I have silhouettes on IS and, as Vicu said, I always expect them to be priced at 1 credit. But I'm not so sure this is a bad thing.

I just had a vector accepted yesterday at IS today and (it's not a silhouette) priced at 5 credits, and I didn't know whether to be happy or worried. Sometimes it seems that my 1 credit vectors sell more than 5 times as often as if they had been priced at 5 credits.

You wouldn't think that designers would be so price conscious as to not buy the image which they need because it costs more, but it may be true that this is what happens a lot.

Lee, thanks for the links. I had not seen compare.com before. Very interesting.

I'm not going to knock DT. They have always seemed serious and business-like to me and I believe their new search is intended to sell more images, which I personally am 100% in favor of.

Messing around with the new search, here are some observations:
-I searched on 'christmas'. Of the 20 images selected, 17 include attractive, young model-women (as opposed to only 8 which included Christmas trees).
-At DT, my total dls are 1093, which should put me in a fairly high percentile as far as sales go (not "1500" but on my way maybe). I'm an illustrator and I have the word 'symbol' as a keyword in most of my images. But when I search on symbol, NONE of my images come up in the first 14 pages of hits (I got tired of looking after that).
-If I filter 'symbol' for 'illustrations with additional format only', then of the first 20 images, 13 are rudimentary images by the same person and none of them has more than one dl.

It looks like the new DT 'relevancy' search has a few problems, which is to be expected. (Not yet anything like what has happened at IS.) My DT dls are down a bit. I expect DT will get things working better soon.

"...The search takes into account the quality of the image, performance of the contributor, exclusivity, buyers experience, editors opinion and many others. Because editors or contributors may be subjective, we let the customers' experience play the most important role and improve the ranking. We believe it to be 100% objective in regards to the stock value of an image. [my italics]"

Does this mean that DT is instituting a customer review system, where customers rate images which they have downloaded?

The reference to 'exclusivity' which Read_My_Rights first noticed is a bit troubling to me (as I am not exclusive), but it sounds like exclusivity may be lightly weighted in the new system. If the new search system results in users finding the better images then I am for it.

My own sales on DT were a bit above average today.

Using ALEXA rankings is not a real acurate way of gauging traffic in this biz.

For a start, the traffic is monitored by those using an Alexa toolbar, which only works on IE6 and above.

Alexa does not work on Firefox or Macs. And, I would think the majority of designers use Macs ... what do you think.

Alexa is a good gauge of where traffic flows, but from a sales point of view, I reckon it is a waste of time in any publishing industry stats.

You're right, of course. But the Alexa charts seem to have correlated very,very well with my microstock sales for the last (almost) two years. And also with the sales anecdotally reported in forum posts by stockers with large portfolios.

The populations which Alexa samples have the flaws you mentioned. But in their favor, the samples are huge. In statistics, as I recall, the larger the 'n' the more reliable the correlations. The huge size of the population may wash out some of the shortcomings of the sampled population and add to the validity of the results.

Anyway, the Alexa charts are fun to look at and I do not think they are comopletely without validity. They may be, until microstock sites start making public their sales data, the best clues we have as to what is going on with downloads in the industry which we are part of.

...I think StockXpert could give istock a hard time.  They offer a good deal for the contributors and for the designers.  The site is fast and easy to use.  They have had good sales since I joined last August and I have made more with them than with FT/BigStock. 

I wonder if more people will drop istock exclusivity if a few more new sites take off?  It might have been wise to be exclusive when there wasn't much competition but I don't think it is worth doing now.

Very thoughtful comments. I echo yours, and add mine:

-StockXpert doesn't have the puerile high-school-clique/snotty-peebert culture you find at IS. StockXpert is run more like a business. Some IS exclusives who have the need to belong will probably remain loyal to IS no matter what, but business-wise imagists (as Kirsty Pargeter, Rinder, Andresr do now) may choose to reject IS exclusivity.

-And StockXpert sells vectors, in a sensible way. And uploading vectors at StockXpert is much, much faster and easier.

-And, in spite of constant denials by the rulers at IS, the new search system there looks more and more like a total, permanent disaster. They seem to have shot themselves in the foot with it, and refuse to admit that they are losing blood.

I have always assumed that keywords of things which are not in the image are usually simply laziness on the part of photographers.

Phogographers often submit photos in a batch, from one shoot. They simply use the same list of keywords for each image. If they take a picture of a sunflower and a bee is on it, then the 'bee' ends up on the keyword list of every image in the batch.

To me, it is stupid to intentionally spam keywords. I think every site has a policy against it. Who knows when a site will start to crackdown and kick off keyword spammers?

Quote from: sharply_done on April 23, 2007, 23:33

I think $500 is a fairly easy bar to clear. If you've been at SS a while and haven't made $500, this might be a good time to pause and figure out why.

Agreed. It's easily achievable, in a matter of months, by anyone who's serious.

Judging from my experience with referred photographers, there must be thousands upon thousands of contributors who are casual about it, with minute portfolios they never add to.

I have referred quite a number of people and, of the ones who have been accepted, not one has been serious about building a portfolio. Most put up 10-20 images, and then seem to lose interest. I have tried encouraging them (to boost my 3c bonus  ) but no luck.

Why should the casual submitters, or those who have lost interest, benefit from the raise?

Interesting. Maybe SS is trying to discourage the 10-20-image galleries. But one good thing about those, from SS's perspective, is that they are unlikely to ever reach the threshhold for getting paid, and so have submitted for free, really. But maybe the casual submitters are more trouble than they are worth?

I suppose it is asking too much that Jon might share SS's overall thoughts on the new distinction? Are more perks for the 'serious' submitters in the works?

And if the stastistics at Alexa are correct, page views at iStock have been falling off a cliff over the last week.

Fascinating.

yes, the Alexa charts are very interesting.

Some people will say that they are not reliable because the data comes only from the millions of people who have Alexa bars on their desktops. But from what I have surmised from the microstock forums and so on, Alexa's data seems pretty consistent with what is going on at the microstock sites.

If so, the April slowdown which the posters here complain about is not just ebb and flow, and the drop in IS traffic is indeed shocking.

I just took a look and I am rank 1904 with "Sold photos Pay" = 202. I wonder how many submitters they have.

I want to call Jon a name: Santa!

Thanks for the gift of a 20% raise, SS. It will come in real handy this Christmas season, when I expect to get even more downloads at SS than I am now.

I'll be shocked sh*tless if they raise it anything other than 5 cents, like they did last year. If it's only 1 penny, a lot of people are going to be very disappointed.

This has been an informative thread to me!

I did not know that you could see who bought your images on FT. (I discovered that Fotolia itself bought one of mine recently, for 2 credits - I wonder what they are going to do with it). I also had no idea that the order of keywords made a difference. So thanks to you posters for the info!

As for me, I like FT except that the site itself seems slow, and everything is a little different the way it works, even the log-in is strange. But I like the way they pay, you don't have to make $100 or even $50 before getting paid.