So BS is selling video for a lower price than stills... yeah, that's gotta work.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE ??

Seems pretty normal to me. Popularity in SS doesn't mean most downloads, I believe it's more like downloads divided by their age (roughly, as there may be other factors involved). New images have a boost even without downloads, so a file uploaded today may appear at the top - but will go down if they don't sell.

Considering only IS sales, money is surprisingly up without any uploads in a while.
Unfortunately I make 85% on the PP which fell off a cliff since IS subscription was introduced.

I would agree if the keyword was completely eliminated, but old images still have them. These will never suffer any more competition. That's quite unfair, I won't be heavily affected but those who shoot beautiful women often will have a hard time against old files.

It's like the word "background" it's completely useless, but some buyers use it.

One Istockphoto is already painful enough, there's no need for another one.

They messed up again, TS was a good seller for new files and was diluted with the IS subscription. They just lost more customers to SS in yet another unnecessary transition. I sold more credit sales than usual the days before the change and 0 since then. Lost all my hope for IS.

All micro agencies with the exception of SS are decaying, and as the industry reaches maturity it's normal and expected for increased market share concentration. In the long term it's gonna be just SS which would be great if it wasn't for the flooding competition. I still carry on with FT but I know it's just matter of time until they too go under.

Quote from: gbalex on September 11, 2014, 18:14

My sales on DT now exceed my sales on SS and have for over 12 months now.

Dang, congrats. That is simply amazing. My sales on DT are 1/4 of SS.

I make 33 times more in SS than DT with about the same number of images.
DT's time has passed - outdated, painful submission, ridiculous reviews and insignificant sales.

Like somebody well said, it's going to be a 2 horse race from now on.

PP was really bad -27% downloads compared to July and -37% revenue.

IS sales being in extinction and the few subs do not make up for the loss in the PP.
If there is no Getty 360 it won't be worth the pain to upload there.

Some subscription buyers must be heading to SS. Probably a good thing.

Thanks Scott - Topic solved.

One thing is keyword spamming, but for most images you can still find 50 relevant keywords without having to lie or being overly creative. What I hate the most are the paradise islands or european cities where some people put a whole list of different locations, competing with the real stuff.

It would be much better if agencies set a limit of 10 keywords, it would save us and the buyers a lot of time. But I've seen top sellers with both few and plenty of keywords, I guess what counts the most is the image quality, and luck to be seen in the first few days.

Have you guys seen the new SS search today?
Now they only show 3-4 files per row (at least in my computer) where it used to be 6-7.

Files in the first few rows will benefit and all the rest will be punished.
This will favor sale concentration, bad move if you ask me.

Edit: and it's back to normal 

Hard to tell... when I think it's an image with potencial to be a good seller I put 50 keywords.
Normal pictures I put maybe 20-30 keywords so I don't waste too much time.

When an image is sold in SS without keywords attached, I understand it's divided by all keywords. So 1/50 relevance of a sale while 10 keywords would be 1/10 of relevance. Still what matters the most is to get the keyword attached. It would take 10 sales of a 10 keyword image to get the same relevance as 1 keyworded sale. So I don't believe less is more because you have more chance to get relevance with more keywords. From what I've noticed buyers use a lot of weird keywords because they don't really know what they want until they see something they like.

Less common subjects can get to the top page with only one keyworded sale.
So as long as the 50 keywords are still relevant, I think it's your best bet.