Looking at the counts of various types of content, it appears there are lots of new illustrations and vectors in the free collection this morning.

Compared to my last check November 15th, vectors have jumped to 112k (seems to vary by which sort order you pick) 79k (from 18.5k) and illustrations to 21k from 7k. Total free collection is now 959,977 - not far from a million high-quality free images

... Do you think any favoritism as well? For some reason I just don't seem to fare well on SS. Maybe I am over thinking this matter 

Not sure what sort of favoritism you had in mind, but various theories about preferences for people or groups have been around since I started with iStock in 2004. When I was first with Shutterstock (same year) Jon was writing code as well as inspecting images and keeping the site running and growing was just about as much as Shutterstock could manage. Once iStock started exclusivity, they were quite open about preferred placement for exclusives, but even then, they needed to keep the site appealing to buyers and that limited how much preferring they could do.

There were  some of the lesser sites - Deposit Photos comes to mind - where they offered me preferential placement in search results and a boost up to a higher level if I'd upload my portfolio. I said no, because that seemed (a) such a terrible idea from a buyer's point of view and (b) a very short term perk as they'd be offering that to others who came after me who'd then push my images down in favor of theirs. I have no idea if they ever actually did rig the search - they could have just said they would and not follow through.

Years back Shutterstock did a deal for content with some large factory-like group and I remember another contributor being angry (via the SS forums) that Jon was betraying the contributors who had taken the agency that far by diluting their content's exposure in the collection. Jon didn't buy that and talked about growth benefitting everyone. Sometimes I think the pollution of the Shutterstock collection by removing the 7/10 admission criteria and accepting almost anything just to boost the collection size was a terrible anti-contributor move. Not secret or behind the scenes, but it really made it hard to maintain sales growth.

When SS started doing corporate deals where the license terms and prices weren't transparent any more (and contributors asked) it wasn't clear what the selection criteria were for things shown to the corporate customers. The large SOD sales lifted overall RPD so it was a big part of making a decent return.

I know when Fotolia started in 2005 it was surprising to see what became a best seller there compared to the other agencies - possibly in their case it was how well they did in Europe because they built translated versions of their site so buyers didn't have to mess with everything in English.

Bottom line is that you can't do anything about any of the behind-the-scenes stuff, so there's not much point in fretting. Focus on your content and good metadata; keep an eye out for the agencies and their business practices though

The intersection of each agency's placement decisions (default search order, secret sauce algorithms for "best match"/"most relevant"/"relevance") and the sheer dumb luck of timing of initial purchases.

If you catch a wave (with a decent image; there's always a need to have reasonable content), sales beget sales (largely because that boosts placement at most agencies).

Everyone who licenses content would like to reverse engineer how sales are made, but my experience is that while there are some public guidelines - like Adobe's emphasis on the first 10 keywords or Alamy's starred keywords system - most of the necessary information is considered proprietary.

When changing the region for some countries ... one of my best sellers ... has dropped  ...

That made me curious. I have an image that sells well this time of year and I checked its position for the countries you checked, plus a couple: Netherlands,  USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Russia. It was in the same position for all countries.

I tried a different search (non-seasonal images) where I have several images that are generally high on the first page and there I did see a difference by country. The images were all shot in the US, but have very high positions in the other countries too - but which ones are higher varies, and although there were many of the same images showing up, the results were more varied that I'd have guessed. It did not seem that the country in which these were located (outdoor scenes) was the driving factor.

Other than recent sales are higher or lower and that drives position changes, I'm not sure what else could be at work.

for me as a user with a portfolio over 200.000 there are some workflow issue on the contributor site so here is my fix / wish list  ...

I am a small contributor, but there are many, many things about the contributor interface that need to be worked on - both workflow and stats.

Adobe has done next-to-nothing with the contributor interface (other than shutting down the Fotolia stats), and most of the things they have changed/added haven't been what contributors asked for. As but one example, contributors asked to be able to search their portfolio (on the contributor side) by keyword. Adobe implemented search by file number which is barely useful.

Until Adobe shows any interest in improving the contributor interface, giving them more lists seems a waste of our time. Possibly if you can get some other important contributors together you can gain some traction, but I don't think the problem is a lack of ideas about what to do.

Sales there are good and royalties are reasonable, so there's that

...Any thoughts?

My first thought was that I couldn't see how this could in any way be an assist in marketing the agency - they are licensing images, not the contributors who created them.

My second thought was that none of that information was any of Alamy's business.

My third thought was that it was a totally harmless set of information and that on balance, contributing to their time-wasting exercise wouldn't take long.

So I completed the survey knowing that I was of zero help to them as I'm white, old, not disabled and in most other respects boringly mainstream

Quote from: KuriousKat on November 12, 2021, 08:11

Shutterstock sometimes has Instagram or website links in the bio, but that's probably your only option.

It's very frustrating, they don't have any links. Did the sites have messaging before? I really feel like at least some did at one point.

If their work is on Dreamstime, you can send a comment from one of their images to the contributor. iStock used to let you site mail contributors, but that was long ago.

I can often Google someone to find a twitter account or some other presence outside of an agency (although you need to be sure it's the same person, but many contributors promote their work via social media). Or do a Google image search on one of their images to see if anything useful turns up.

If the agencies would leave metadata in the images, it'd be easier to track artists down, but that is obviously why most of them delete all of it (and Adobe Stock keeps most of it, but not the URL link for copyright information)

https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-and-staples-us-retail-join-forces-power-new

I dug around on Staples' site and found some details. It's a one-use license for $1.99. You get charged again if you re-order the project. You can't use the image in any off-site projects (see the screen capture).

If the no reuse policy is enforced, and if Shutterstock contributors get their percentage on the full $1.99 price, this could be a decent deal for contributors. 60 cent royalty for a single use (at the 30% royalty rate). I have no idea how popular Staples own design services are - possibly if the bulk of customers already use Canva, it's not clear how this partnership will pry them away to switch over.

This brief rundown on Staples - I didn't know it had been acquired by a private equity firm - says its sales have been falling sharply as customers move to online outlets, so perhaps only a modest impact for Shutterstock contributors.

https://www.statista.com/topics/2114/staples/

...I'd like to see lifetime earnings or lifetime downloads for images, how do I do that?

It's been asked for many times, along with other contributor stats features, but nothing so far...

So when should I contact Alamy about sale being not reported. I found one of my images on Buzzfeed, article is from June 27th. So it's now been more than 4 months and still not reported?

I'm glad you received confirmation that they need to get this billed, but more importantly, they need to get you paid for this use. My experience with the delay between billing and payment is that it can take months. Given this customer just "forgot" to acknowledge a use 4 months ago, I wouldn't assume prompt payment once it's billed.

The good news is that there's no worry about Buzzfeed not being able to pay

If you didn't already reply to customer support, I'd suggest writing back now. First, thanking them for their confirmation of the download, but then pointing out how long it has been since the use of the image and suggesting that "as soon as possible" is too vague. That you need Alamy to make getting you paid for this a priority, given their error in the usage being ignored for so long.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to have an automated system that sends notices to customers who download images and after (let's say) a month, don't report a sale. There could be boxes to check for "Didn't use" "Oops, forgot to report it" and "Project ongoing" so it'd be simple to manage. For a genuinely forgetful customer it'd be an assist, and it'd put all customers on notice that Alamy does expect them to pay if they use images.

I would cut Liz's suggested time to every couple of weeks until you get paid.

On Tuesday, Shutterstock announced their Q3 results and on several measures beat Wall Street's estimates. Stock ended up for the day. Today (Wednesday) there was some sort of anxiety and the shares ended at 117.44 (-$6.87  or 5.53%). In general, management's actions have kept Wall Street happy and that's still much higher than a year ago.

https://investor.shutterstock.com/static-files/086ac986-a1de-4ef2-bf06-3c177314a566
https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-reports-third-quarter-2021-financial-results
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/10/26/shutterstock-inc-sstk-q3-2021-earnings-call-transc/

Shutterstock didn't include PicMonkey's numbers yet.

The Enterprise Channel has apparently risen from the grave and grew by 17% ("... bookings momentum and great performance at Shutterstock Studios"). They noted increase sales commissions to go with the Enterprise growth.

Gross margin improved by another 0.7% - they noted a gradual return to paid downloads but said it didn't impact their gross margins (I assume because of the lower minimum royalties, but they didn't say why).

They changed their guidance for the end-of-year numbers including this comment "Revenue of $765 million to $770 million representing 14.75% to 15.5% annual revenue growth. ...annual margin expansion of 100 to 150 basis points above our previously provided range of 100 basis points of annual margin expansion."

Any time they talk about increasing gross margins by 1% to 1.5%, contributors should look out for reduced royalties - contributors are the cost of goods and thus need to be shrunk

They now have a FLEX subscription on the web site - think cut price on-demand packages (but you have to be careful to cancel as it will renew each month if not). You get 25 points per month - Images are 1, Videos are 8 and Music is 4. With no annual commitment, an image costs a buyer $2.76, versus $9.80 for an on-demand product. Not sure how a video for $22.08 will appeal to video contributors - compare that to $71.80 for an HD clip or $119 for 4K (with subscription).

From their support page, "FLEX 25 comes with no restrictions on image size or footage resolution, however, it currently excludes Select footage and PremiumBeat."

There was lots of frothiness about Creative Flow and its components - Shutterstock.AI...blah, blah...content organization...blah, blah...create and collaborate. Also larger and faster-growing TAMs (total addressable markets) including "... the $8 billion TAM for creative applications". They want to transform Shutterstock "...we should be able to accelerate our growth beyond the stock content market segment"

In the earnings call, questions were about slowdown of the growth rate and Stan deflected with some words about their data business to "... generate a pipeline around image recognition and data products, particularly for platforms that are building artificial intelligence models".

A question about Creative Flow was what users were asking for and how did this compare to competitors. Stan Pavolovsky's answer is primo content free corporate speak:

"So, if you can take millions of pieces of content and take that down to a handful based on recommendations, tied to our first-party data, that's an incredible win for our customers. And so the acquisitions we did as part of Shutterstock. AI in addition to our existing image recognition data is allowing us to launch these products with the recommendations, with content recommendations. And so that's really the kind of what we call the secret sauce to how we're transforming the company. But effectively. It's, we are moving into our customers' workflows with tools centered around storage, centered around planning, centered around image our editing, but we're doing it all with recommendations upfront."

They were asked about the new FLEX subscriptions and how those have performed and why introduce more. The CFO said that they were seeing increased "wallet share" especially from enterprise customers.

Another question was whether any of the other market "headwinds" - advertising, supply chain, etc. - were affecting Shutterstock's markets. CFO said not really.

And I've done a Q3 chart showing changes from a contributor perspective. Overall downloads are still down (they report them as up because they're comparing to Q3 2020, not all time) and royalties down on an all-time basis, but up 0.1% compared to Q2 2021. But compared to Q3 2020, even though the revenue per download rose nearly 11%, contributors' share (royalties) declined by 0.02%

Do a search for Envato Elements. There are lots of threads about it from the last few years. I left Envato before they set up Elements so I don't have any personal experience to offer, but do consider that the special offer is only for 90 days, and not permanent.

Lots of sites (including Canva; their boost was for 6 months) have used temporary earnings boosts or guarantees to entice contributors into a new royalty model. If you are concerned about your income from that site over the long haul then try to figure out what the income might look like after 90 days.