Quote from: cobalt on December 14, 2011, 12:31

I sincerly doubt that anyone here is hoping that istock customers leave and lead to a drop in traffic.

Why?  I'd be happy to see customers move from a site that pay a pittance % to somewhere fairer

I too would love to see most buyers leave IS and FT and migrate to sites that pay a better %age. Both to send a rock solid message to the other sites that dropping %ages isn't the way to get ahead and for my own personal greed. If I was only going on personal greed I'd hope they could keep just enough sales to keep the big exclusives from leaving - I am skeptical of that now though.

I think IS has been hiding the drop in revenue for exclusives by slowly lowering indy sales (through best match). Unfortunately for IS eventually they won't be able to keep doing that and the exclusives will start to notice. I think that high level exclusives are still probably doing fairly well at IS and would take a big hit to leave, but if the IS line is only going up slowly or even going down and the other sites are going up more rapidly at some point you are going to want to get onto the faster rising sites.


As far as all the alexa rankings etc. - they do suggest a drop at IS - one thing to consider is that the SS rankings might only be for the buyer side and all the forum and checking stats etc. is all on submit.shutterstock.com

Aldra - that port should do well anywhere. Wow.

I checked the dashboard to see if there has been progress on reviewing my files and noticed that what used to be a number X out of Y where I assume X related to the position in the queue and Y the total number of items in the queue.

The numbers were interesting in that it showed a number of things.

Reviews weren't being dealt off the "top" of the deck - I had images barely change their number in days while others dropped 10's of thousands and were reviewed in the same time. (another possible interpretation is that these images were dealt out to a slow reviewer who has barely reviewed any images in that time).

The total number of images in the queue gave a relative idea of how long the queue would be.


Now the images have a bar that presumably extends from a short orange bar at first through a yellow section in the middle and green at the right as it gets closer to getting reviewed.

I also see and like the fact that the number of days an image has been waiting are listed. (mine go up to 13 days though) - although plenty have been reviewed in less time.

It would be nice to see the total # of images in the queue though.

Another thing is that the bars do not continue to increase as the time increase but instead some of the older images have some very short bars.

I just checked and my new images are in the search - but the way the search works has completely changed now and unless users select "new" (or random) they are going to get results that favour files that have already sold. I guess that's the reason for the change - and it isn't going to favour new contributors who dump large portfolios there.
As I've been submitting files every month for seven years the net effect for me has just been to reinforce sales of older stuff. Rather than suffering from the search, my sales have gone up. It may be a different picture for people who have only been submitting for months or a year or two.

In general I think that other than the "New" search SS has always favored files that sold. I think a year or more ago they lowered the boost that recent images that sold got. This tends to make the "most popular" search closer to all time sales rather than just sales/time. I am not sure what goes into the "relevant" search - perhaps a heavier weighting to the title? This also might have been around the time they went from indexing new images a few times a day to almost continuous indexing for the new search but then they would take a while to show up in the general search.

I think the problem more recently with new files is when the "new" search doesn't show them they get permanently buried with almost no chance of a later sale unless the search is very specific or the sale comes from a portfolio search. I have had a few files that seemed DOA but then a bit later started to collect a few sales, so maybe there is hope for new files with no sales (or maybe they are just obscure enough to show up in searches with only 1 or 2 pages of results).

My sales have continued to climb this year, but I have a lot of older files and semi-obscure ones that are keeping me at the level I am accustumed to (low but continuous sales). I am a bit worried that most of my new images for this year will be essentially wasted on SS.

If SS rejects 4 out of the first 10, they don't necessarily look at the others, so perhaps they would be rejected too.

I completely agree that rejection reasons often are not particularly helpful - like "isolation border is too feathered or too sharp" - well, which one?

I would say that reviews are somewhat arbitrary and capricious - AT ALL SITES (at least all that I have submitted to). It does suck if you have to wait to try again, but in the meantime you should learn a bit about what SS likes and doesn't like - at least for the first 10. I sometimes found that what SS accepted IS would reject and vice versa to some extent.

I don't think I ever gave SS my credit card number - that is a new one to me.

You can opt out by disabling your images or deleting your entire portfolio at IS. I agree it is the "nuclear" option, but it still exists. Only you can decide if the drop in income is worth the drop in blood pressure.

I could be off base here, but it seemed like for a year or 2 IS was able to prop up exclusive earnings at the expense of indys. Maybe now that is no longer the case. I never did understand why they separated out RC for different media let alone having different levels for them... I certainly would not look forward to rekeywording and uploading to many new sites although I would look forward to the possibly greater stability it would afford. I suppose being able to do it one media at a time would help balance out the short term drop in earnings though.

I didn't get the e-mail. I am in the grandfathered group, but I still am sad to see them dropping commission %. Without seeing the books I am always skeptical of sites claims that they need to pay us less to stay competitive (or whatever language they use to justify it). Maybe the captcha I have to type in every time I go to the site is costing them too much.

I also agree that it isn't really enough notice for someone to boost their portfolio unless they are very close - 123rf has a history of occasional long waits for reviews (that they seem to be in now, I still have images from Nov pending) combined with the occasional 100% rejection all for the same reason that could make it rather difficult to get a whole lot of images accepted. Were I within shooting range of getting to 150 images accepted I think that I'd send in all my rejects today in the hope that some of them got accepted.

Sad to see another site go down this road. Maybe it really isn't sustainable.

Doesn't it tell you the time of the sale on the reporting page? Just check to see how "real time" the last sale is (when/if they start reporting sales properly again).

Then again, who knows what time zone they use.

I don't have a lot of holiday images, but December usually is pretty good until just before the 25th, then the rest of the month is like a string of weekend days. All in all it is usually a midling to decent month.

It isn't for security, it is to keep automatic programs from logging on to gather data on downloads etc. (and I presume clog up the servers). It is a shame they can't come up with a better way of doing this though.

Just to ensure we are all looking at the same page, my OP refers to the stats on http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php , not http://www.istockphoto.com/my_uploads

Neither of mine are correct (I think) - it is possible I had no sales for the last 27 days of the month on IS, but my balance did increase, so I doubt it.

My first photo (which was part of my initial 10 too) got rejected because it would be more suitable on graphicriver - but I was under the impression that was for vector art - although looking at it it appears that they also include vector photo composites.

Has anyone else uploaded straight photos to graphicriver?

you can see the image in question here:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-fireball-image993876

I got an e-mail about this image, but I couldn't find this image on the site anywhere - where are the results of image reviews displayed?