New record for SS I think __ over 100K new images accepted in just the last 7 days. They've now got 8.7M images on-line and are adding to the collection at the rate of nearly 15K every day.

Just under 5 years ago they were proudly proclaiming '4000 new photos added in the last week' and it's been growing fairly steadily ever since. At what point do you think it might start to level off?

At what point do you think it might start to level off?

Probably at the point where many small players stop shooting for microstock and stop uploading. The large image factories will become the norm. This will first happen in the high cost of living countries like the US and Western EU. In the low cost of living countries like Eastern Europe this process will take much longer. The nanostock world of 2015 might look like large Russian and Serbian image factories selling mostly to the West (and India, as far as they harbor a lot of outsourced graphic work).

Did you see any iPod, printer, laptop, sneakers, T-shirt not made in China recently? Welcome to globalization. Images don't have to be transported with ships or planes, they travel cost-free with the speed of light. The only issue in outsourcing is fine-tuning Western needs to alien cultures. So let's all write blogs with Photoshop and lighting tricks, with content hinst and our trade secrets - and educate our future competition fast.

I think the answer will be:  when they create upload limits

A second thing that might help contributors is a better search engine - because in 8M+ databases, you are going to lose quality stuff no matter how good the search is, and given the emphasis on new uploads, the search needs some work.

it would definitely improve it

an approach closer to IS is probably a better idea: quality over qty

if you allow 12,000 - 15,000 uploads a week, and you reject 50% of them (which could easily be considered garbage by today's standards), you will improve the quality coming in

nothing wrong with limits

No one will believe a bubble is a bubble, until the crash comes.

Adding 100,000 image a week is just nuts. 

Quote from: ichiro17 on October 30, 2009, 13:04

I think the answer will be:  when they create upload limits

Ah __ I think you may have hit the nail on the head there.

If they are accepting 15K images every day then they are probably reviewing 20K+ in the process. Even at a reviewing cost of say 10c per image, including bandwidth, storage, etc, then it is costing them about $2K per day or $60K per month.

There must come a point when the agency starts to question whether all of that investment is fully justified in what it brings to the library. If you halved the allowable uploads then you would also halve the reviewing costs, probably with very little real loss to the collection __ it might even improve it.

I still think that their growing will diminish our income individually before it affects them as a whole.  I know for a fact that my images at SS bring me in approximately $0.25 per image per month while SS probably average more then $0.25 per image per month. Over a year that image had brought them over $3.00. The $0.10 to review the image is a finite expense. Bandwidth, storage, etc  has been  getting cheaper so I am not sure how much of an issue this is, however put in a couple of cents per month per image for storage and bandwidth and it still is  low expenses. For them it is better 20 millions images multiply by $2.00 then 10 millions images multiply by $3.00. For us individually it is better the $3.00 per image per year.
My numbers are probably way out, but this is just to articulate the logic. Denis

I still think that their growing will diminish our income individually before it affects them as a whole.  I know for a fact that my images at SS bring me in approximately $0.25 per image per month while SS probably average more then $0.25 per image per month. Over a year that image had brought them over $3.00. The $0.10 to review the image is a finite expense. Bandwidth, storage, etc  has been  getting cheaper so I am not sure how much of an issue this is, however put in a couple of cents per month per image for storage and bandwidth and it still is  low expenses. For them it is better 20 millions images multiply by $2.00 then 10 millions images multiply by $3.00. For us individually it is better the $3.00 per image per year.
My numbers are probably way out, but this is just to articulate the logic. Denis

I think your logic might be a bit flawed there Denis. Whilst an individual contributor's income will almost certainly be diluted by owning an ever-smaller proportion of the library, that doesn't apply to the agency who effectively 'own' the entire thing. The agency's income is determined by the number of paying subscribers not by the number of images __ theoretically the more images they have the more a subscriber might choose to download which could end up costing the agency money. But then they've also got to keep the LT subscriber happy by continually supplying new content.

You're right though, the reviewing cost is still a tiny fraction of the overall income that they are generating through subscriptions.

no wonder my new photos are not getting any sales at all, for the past few months...