My earnings in Shutterstock keep going down while downloads are growing steadily. That supports the fact that SS's strategy to grow its subscription products is strong.

No sense for contributors to works so hard to get more sales but in the end, earn much less. How long can this trend continue until contributors pull the plug?

It is so frustrating to read these reports and see how SS's revenue per download keeps growing and then look at your own RPD which keeps going lower at the same pace. 

Very informative analysis and a great summary for beginners like me. Thanks for sharing your experience with us!

Kiitos Ukko! 

Quote from: JamoImages on February 04, 2022, 02:04

Hi guys,

I've just published my 2021 stock photography earnings in my blog.
The post includes also my 5-year earnings development graph from 2017, the beginning of my stock photography marathon. Trend is still pointing up but for how long.. who knows.

Shutterstock's royalty cut had at least -30% impact on my SS RPD. About this followed by bitter whining about evil corporate rule and why Adobe Stock is the BEST site is included in this report. 

Enjoy! 

https://jamoimages.com/stock-photography-and-footage-income-in-2021-and-5-year-development/

Beautiful images, Jamo!

Thank you Wilm! 

We're just numbers to the current SS board. Shows how much they have respect for their contributors... sad... 

Thanks for comments. Now, most of the images were reviewed. I guess they're following this forum 

Really good interview! Thank you, Alex and Mat! =)

Thanks for sharing the link to this interview

Love the interviews you been doing lately Alex! Keep on going!

Probably on the Q3 earnings report we'll see some hard data on how this has an impact on SS business.

Hi!

Im returning to uploading and want to upload all my files to EyEm. However there is a problem, i was an old non-exclusive istock contributor and i guess my files are now selling on Getty or whatever, not sure exactly what happened when we agreed to the shift a long time ago but, i login to ESP and see/request the earnings from there, not much at all...

Anyhow Eyem says that the files uploaded to them will possibly be sent to getty for review of selling also at Getty. I wrote to Eyems costumer service and asked them if i could upload my old files, or if there is a risk of "collision" and duplicated if they get accepted also at Getty. They shortly answered: "yes there is such a risk".

My questions to you:
1. How much of the earnings from Eyem comes from the Getty Partner channel in you experience?
2. If the Getty part of sales is low, maybe I could opt out of this getty thing and upload only to EyEm?
3. Maybe i can delete my old istock files from Getty, they are not selling that well at all...  would it be worth it/doable?

Yes i am selling only non-exclusive and plan to keep doing so with all my photos

Hope you can help me shed some light on this!

I sell on EyeEm and IStock as well. I used to have very good sales from EyeEm until it just hit the wall right before summer last year. Coincidently, I started contributing to IStock in march 2019. I upload more or less the same files on both. Did that have anything to do with it.. who knows... But it makes sense that Getty would prioritize selling images through their own channels.

Many other contributors have also reported decreasing sales from EyeEm though. So this is all just speculation.

The other question:
1. Most of the sales come from Getty. Roughly 90% or so. However, sometimes you may get big sales via EyeEm's own market. Over $125 per image or so. But these are extremely rare.
2. I'm not sure if you can opt-out of partner sales. Correct me if I'm wrong.
3. Does deleting the IStock files help anything? Hard to say...

EyeEm used to be my top-selling agency before it became quiet. It still sells but not nearly as good as it used to. My IStock sales have passed EyeEm already and I have only 400 or so images in there.

Hope this helped.

My summary of the webinar. Please feel to correct anything I heard wrong or interpreted wrong.


AS webinar Keywords Indexing

1) Titles are searchable. Most important words, concise and accurate. Title will impact keyword value.

2) First ten words, most important. Keywords are 80%, primary focus of the image.

Same words in both adds weighting, factual not subjective. 11-49 are flat, but title does give them a boost, do not use 50 words.

And image typically shouldn't have more than 39 keywords, unless it's very complicated and needs more words. At 50 words, everything becomes flat, 1/50th value.

Plurals don't need to be added, nor -ing ending words, except when it's a noun, they do not need to be added. Don't use plurals or -ing words on first ten words, in any case. Phrases are found in original language. If you have a two word phrase, the individual words will not be found, the phrase will be. I think the conclusion was, use both.

AI will recommend up to 25 words, if you upload an image with none. Title should be a sentence like structure. Important for people images: ethnicity, gender, age group, life stage. More factual, don't clutter up the keywords. Avoid ambiguous terms and words.

Conceptual keywords are not generally placed in the first ten or the title.

The system will show related keywords to customers, sometimes words that are not in your images. Punctuation is not recognized in the search, apostrophe for example. Nobody or no people are good to include as well as vector or illustration if that applies. Camera angles or views can be useful.

The Adobe site recognizes copy space in an image, there's a filter for that in the buyers search. Add those words if you wish.

Mat? When is the Search Webinar that you mentioned, I'd look forward to knowing some of the answers to things that you noted, would be for that team.

Nice information, thank you.

Thank you Pete! This was very useful