Quote from: Sadstock on April 22, 2011, 19:37

Quote from: pancaketom on April 22, 2011, 15:14

I looked at it a bit more and there are a few things that are confusing to me, for instance these keywords were listed for a file with only one download...

central (33%); central park (33%); park (33%)

does that mean that the person was searching on "central, central park, park" or  was the search for " "central park" central park " ?

(as an aside, if I was searching for an image of central park in NYC, I'd have considered this image a spam, since I think they keywords I actually had were "central oregon" and "smith rock state park" - I guess the buyer wanted it though.)

----------------------------------------------


I think the example above is showing how Shutterstock is dividing up the best match points given to an image that has recorded a sale. 

Somebody searched for "central" and "park" and purchased your image.  Shutterstock then awarded .33 of a point to "central park", .33 to "central" and .33 to "park" boosting your image moderately in all three searches.  If only a single term is searched rather than two, 1 point is awarded to that term and it gets a more significant boost in best match.

I have a bunch of images that have sold once and now give .33 to a bunch of nonsense terms, things that almost nobody (other than the person who purchased my image) would search on.  That fact that they are being awarded at all means that they must be the search that was used to find the image.   

I think you are misinterpreting the information.
I believe it is just information, Shutterstock is not awarding points to keywords. They are telling you what percentage of sales came from buyers using that particular keyword. I don't think this affects the best match in any way.
Shutterstock is just providing you with a tool to understand how buyers are searching.

steve

No, he is not misinterpreting the information.
Only in the very beginning (the first few days), images are showing up for all keywords given. But after that, images will only show up in searches with keywords that were previously used to purchase the image.

For instance... I have a picture of a feather in the sky. It sold 7 times in the first 2 days. However, a few days later it still did not show up in the most popular search for 'feather', nor in any of the other keyword searches. With the exception of the keyword 'background'. The darkroom revealed that this was the keyword used for all purchases.

Then I have a  background image. It was the most popular summer background image within 48 hours, but it did not show up when searching for 'spring background', 'nature background', etc. There again... the image was purchased 16 times on 5 different keywords, but the keywords 'spring' or 'nature' wasn't one of them. So, it just does not show up in the spring background search (I checked 25 pages with the filter on photographs)

Anyway, to make a long story short... I checked at least 15 files (incl. very good selling ones), but none of them were to be found in searches, other then the ones that had keywords the files were previously downloaded on.

Then yesterday my feather image showed up in the 'feather' search and when I checked the darkroom, there was indeed someone that purchased it, using the keywords 'feather'.

However... it's obvious that only new images have a chance to get downloaded on their key keywords, since they fall back more and more in the newest search and don't show up in the most popular search, unless and until the files were downloaded on these key keywords. The longer they are online, the slimmer chances are that they will get downloaded, meaning that we are missing out on sales big time.
I mean... I have recent images downloaded on the keywords 'green' several times, but they don't show up when searching for leaves, etc. So, these images have not sold again after a very good start, the first few days. And that does not surprice me, since there are millions of images with the keyword green and it basically says nothing about my image.

I do understand that the keywords used to purchase the files should be included in the algorithm, but I also think that it should not have this much weight. And also, that the files should at least show up on the keywords used in the title.