The game has changed from one where adding new images translates into increased revenue, into one where new images are needed to keep your earnings at around the same level.

Yes, and this is true for ANY business once enough competitors discover that there is money to be made.

Of course it's a bit frustrating when it used to be easy to make lots of cash without too much effort (and mediocre images were more than enough), but as always, the hard workers who don't give up succeed in the long run.

Pretty good for me - almost hit $3000. I've published my blog post as usual at

That's what I like to see. Some hard data.

I'm sure some of the more sour people here will have a hard time accepting that your sales haven't gone down the toilet since 2013. 

Quote from: increasingdifficulty on October 03, 2017, 07:09

I think Pauws99 is on a different moon cycle. 

er I said the first half of September was slow....so to spell it out for the statistically challenged  the second half must have picked up to have a fairly average month.........so things picking up later in the year than normal.

What does it have to do with statistics?

Anyway, it was a joke. You wrote "picking" which means that something will happen in the future. Not "picked".

I think Pauws99 is on a different moon cycle. 

Thanks.

But what is your data then, that you base your theory on?

You write things like "because I uploaded images, footage sales went down". But that's just a sentence you picked out of the blue. Based on emotion. Sales would most likely have gone down even if you hadn't uploaded images, so would your conclusion then have been - "sales went down because I didn't upload any images"?

You have 12,000 clips, which is an enormous portfolio. Therefore, sales are likely to be more even than for someone with a smaller portfolio.

By the way, did your caps get temporarily lifted in September?

After 10,000 clips, it's very hard to continue to see meaningful growth, unless you dramatically increase your quality/content. 500 (good) new clips take a LONG time to make and upload, and that would still only be a 5% increase.

During the time it takes to upload 500 clips, a big part of your portfolio will have become old enough to be very hard to find.

It is almost impossible to keep increasing sales forever. Naturally. Not because someone puts a cap on your sales.

As you can see, each month has a very specific, yet variable, cut-off point. A hard line where the earnings bar for that month won't go any higher.

  - I needed a good chuckle.

Patterns can be found ANYWHERE for a person who wants to find patterns. That is how the human brain is wired. But it doesn't mean that there are people stopping your sales.

The search engines aren't that complicated - recency (when a clip was uploaded), sales, and keywords/descriptions are the main parts that determine search rank. Different agencies weight these a bit differently (more emphasis on title, or description etc.), but in general they work in the same way. Conversion can also play a small part in more advanced engines.

That means a clip with 0-1 sales that is 2 years+ old is not likely to be found if there are many competing clips for the same keywords.

A clip with many sales will continue to be found until enough newer, competing clips have been uploaded that match the number of sales, but have a more recent upload date.

This is the main reason why you can't just leave your portfolio and expect sales to stay the same. It is also the reason why you need to keep uploading more and more material just to stay at the same level.

Especially people who have older portfolios can experience a drop as their older clips with few sales become virtually invisible. The first two years everything was relatively new, and the upload rate is often the biggest at that time too, which is why a rapid increase in sales can be seen. This will not last forever.

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You're very welcome to dive deeper into the cap theories. It's a waste of time, but go ahead. 

If it was even remotely true, everyone would have the same earnings per clip. But we all know that's not true. I guess they just pick a select few contributors that they want to cap. Just because.

So... zero correlation then.

You're just making things up out of the blue I'm afraid.

Do you have the sales graphs (last 12 months) to show that on the exact date you uploaded images, sales went down.

I mean... You can't seriously say that after 5 months, sales went down, and THAT is the reason.

Yes, one blog post who writes "kinda" in a serious article. The conspiracy is proven! We can all rest now.

So, if the sales would have gone up, everything would have been normal. No correlation to images, right?

Classic example of "sales go up - I'm good", "sales go down - it must be the company's fault".

It is quite entertaining to read, however.

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You do realize three things can happen: Sales stay exactly the same, sales go up, or sales go down. That they stay exactly the same is less likely than the other two scenarios.

If you bark at a cat tomorrow, your sales may go down, up, or stay the same. I'm sure you can find a blog post where the writer barked at a cat and sales immediately plummeted.

 

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Maybe you just uploaded less video clips since you were busy with images and that was the reason? Maybe sales always fluctuate, up or down, no matter what? Maybe the CEO of Shutterstock reads this forum and decides he doesn't like certain people and punishes them?

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You WILL NOT be able to increase your earnings in all eternity despite how much you upload. It doesn't work like that. There is a FINITE number of customers (more or less). When you reach a certain portfolio size, your earnings will not continue to increase nearly as much as when you started. Or at all. At some point, uploading is necessary just to maintain sales. Or even to prevent a bigger fall in sales (due to files getting older, less relevant, etc. etc.).

This happens naturally, without caps.

It's just that certain people complain about caps or have conspiracy theories on every single forum I visit (not specifically talking about you Brightontl). The odd thing is that somehow, the evil companies always seem to single them out and punish them, not allowing them to grow. They complain about the same, or lower sales despite bigger portfolios, and don't realize you have to grow your portfolio faster/better than the competition. Not just grow it compared to itself.

The thing is that I have never experienced any caps myself, and I sell a lot of things at a lot of different places.

It's human nature to try to look for patterns here and there, when there are none.

I don't doubt that certain sites change up their algorithms a couple of times a month, but I don't believe for one second that they single out particular contributors and put a cap on their accounts.

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Anyway, $1,000 per month is great and I don't see why you need to look for something to blame. The more sales you have, the less the monthly total will vary. It's how things work.

Drink responsibly. And have a beer for the rest of us. 

Haha, thanks, I didn't mean for you to do a bunch of heavy calculations, just look at the Pond5 Dashboard - Statistics. Period - All time.

That's the quick way to get the monthly average for ALL clips, which is what I'm looking at now.