This announcement closely followed by a flurry of refund emails. I hate IStock.

Got one (my very first in 2 years) refund email, too. A coincidence?

Quote from: Lana on October 25, 2016, 06:13

Quote from: jamiehooper on October 24, 2016, 13:40

Fotolia has been great for me this year; in fact ahead of SS a bit every month. But October looks to be a disaster for me, with sales half of what I've been getting since the beginning of the year.
I did sync with Adobe; but I don't necessarily think there's a connection at this point.

With a few more days to go my October could be about 30% of the previous month

Lana, could it because most of your images are focused on landscape and travel but in the forth quarter (October-December) mostly Holiday related images sell? (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Shopping, Santa, New Year, Gifts, etc). How are your October sales on SS?

It's interesting as my port is similar (i.e. includes mostly holiday related images from travel destinations), but still Fotolia is projected to be +45% month-over-month. At the same time SS is going in reverse, around -40% in October compared to September. In fact, it's going to be my first month where FT outpaces SS, in almost 2 years of experience.

I guess it's really impossible to figure it out, unless you know all the ingredients, including both company's internal ones and external factors.

Quote from: shiyali on October 23, 2016, 17:22

What's up with their royalty free editorial? Wasn't it supposed to come in September?

I dont think a date was given but does seem to be taking a long time....

They first mentioned that the new tools were "soon" to be released back in March. They then said that they are "in the final stages of testing" these tools" back in September. It seems the have the most stretched definition of "soon" I've ever come across I know it's important to iron out things before releasing them, but first, companies with such potential can mobilize and release new products/tools within relatively short period of time, and secondly, no one can make a perfect bug-less IT product, you have to go through the beta mode and iron it out with the help of users; why wait so long?

FT and SS are both down here in Europe as of 10pm CET. Wow, what a large-scale attack...

Seems at least the whole Europe is down for SS.

Unless I miss this functionality in qHero, it would be also nice to have a possibility to prepare editorial images for submission in batch mode. For instance, it could be very well a case where I have several photos with the same subject, location, date etc. So it would be nice to be able to CTRL-select several images and enter the editorial metadata just once instead of repetitive times.

Well, some of the comments become quite personalized here, questioning even the validity of my reading of my own stats or my assumptions, so I won't engage into this kind of debate. I just want to point out that my original post was a mere assumption and a call for discussion, rather than anything else.

And secondly, I think it's difficult to argue against the fact some people raised here that new contributors' material is placed on top of the search whereas established contributors very often (if not always?) get buried among dozens or hundreds of pages. This fact alone may support the idea that earnings/downloads at SS are directly or indirectly regulated by the agency. The question of 6 months or 3 months or 12 months etc. may be irrelevant after all. It's more about how SS wants to (artificially) help one group of contributors at expense of another, rather than precise timing and duration when this happens. "6 months grace period" was just based on reading of my own stats and hearing this on multiple occasions from others on this forum, and may vary from one contributor to another.

Is it just me that's seeing something completely different when looking at that chart? I'm not seeing a suspicious drop from one month to the next, I'm seeing a gradual month on month increase that just happens to have two months where you got lucky.

I mean if the grace period is intended to provide sales that make people want to stay and upload more stuff... why did they wait until months 5 and 6 to start giving you some decent sales?

The gradual increase you're talking about indeed take place with regard to the downloads number over the period of the first 12 months, along with increase of my port, which I pointed out to appear contradictory to the "plateau" effect mentioned here. And even then this downloads increase peaked out in May and until this day is in a free fall.

The decent sales in terms of revenue you mention took place exactly within the first 6 months, so perfectly fine with the assumption. The subsequent revenue growth is flat at best if you average it over the period less the two spikes at the very beginning; besides, two or three high revenue bars which are on par with the 4th and 5th months are, in my opinion, greatly due to the significantly larger port by that time and perhaps very busy months for the industry overall.

Anyway, I think it's hard to ignore the fact, at least based on my example, that there's something artificial in the SS's system, and the usual business rule whereby the harder you work (=the more frequently you upload quality material) the more you earn, doesn't seem to be working anymore.

Are you contributing to other agencies? Do your Fotolia sales grow?

Fotolia. Yes, I do. As noted in my original post, FT does indeed pick up slowly in recent weeks (see the projection for October in last bar on the graph below), but overall it has a similar trend with SS, peaking in Feb-Apr 2016 and then stagnating suspiciously ever since (I had almost identical number of downloads in four consecutive months this year, isn't it abnormal with increasing port?). It's still roughly 50% of what SS generates for me. In other words, with stagnant SS and very slowly increasing FT, I don't feel the right feedback from what and how I upload. But that's not the point of my original post. It's about the anomaly in sales/revenue of SS.

Why don't you look for critique directly at SS forum if you don't want to share your work here? The truth is out there

As far as critique of my port is concerned, that's not my objective now, as I'm more or less confident in quality and content of my port by comparing it with others'. Same goes for keywording as it's done very precisely and targeted (no spam, no irrelevant words, etc.)

My only guess is that SS is stagnant in my case despite constantly increasing port is due to a combination of (potentially) sweeter conditions for newbies + insanely increasing library of the agency.

Hi all,

Some people claim that SS gives something like a grace period of couple of months (6?) to new contributors by making their pictures sell no matter what, with good numbers. So as to create an illusion of extremely easy and profitable business with them. I kind of didn't believe this and still have some reservations as to this theory, however, my own statistics of 1.5 years' experience with SS basically supports this claim:


(greyed area - uploads, red line - downloads, blue boxes - revenue)

As you can see, my upload rate was always quite stable, without much interruptions. Basically, in these 1.5 years my port increased almost 600%, and while the very first 6 months my revenue increase rate followed uploads, as of 7th month everything just fell to the levels of the first 4th-5th months where it stays until nowadays, no matter how many material I upload.

Of course, there's always the fact of insane increase of their library (almost 1 million per week!) which dillutes everything, but back in mid-2015 their library was also increasing significantly each month (300K-500K per week?).

From the very beginning SS was my Top-1 earner, hence all the motivation. But it's clearly loosing steam very quickly, and the problem is that none of other agencies can make up this loss (even Fotolia's recent increases are still a matter of statistics, not a real substitute to SS).

Oh, and my only 4 or 5 ELs so far sold with SS were made in those first 6 months...Not a single EL since then (i'm still opted in).

Some food for thought.

What a drama going on...

I have earned $28 in 15 months with a port close to 1,000 images, or $1.8 per month... With their payout threshold being $50, I will need at least another 12 months to get my first payout, or roughly one payout of $50 in 2.5 years. Clear case for deactivation.

About -20% drop for me in July compared to June, and PP stopped coming sometime like mid last week. Didn't alarm me since it's not a 50% drop like most of you report, and also since it's a dead summer season now, so I thought 20% drop is normal... But appears like it's abnormal anyways.