Shutterstock is stirring their algorithms to spread sales out among contributors.  The idea being to continue to take in money from sales, but not have to pay out as much, because no one contributor will make enough for a payout for a long time.

Shutterstock is certainly mashing up search algorithm, but I don't believe for this reason. Why should they lower the payout limit month ago?

By the way, I have just reach third level earnings in these unlucky days... 😁 listening to conspiracy I should have to be blocked before.!

(sorry for my poor English)

Hi res image at Cavan = $500 each. Hi res image at Stocksy = $125, that's 4 times more per image!

So now I'm going to start a new agency, with hi res image at $1000 each.
WOW

It's useless to look at prices if you have not buyer. Comparing prices between agencies is a simple joke

Really helpfull and interesting, thank you!

Most designers prefer to add their own post processing effects to match their project exactly. Not all black and white conversions are created equally. Doing it yourself limits the options available to the customer and ultimately limits your customer base. In my opinion you are better off uploading the clean, color version of the file and letting the buyer adjust how they want.

Adobe Stock will accept some black and white content but it must have a serious "WOW!" effect to be considered.

-Mat

Hi Mat
I'm sure you're right generally speaking  but I have to say  that many of my bestsellers  are in black and white,  one of them is top on adobe/fotolia, hundreds of sells. I think that vintage style black and white is specifically linked to the content. I'm reasonably sure that same image in clean color would not sell the same

real there is still somebody that don't think ss and other agency are controlling the level of sale for any contributor?
do you think that company like monkey business for example, who employ 10 15 people and have cost of 200 thousand pound minimum year, still produce content without any insurance that at least they file will be positioned good? dreamer

And which should be the agency interest doing this? Paying higher royalites, when they know that could have billions of good images paying less?

It's funny, this conspiracy idea is exactly the opposite of the other famous one, where the agency should distribute earnings to much more contributors to make them all happy.

So, is an agency interested to pay only big contributors, paying more royalties, or is it interested in paying less large number of contributpors, to earn more and make them happy? To be or not to be, this is the question

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 17:11

For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?

Does those images have similar relative position if you search for them with more specific keywords?

Thread is very interesting, and I'll try to answer from my point of view. I'm not a db algorythm expert as you :-) I will just try to give myself an answer.

First of all, I see a little bit confusion and misunderstanding about the point. People here often talk about three different events:
1- constant drop of earnings
2- alteration of search results depending on buyer (area, past search, preferences...)
3- alteration of search results to push a cap on contributors earnings

Points 1 and 2 are absolutely real, with no doubt, for many reason. But have nothing to do with point 3.

We're discussing point 3. Ok.
Wich are the reasons for an agency to play in this way?
I see a couple of reasons: one is to pay less royalties giving advantage to new "0,25c$ level" contributors, other is to give buyers always new files to choose.
Can you imagine other reasons to cap earnings? I can't see any.

How to do this? The only way (only legal way!) to do this is to costantly change search results, mixing rating for every single image with contributor rating... it's really complicated, I know, but it can be done.

Giving the high numbers of new files every day the result should be to have a completely different search result page quite every minute (or second...).

But the point is to bear in mind the buyers advantage: agency probably want to give them a good mix of new and old good images. How can i cap earnings of old images? Simply impossible, as they should just disappear from search results. And if ALL good earnings should disappear from search results the buyer would be not very happy to find different images every day.

About contributors: ok, I could give a contributor rating, instead of image rating. I could, let's say, give a maximum rating for total images of a single contributor and push up and down his images (so his earnings) until a maximum amount. In this way, contributors with many images would be strongly punished!
No sense at all.

What I really think is that the growing mountain of images tend to make this calculation quite impossible, and any statistics is unreliable, as should depends from number of total files and number of files uploaded by single contributor.
What I really think is that there is a big contradiction between people who cry about drop in earnings and people who cry for stable earnings (too much stable?). The two points of view are at the opposite, but often we read both in the same thread, as in this.
Finally I cannot be sure about the real answer, of course
And, as I told before, I think Mb post is really interesting and I can imagine that something is true. What I believe is that final purpose of manipulation is NOT to give cap on earnings, as I can't see a clear reason to do this without big risk to penalize buyers.

If google can adjust your search results based on location you live, what you usually search, what is currently interesting, what had more views and many other factors, why would be impossible to adjust such a small scale database for many other reasons? Don't underestimate the power of code. Never.

Maybe I'm not explaining this very well ;-)
I'm sure that a lot of adjustment are done on database results for a single search. I simply don't believe that locking earnings on a specific amount for each buyers is one of this adjustment
I can believe that some contributors could have a generic rating that push their images or clips up and down, but this has nothing to do with selling the content. It depends on new content pushing, mixing with old ones, and better content with same subject moving up.

I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.

I know very well. It would be very easy to do it here, just screenshot from different user from all over the world. If I remeber well, this happened in the past, without evident results.

And, more important, ok SS could give different results, and so?
Which is the advantage for the agency to have so complicated and endless calculating for giving different results in different parts of the world?
I cannot understand this from any point of view.
For example, it's better to give more space to new images for european buyer search? Or for american ones?
Well, this kind of complication is completely useless from my point of view

Quote from: derby on May 25, 2017, 05:46

Where do you read about 10% royalties?
Eyeem gives 50/50 to the author, and the Eyeem/Getty agreement is not public, I think

So if you choose to submit to eyeem, you don't actually know what percentage of Getty's take Eyeem gets, so you are getting 50% of
That's not a business 'decision', it's entering a great Lottery!

You're right :-) but it's perfectly normal, as it's exactly the same for all other agencies and their partnership. Who knows the company agreement?

I think that most important point is not the "AI" software efficiency.

The point is that a buyer should know EXACTLY what he wants. And for conceptual images I'm quite sure this is not real. The buyer simply doesn't know exactly which kind of image want.
This side of human creativity will never be overtaken by any artificial AI.

Well, I hope so :-)