Nope! I would love to have unusually high downloads but, sadly, nothing so far today.

September was pretty flat for me at both SS and AS. Downloads slightly below average and quite a lot lower than September 2021. RPD average but definitely better than September 2021.

Still ahead of 2021 for total downloads and total revenue.

However, worth considering that I had a big Covid related seller in 2021 that has run its course (as expected). So I have managed to replace that with new material that is selling. Uploaded quite a lot in July/August and hoping that material starts to get traction.

Quote from: yougogirl on September 15, 2022, 14:55

Just wanted to see if anyone had any insight on this - there's a photo I recently submitted - let's say it's a photo of a flower. I submit it, along with about 30 other photos (mix of commercial and editorial). Only THIS photo gets reviewed immediately - and immediately gets swiftly rejected due to "noise" (uh huh....  ) The other photos stay in the queue and are later reviewed.

I see the rejection and get irritated lol, so I re-submit the photo of the flower. Again, immediately rejected for noise. For kicks, I submit some more photos. Those photos sit in the queue as they should.

I try it a third time - again, immediately rejected.

Anyone know what's going on here? It's so weird. It's just this one particular photo.

Yes, AI makes the fast rejections, before the image gets to the next possible level. We don't know and there could be a second level of AI, or something that makes suggestions to human reviewers, so they can work faster, and make fast rejections.

Does the image pass anywhere else? Post the image here and get some answers when people can see the actual question. Otherwise we're just making generalized guesses. It's a flower. For all we know, the AI says, "It's another flower, just reject it for noise."

As far as I know and all the way back into the early years, clicking submitted before does nothing. Why should I tell them? Their image intake is easily hundreds of thousands a day. The cost of having someone look again at a rejected image, because it has a box checked, would be a constant recycling of the same images, which makes no sense. That's why they used to have a rule about not uploading the same images again, or there was a potential for the account to be locked. Now they just say, send it in again.

Suggestion, if the image is large, downsize to 6MP and upload again. Many of us have found that reducing an image to that, will suddenly make it not noisy or pixelated. The dumb AI will pass it.

Here's the complete rejection reason - Noise / Artifacts: Content contains noise, film grain, compression artifacts, pixelation, and/or posterization that detracts from the main subject.

Unless you get something special that just says NOISE, there are a number of reasons included in that.

When I get a noise rejection, I usually just run it through the Denoise filter in Affinity and, seven times out of ten, that does the trick.

What makes SS very scary is the huge range of "commissions" for an individual sale. For example, could be 10 cents or $200...that is a factor of 2000:1! My question is "when it is all said and done" does SS also see that huge variability to their bottom line? How would SS be doing if what the contributor sees as "big sales" slacked off quite a bit?

What SS will be doing - and what I do - is to look at what the averages are rather than individual sales. So they will be looking at things like total volume, rate per download, margin per download, etc.. When you have a huge volume of sales, as SS does, it all averages out.

I've been on a cruise for the last couple of weeks and have uploaded quite a lot of photos from various stops. So here are some of my observations:

1. There is no consistency in reviews. Some reviewers are ridiculously strict and reject just about everything while others are more reasonable and sensible. That doesn't mean that bad photos pass but good ones generally do depending on the reviewer. So you need to resubmit, often multiple times.

2. Reviews of commercial photos tend to be stricter than those of editorial. Review time is also longer. It is especially hard to get landscapes passed in my experience. Also hard to get shots taken from a distance (e.g. a view of a town taken from the deck of a ship).

3. Focus rejections are a 'catch-all'. I took a couple of photos of a fairly unique church but the sky is completely washed out. Not much I could do about that unfortunately. The church is in focus but it isn't a great photo because of the sky. I accept that. In my opinion, they didn't want the shot and used focus as the excuse.

4. I think they might use AI as a first screening. I had one shot bounced out really fast a couple of times and I think that was the AI. If it gets past AI then it probably goes to a reviewer.

5. Most of the shots I submitted were accepted and even some that I thought were on the edge for various reasons. I have a small file of shots where I continue to disagree with the decision and will continue to resubmit. In a number of cases, I had to resubmit a couple of times but I got there.

6. I have the resubmission process down to a 'fine art' so it costs me very little time to do it.

7. Shutterstock clearly have 'their standard' of what they want in terms of quality and focus. Many of us might disagree but it is what it is and there is little point in getting upset about it. Just play the game.

Just to reiterate, these are my personal observations based on three hundred or so submissions over the past few weeks. Others may have a different perspective and that is their right.

Be careful not to overthink this. Lots of organizations use stock images but don't really put much thought into where they come from.

I worked for one of the big public accounting firms and we used images for things like proposals. So, for example, we needed a picture of a swimming pool (proposal to a corporation that made chemicals for swimming pools) and we told the marketing guys to find one.

I doubt they trawled through multiple agencies looking for great swimming pool photos. They probably used one agency (don't know which) and grabbed a couple for us. We weren't too fussy either. The photo worked because, according to the client, our competition hadn't made the link between chemicals and swimming pools so didn't show that they understood the business. So it could have been any swimming pool photo. Didn't need to be a great one.

My guess is that our marketing guys had one subscription with one firm. They didn't have time to go shopping around for the best possible photo for end-users that really didn't care that much and were much more focused on the contents of the proposal than the images.

Had a number of photos accepted which is nice. The number of photos I have in the 'free' collection is more than the money credited. Is this because some of the photos from last year haven't dropped out of the collection as yet because a full year isn't up for them?

If I'm a customer looking for an image, I might not want one that loads of others (apparently) have bought. I might want something different. Then again, I might not care.

They aren't going to change the legacy stock business other than tweaks to the contributor commission and the pricing. When they changed the commission structure a couple of years ago, despite noise from some contributors, nothing changed. The database continued to grow and SS continued selling stock. So don't expect anything good but don't be surprised if commissions change for the worse.

For a new CEO, diversification will be the name of the game. They need to get into emerging technologies and trends and they need to find high margin business.

My guess - and it is a guess - is that he is taking the money and making a run for it. SS stock has done very well over the past two years and Pavlovsky is worth somewhere north of $10 million as a result.

He may feel that he has taken SS as far as he can, that the results and the stock prices aren't going to get better. So preferable to leave on a high and with a serious chunk of money while leaving the challenge of running the business to someone else.

I would not be surprised to see him resurface somewhere else and maybe to do something similar. Take a business with a stagnant stock price, wield the axe on costs, get the price up, make more money and move on again.

Stock is a commodity business. Volume and margin are the name of the game and the only way to drive volume is through being price competitive and the only way to drive margins is by cutting costs. Unfortunately, contributors represent the biggest cost and Pavlovsky's successor will probably want to look at that.

"Laughing in the purple rain" is in the same league as "Money won't make you happy".

Money won't make you happy but it can buy you a better quality of misery.

I wasn't going to post this, but just for fun. Here's how to make a rejected focus photo into a passing photo. And I agree, for a dime, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to please some computer. I used Irfanview. Open, resize, saved with a new name, uploaded again.



Not worth more time or worrying for 10 cents.

I didn't know that magic of better photos was so simple? Just use a faster shutter speed. over 50 years wasted trying to learn and understand exposure, and all I needed was a fast shutter speed? 

Do you resize the pixels or the Megabytes or both?