For me personally the game with iStock/Getty is over. Worst month in 2017 and in the last 26 months in principle. 27 bucks in total, it's just a joke. Is that the result of their (admitted by themselves) change in the search engine, giving priority to new stuff? Sick.

Now, I don't even need their live stats they can't deliver for 9 months already, what's the point anyway?

@Cider Apple

I heard Stocksy paid back 200,000 dollar to the community, which is awesome, but in the end it comes down to 60 dollar per contributor per year. Just want to say that it is a great gesture, and unique, but not one that makes you rich. It is down to the sales, some people will do well, some people won't and some people will sit in the middle. And thats just life.

Don't know where you took that numbers, but from Wikipedia: "Stocksy now has over 900 contributing members, selected from over 10,000 applications. Its revenue doubled from 2014 to 2015, to $7.9 million. For 2015, Stocksy paid out over half of its revenue as royalties to its contributors, totaling $4.3 million."

$4.3 million paid out to 900 contributors makes an average of roughly $4.800 per contributor. Obviously some more, some less, but that's still a big difference.

What kind of stuff are you shooting?

UWA landscapes and architecture primarily, with anything else in the remaining part.

Very poor start of a month, despite all hopes that a back-from-holidays-September will recoup somewhat an otherwise miserable year for me so far. Another proof that things are so random (or manipulated) on microstocks. For instance, august was very good at SS, but First week of September is just horrible. Where's logic?


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Images are indeed similar, but not identical, these are two different things. Most probably a couple/family (wife and husband) shooting in the same studio. Not sure whether this is more beneficial rather than having one account and two contributors, which AFAIK is not prohibited per se. Don't see any big issue here.

Which new platform are you talking about? I'm receiving x10 copies of status report from SS every time they approve my batch of images, instead of just one. Happening for some time already, contacted them with no response so far. This is not a technology company, but some amateur-run startup which accidentally happened to have the biggest portfolio.

P.S. Thanks for keeping us up-to-date with news about SS.

My recent experience with SS is that a lot of my newly accepted photos get sold for the first time blazing fast (from within few hours to few days), however after that there are no sales of these assets at all. Which makes me suspect that there's something strange in this pattern. For a pure coincidence there are just too many examples with my portfolio like this, with the most recent being earlier today.

Anybody else with the same experience?

Shutterstock released their second quarter 2017 results and they are miserable, which is why they're down 17% on NYSE today.

Their results in a nutshell:

Revenue increased 8% to $134.0 million
Income from operations decreased 69% to $3.3 million
Net income decreased 58% to $3.1 million
Adjusted EBITDA decreased 19% to $18.3 million
Diluted EPS decreased 55% to $0.09 per share
Key Operating Metrics             

Paid downloads decreased 2%
Revenue per download increased 9%
Image collection expanded 57% to 144.7 million images
Video collection expanded 55% to 7.6 million clips

More on: http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2290950

Struck by their explanation of the plummeted income from operations: "driven by an increase in operating expenses primarily due to higher royalty costs associated with increased levels of revenue, increased spend in marketing and increased administrative expenses." My royalties at SS are the lowest during the last four or 5 months in the last 2 years, despite constant and significant increase of my portfolio.

Similarly, explanation for low net income: "due to the decline in operating performance and a higher-effective tax rate, which was partly offset by non-operating transactional gains related to foreign currency as compared to the second quarter of 2016." Time to start worrying about the "leading global technology company offering a creative platform for high-quality assets, tools and services", with their own outlook in mind:

"The Company's current expectations for the full year 2017, reduced from those previously announced, are as follows:

Revenue of $535-545 million, down from $545-560 million
Income from Operations of $30-40 million, down from $47-52 million
Adjusted EBITDA of $85-$95 million, down from $105-110 million
Non-cash equity-based compensation expense of approximately $30 million
Effective tax rate in mid-30's%
Capital Expenditures of approximately $45 million, including capitalized labor of approximately $20 million"

The first 7 keywords have the greatest emphasis. The minimum number of keywords you can add is 5. I recommend you add between 15-20 for maxim visibility

Thanks for your clarifications and advise.


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On the contributor side of the site, the keyword order is maintained. I hadn't looked at the buyers side, but I guess they are showing those in alphabetic to avoid providing information to other contributors on what the original submitter thought was important.

Thanks, Steve, that was my assumption as well (otherwise, why mentioning this on contributor's page), but just wanted to clarify whether I'm not missing something, when one looks at buyer's side.

Same here. Even if it's an accounting mistake, they should at least share some part of the bonus with us, for moral damage

All of a sudden, Shutterstock in April was just nasty.

-45% vs. Mar 2017
-39% vs. Apr 2016