I think it's actually fairly simple. There are a number of threads that talk about the fact that long-standing contributors earnings start to slip as they can't add to their portfolio fast enough to outpace the total number of images from other contributors.

Well - the same law of numbers applies to the agencies themselves. If their total portfolio does not grow at a high enough rate, then ultimately, their sales growth will slow. Since Shutterstock has to report their numbers to the public, any slowing in their revenue impacts their stock price.

In short, I think that this is a simple response to try to get more submissions so that, even with reduced entry standards, they can continue to grow the entire database by just a few percent more and limit the revenue erosion. It will help for a year or two -- and then the same law of numbers will take effect and they'll have to try something else or diversify further.

No comment on the impact on ability of their software or reviewing staff as they have to accept more images and weed through them using whatever processes they need to manage this with. But, I expect that review times will start to increase until they improve their processes.

This question comes up periodically. The reality is that while some new images pop to the top of the list, it takes a while for images to be downloaded no matter what distributor.  I've mined some data from my portfolio and one way to see this is to see how long it takes for an image to sell. Looking at Shutterstock, the following table shows that of images I uploaded in 2005, 100% have sold. However, of those that were uploaded in 2015, only 44% have sold (so far):

The third column shows the total for 8 different agencies:  BS, CS, CR, DP, DT, FO, IS, and SS. The overall results are clear:  SS is ahead of the average, and often substantially so, for each and every year.

YEAR         SS Only     ALL
2005    100%   82%
2006    96%     70%
2007    92%     60%
2008    98%     58%
2009    93%     52%
2010    89%     45%
2011    84%     42%
2012    75%     39%
2013    68%     36%
2014    47%         20%
2015    46%     15%

I am not defending Shutterstock and have no idea if/when they tweak their search engine. Just pointing out that new images always struggle but that, over time, they do tend to get downloaded at least once. It would be interesting to repeat this to weight this by the number of downloads by year -- but that's not as easy to sort out across the agencies.

As always, your results may vary. This is only my portfolio.

Thanks. Looks like they must not be publishing that information any more.

If it helps, I've had one waiting since June 6. I have asked Scout for an ETA on review and apparently the "executives" are not in a hurry to make decisions as I was essentially told that they'll get to it when they get to it and not before then.

Pseudonymous Says:  I'm blaming that one person along with the 100,000 (or however many there are still contributing there).

I'm not saying it's a smart strategy. But, it was a thoughtful and logical strategy given the trends that I had seen in my own portfolio. If I recall correctly, the last change primarily (only?) affected non-subscription sales -- subscription payments on average were still higher on FT than on others. Throughout 2010, at FT I had been seeing a steady increase in downloads per image in addition to a mix-shift towards subscription so I figured that the overall decrease may not be that impactful. I generally don't think it makes sense to make major changes in my strategy until it is clear that a market change is sustained and impactful. This thread has forced me to analyze the current situation much more closely.

Specific to FT, they have a history of consistently reducing royalties. I figured that the last round in January would NOTbe the last time that they would cut royalties and negatively impact contributors. And, I am not naive enough to think that this will be the last time. In an agency where my number of downloads per image was increasing, this was acceptable as I figured that the royalty cut was (maybe) going to fund marketing which was resuting in an overall increase. But, so far this year, that basic fact has changed and so the double whammy with the royalty reductions is particularly noticeable. That said, I am also particularly conscious that other agencies that I'm hoping will fill the gap (think StockFresh) have not yet reached their potential. So I wait and look for reasonable alternatives as I adapt my personal strategy to meet what I see and hear in the market. My strategy has changed in the last 12 months as I look at the stock landscape. And, in terms of going forward, my strategy is likely to change again as the landscape changes. Everyone's mileage may vary.

To uplevel this discussion, in the face of what has been changes on the part of IS, DT, FT and others (all in a consistent direction), in your opinion, what are the primary agencies (or agency) that YOU would continue submit to these days? How would you adapt your own strategy to reflect the trends? Or, do you just pull the ripcord on every agency that you think has dissed your portfolio by changing their model? If the latter strategy, how do you expect to make up the revenue hold? Just wondering as I need some additional ideas on how to continue to grow. Continuing to submit every image to every agency may not be the right strategy -- but what is the winning strategy in today's climate?

If you look more closely at the individual images, they've still screwed it up. At least on my image report, it appears that the images that were downloaded in November carried the equivalent of 30 credits each on the reports page. That is, I simply subtract my totals from today from my last report (in November for October sales) and, presto, I have about the same number of images that show 30 downloads and about $7.50 for each download. Pretty good stuff but these results do not carry through to the account summary for actual sales...

I have a much smaller portfolio (400-500 or so images) on each of the Top 4 and have varying numbers of images on a handful of other microstocks. I have maintained a pretty good database of monthly earnings and downloads and I trend them on a 12-month rolling average to eliminate seasonality. For me, the trends are:

All-Up:  Earnings have been generally flat from about July 2008 onwards driven by what appears to be dramatic changes at IS and SS -- probably a result coming from a combination of changes to search algorithms coupled with slower growth in my portfolio relative to image grown online at each of the agencies. The most telling global trends for me is that for every 100 images that I have online, I am recording about a 5% decline every month in average number of downloads. (Note that this corresponds very roughly with the rate of increase of new photos. Using SS as a proxy, it looks like they are adding about 70-80k new photos/week against a total of 7-8M images -- so about 5% per month increase.) As I am not growing my overall portfolio by 5% every month, my proportion of sales is declining. On the other hand, due to slowly increasing payouts, my average royalty per download has been increasing at a very steady 1.2% every month. By adding 3% new photos each month to my portfolio, I am roughly running at a steady state.

Specific trends at the Top 4 are:

IS:  Earnings trend declined consistently from July 2008 to Dec 2008 and then started to increase slowly since that time. Downloads are still flat-to-down but earnings/download has increased steadily.

SS:  Earnings trend also declined consistently from July 2008 to Jan 2009 and has stabilized since then. Downloads declined through mid-2009 but have stabilized while average earnings/download has increased steadily with more enhanced downloads of various sorts.

DT:  Earnings trend has increased consistently ever since I joined in 2006. Downloads are flat from mid 2008 onwards but average earnings/image has increased steadily as my images reach new tiers.

FO:  Earnings trend has generally flattened since September 2009.  Total downloads started to increase in September 2008 (coincident with subscriptions?) but average earnings/image has been slightly down since then as mix shift to subscriptions has occurred.

Thanks Steve. I had 37 downloads from December 1 to December 18 and zero (across all SX channels) since then. Statistically, this is highly unlikely -- unless the search algorithm has changed entirely. And any change there is not too significant as the number of views per image that I saw for December was down a little from November but only a little which is consistent with a holiday slowdown.

Relative to other agencies, they saw a slowdown of about 50% from normal traffic but not one stopped altogether during this period.