earnings.

If you get to a different result by multiplying earnings per image with files per category, your calculations must be flawed.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. You are referring to 2 splits of earnings: 1) per agecy per year and 2) per range of earnings per file. Ranges of earnings are like ($0-1, $1-7, ...), but files are of all agencies together. They are sliced too differently, in my opinion, and it seems to me that you're trying to use one for conclusions about the other. Can you try to explain again what do you mean?

I can only image the number of crap images that they have to sort out on a daily basis. At least this will keep some of junk and junkies out.

How will it decrease amount of junk coming in? They still need to review images. Submissions are files they send to their microstock account after their review, or they count it differently?

So you are just guessing. I looked into the link you provided and also into wikipedia article on concept search that is linked there, and I do not see any evidence that the search engines at the major microstock sites work that way, except that they may address issues like various forms of the same word (strike vs. striking was given as an example) and sometimes minor misspellings, but the issues with polysemy and synonymy.

I wonder, did you expect to find in the link "Shutterstock uses algorythm XYZ to serve your files (just like ribtoks said)"?

You see, I'm not here to prove something to you. I shared my (engineering) insight, if you specifically do not agree with it, I have nothing against it. Luckily it does not mean it's wrong.

Could you please elaborate ?

Indexing for search is quite more complex than just taking taking all the keywords you entered, creating tens of thousands of "lists" (per each keyword) with all the files that have that keyword and then when customer entered "mangrove forest background", checking if the given file in the in the list of "mangrove", in the list of "forest" and in the list of "background" - then showing it. The way it works in reality is that all of the these keywords are essentially replaced to one of the concepts (in the so-called "concept tree") that agencies search engine understands. Amount of concepts is smaller than amount of the keywords (there're just too many different words, just the first 100 pages of search results contained approximately 49 thousand different keywords, that's a lot). It could be that the concept is exactly equal to the keyword (e.g. "background") or might be that it's not (e.g. keyword is "paris", but the concept is "city").

Except that I don't know the exact implementation details of indexing in each of the agencies, computer science behind it is pretty established so I can guess with relatively high probability how approximately it works. Usually companies do some small tweaks here and there, but their effect is not that big. But it's not the most important factor for you!

What some people don't take into account is ranking in the search results. Search is only how your file can be listed _somewhere_ in the search results. Way more important question is what this place is exactly and how many customers use such search terms (or close to them). e.g. you would not benefit much if your file would be listed in the page 234,750 of the search Pages, even though you rank for the keyword with that many results. This is where each agency is applying it's own ideas (there's no "established" way to do it). And this is what exactly matters. Main optimization must be done for ranking.

As someone who only typically uses a maximum of 30-35 keywords, I have difficulty wrapping my head around "wasting" keywords. How are you wasting it when it might be relevant?

Yes, I mean if you're trying to use more keywords (closer to 50 allowed). In general search ranking can be quite interesting. e.g. although in agency case we can only observe the results, but we do know from web search that website authority can be dilluted if the website has too many topics (e.g. "keywords") where it does not rank well. I'm speculating here, but don't see any reason why microstock agency would not apply a similar logic.

Especially when I have images on Alamy and SS where I know people found my images through searches like "mangrove forest background", "indian man talking" (where all 3 in isolation are popular keywords) etc.

If customers found your file via "mangrove forest background", it does not mean that happened just because you had a "background", "mangrove" and "forest" keywords. This is simply not exactly how search works.

Xpiks does not support PNG. When I try to add PNG files to Xpiks the window shows "No files added".

Xpiks very much does support PNG, just when you have a license. But you can start a free 14 day trial, try it out, see if you like it and then maybe get a license.

L e a r n    B y    Y o u r s e l f

This is actually not such a great advice. It's like in life - best to learn from the mistakes of others to ramp up faster yourself.

Hi folks

Finally managed to write a detailed keywording blogpost which is taking modern reality into account (AI, data analytics, competition): https://xpiksapp.com/blog/keywording-files-for-microstock/

The typical mistake everybody are doing - batch-editing pictures and considering keywording "boring" directly trumps your sales.

Let me know if you learned anything new from the blogpost

I remember two contributors who occasionally posted on Shutterstock forums who edited their outdoor scenic landscape landmark photos with spectacular skies and colours without them looking like overdone HDR and those guys were making plenty of good sales every month. Granted I recall one of them had a port of over 40,000 images. But that large photography portfolio combined with his post processing embellishments delivered very rewarding results, at least at that time.

Interesting. Would be wonderful to collect experiences like that to help others. People who do not have 40k portfolios still need to start somewhere and having good pictures is the way to go.

Hi folks

Alex and me just published a new blogpost about how to start with drone video for microstocks. The blogposts discusses everything from selecting a drone and passing exam to post-processing workflow and sales statistics.

https://xpiksapp.com/blog/drone-video-for-microstocks/

What do you think about drone footage in general? Did you try it or wanted to try? Really curious of your experience!

Too bad, CS3 doesn't import data when I open a JPG and convert it to an EPS, so I have to do all of that manually. I suppose I can cut and paste. As always I'm looking for the easiest way to do things, not the longest and most complicated.

The software I use doesn't embed data into EPS files.

Just noting, if you save files in Xpiks, it will embed metadata both to EPS and JPG (preview).

Someone who wants an image, if they are at all intelligent, will find words that describe what they want.

Have you ever searched for an image to buy yourself? I can tell you that it's hard to find what you want, because frequently you want to illustrate a concept. It was never the case for me, that I knew I need something like is used to generate DALLE images "two men on horses on the moon surface in the Salvador Dali style". I search for a few vague concepts and then from search results that look somewhat plausible get an idea how to find similar things. So in my opinion your argument is not really applicable to customers. For agencies themselves - hard to know.

Also do you think it is better to target only low or high competition keywords for an image or a portfolio or to mix them either for images or for the portfolio. For example if you go the low competition route, is it better to leave high competition words out entirely?

I think it depends on your content. If you have something that you think will have a high selling potential and is competitive enough, I'd target it to the higher competition keywords. Also since it's possible to amend keywords, you might take tiered approach to keywording. First achieve some success with low-competition and then update keywording. Sure, that's a hassle, but then it might be a turning point from sales perspective. For sure something to experiment with.