Back to the topic: yes, it's been somewhat slower during the summer, but it seems like sales are improving starting from September... we'll see, I guess

Sorry, folks, but the people who have been producing microstock content for a while (5 to 10 years) know the truth: it's simply impossible to keep growing your revenue forever.  Most of us will tell you that we're making 20 - 50% less than we made a year or two ago, with portfolios that are significantly larger.  The agencies are racing to be biggest and lowering their standards.  And Google is making it easier every day to simply steal our work.  I was in a meeting recently and was excited to see that the presenter placed one of my images in his PowerPoint.  But right in the middle of the image was a BigStock watermark.  That summed it all up for me... people just don't care about stealing our work.

But back to the topic.  To me, the positive vibes sound like a fresh young worker at a Sears or Kmart store saying "Things are really looking up here!  For some reason there were fewer customers in July and August but now it's September and business has really picked up.  I feel great about the future!"
 

It's a nice thought but I'm not seeing it.  SS still doing far better for me.  AS and VB doing fair.  P5 lagging.

You know, it's funny but SS seems to be presenting a lot of 'Additional Resources' written by wannabe curators or film/video buffs. Many of those shots illustrating the article have that 'wow' factor (fabulous landscapes etc) but when I view the contributor's portfolio, the particular shot is nowhere to be found on the first 2 pages of popular which indicates to me that it may be a 'I wish I'd taken that' shot but it just doesn't put any money in the bank @38 cents for a sub.

Sure seems to me that SS is doing things to deliberately mislead us.

When you look at your own portfolio as a buyer would, looking at the "Popular" tab, you see all new stuff, right?  Wouldn't "Popular" by definition show you stuff that is actually selling?  For a moment I feel good looking at my Popular page, thinking that the work I'm doing now is paying off, but I know in reality it is not.

And when I look at my Earnings Summary for today -- the page SS "improved" a few months back with an all new and all terrible way of presenting our earnings -- they sort by image number which makes it impossible to see how well new stuff is selling vs old stuff.

Together, these tricks appear designed to hide the fact SS is burying our new uploads while motivating us to keep uploading more to protect their bragging rights of having the largest portfolio of any agency.  Very disheartening.

stockmarketer - nonsense, if you sell on average 15 images per day and then all of a sudden 0 images, then something has changed. Doesnt matter if you go from 100 to 0 or from 15 to 0.

Ooooookaaaaaay...

What if you average 1 sale on weekdays but get 0 sales on a given Friday.  By your logic, that's a 100% decrease and something must be drastically wrong.   Truth is that it's statistically insignificant because, well... math.

If worst than July , I will start to think about suicide�

I know you are probably joking, but please don't joke about suicide.  Others may think you're actually considering it and it plants a seed in their minds that it's somehow an answer to problems.  As someone who has experienced suicide in my family, I can tell you that everyone must constantly be on the lookout for warning signs that someone close to them is thinking of it as an option, and even if you hear someone mention it in a half-serious way, you have to take it seriously and find ways to help.

If you are actually thinking about it, I would beg you to talk to someone who can help.  There are many hotlines and major hospitals should have people on staff to hear you out if you just stop in.  Things are NEVER hopeless.

We would also like to see them to be proud of the contributors royalty percentage increase..

Sure, we can hope for a royalty percentage increase, but they'll still throttle us.

I had several days this week with earnings within pennies of each other.  And download counts were nearly as close.  They're clearly capping us, then pushing us down in search results.

I imagine the business model is going to be to lure people in with the hope of free images, and people will search the site, find a few crappy free images, but many much nicer ones that can be bought on Shutterstock and/or BigStock.   There are a bunch of small players already doing this as affiliates, so SS probably figured they can beat those little guys and bring more paying customers under the SS tent.

If that's the plan, it could be good for us.  If not, I'm curious to learn what SS is thinking.

Feels like have two courses of action now: 1) accept that the diminishing sales are not only here to stay but will accelerate, or 2) quit microstock. 

Seems like on average we're all 40% down on a year ago (except for newbies who of course have a much larger port than they had a year ago.)  You can bet that the slide will ramp further downward at a quicker pace, based on the number of new contributors growing exponentially, faster every year.  Next year we'll all be complaining about sales being down 60% or 80% vs 2017.

And it's not just SS but microstock in general.  DT, 123, DP, CanStockPhoto... all down around 40%.  Adobe for me is about flat, probably only because their efforts to integrate into the CC are still young.  I believe the general trend will catch up to them (or rather, their contributors) soon.

I hate to be so negative, but the numbers don't lie.  And I don't see the enormous flood of new contributors from around the world stopping anytime soon.  It will only get wider and deeper.

The only possible ray of light I see is that SS and others might eventually wake up to realize that the massive oversupply may not be good for their customers.  Quality may become an issue and copycatting may be rampant, and searches may be completely ineffective (some would say they are already.)  The only hope veteran microstockers have is if the agencies decide to curb the oversupply problem, though first they have to see and admit it as a problem, and I don't know if and when they will ever do so.

Earnings down 20% overall compared to Jan 2016

Earnings down 30% on SS compared to Jan 2016

Port size up 25% compared to Jan 2016

Ninth year in microstock.  Sad.

I understand what Stockmarketer is saying, but I think the impact of you saying it is minimal, if at all.  Much of what supports Stockmarketer's position is all of the "you can make thousands" (I'm paraphrasing) in online blogs, tutorials....essentially easy money advice all over the net. 

I can guarantee you that right now prospective contributors are doing their homework, reading this very blog to see if microstock is worthy of their time.  They want to see real earnings from real contributors before they jump in with both feet.  I know it's happening because I did it myself eight years ago.  I scoured MSG for all the insights I could get before I decided to take the plunge.  (And I think the most telling thing is that virtually NONE of the contributors from 2008 are active here today, and may not be active in microstock any longer, surely realizing the futility of microstock long before we have.)

All I'm saying is this: if anyone is reading this forum because they are thinking of jumping into microstock today because they think they can make thousands a month, consider that you'll be competing with one million new images per week, not to mention the 100 million available right now.  Within a year, you'll be competing with close to 200 million and 2 million added per week. 

Check out the posts, here and on the SS forums, about dwindling sales.  Make sure you're paying attention to the veterans -- rather than other newbies... of course if someone has been at this for just a few months or years, every month is the BEST MONTH EVER!  But once someone's portfolio has a few thousand images, reality ALWAYS sets in and the earnings flatline and then tumble as their own growth rate is crushed by the agencies' total collection growth, steamrolling right over them like it's done to all of us veterans.

Hi there,

Glad to hear you're having a good initial experience in microstock.  I think most of us can remember that early excitement and the dreams that if we just keep working and growing at that pace, it can turn into significant income. 

I remember putting my initial numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, and figuring that if I keep uploading a certian amount every day, and my images keep selling at the rate they sold in those first few months, that before long I'd be paying my mortgage, car payment, etc. with my microstock earnings.

The problem is, my spreadsheet assumed the size of my competition stayed the same size while I grew.  Or at least that it grew at the same pace that I grew.  That's the mistake every microstock dreamer makes. 

Not long ago, there were just a few million images in the agency collections.  Now there's a hundred million.  And the collections (at least SS and I suspect most the others) are growing at a rate of a million a week.

So how does a new microstock contributor make any sales at all?  Most of us here suspect that the agencies are either heavily promoting (showing at the top of searches) newbie work because they pay you the lowest commissions and they make more money, and/or to give you that initial burst of hope to get you hooked as a contributor.  It's like that first free rock of crack.

Some middle-ground contributors (not quite newbies and not quite veterans) may dispute this and say things are still rosy for them.  Maybe they haven't yet hit the wall, when their rate of portfolio growth falls behind the rate of agency collection growth.  That's when things really go south, and it happens to us all.

So, in a nutshell, if you're doing this for fun or for a little extra pocket money, keep on enjoying the ride.  But if you have dreams of supporting yourself and your family, and possibly making this a career, those days are long gone.  Sorry.

Starting to fear that spike and monti may be right.  After the big promo wave ended (midnight Thursday but bleeding into Friday) my FT earnings are about half what they were last Friday... and that was the US holiday weekend.

How is everyone else's FT earnings today, only counting earnings after midnight (excluding US sales that came in between 6pm and midnight ET but registered as Friday sales because FT is in European time zone?)

Hmm... if they're mostly from Europe, wouldn't the wave still be happening right now?  Are you seeing more?

When was the last time you looked last night?  I was refreshing till around 12:30 am, and I noticed the wave of $3.30 sales had stopped around 12:00.  As of around 6:30 am, they had not yet started again.