I have less than a 1000 images at FT and I'm at around position 3.000 in weekly ranking.
SS may have a bit more, like 4.000 active contributors with more than 1000 files.

The insane image volume is from factories and similars, not from excess of contributors.
If things get really bad, there will be less uploads. The market always balance itself.

My weekly rank on Fotolia is depended on my uploads and has been anywhere between  2600 and 11500. My total rank is at around 10800, so I overtook over 200 000 "photographers" in 18 months.

Unfortunately, especially with the growth of smartphones, i don�t believe we will see less images coming in. I think we will keep seeing many,many more images going online as more and more people get connected to the internet and have a smartphone with enough quality to upload directly from the phone without extenisve post processing or maybe relying on apps only. The attraction of making 200-500 dollars a month can be a full time income in some countries,especially when several family members live at home and share costs. 4 people earning 400 dollars each can live a comfortable life in some places without working full time.

The only advantage old timers have is experience, which means our content will sell much faster and we can see trends sooner.

An interesting number to watch is for instance how many people attend online agency seminars, organized shootings or even the microstock expo etc...if we really had 40 000 people doing stock mostly full time or more than half their time I think all these events would have a lot more people attending and taking part.

Or look at the numbers of people in these private facebook groups for stock. Most groups have a few hundred people and you keep running into the same faces everywhere.

They can't possibly sustain the costs of reviewing millions of mediocre, repetitious cell phone photos.  Even saying "no thanks" will be expensive.

All these clueless newbies thinking they'll make hundreds per month off of their phone won't even spend the time keywording them - which would be a pain on a phone anyway.

It seems to me like the end result, for SS, will be an absolutely enormous archive with ever-worsening search results.   The amount of junk will overwhelm them, unless they rely totally on past-sales-based ranking.   What am I missing in this picture?

u may be right !!! but stressing on look we have so many new images everyday we can stretch to the moon from here , could be like the landlord of an old bldg planning to sell his apartment portfolio take the money and run... stressing the same ploy on look all my apts are filled with old tenants
and new tenants i am overcharging them with increased rents you can make big bucks buying over this bldg.

or ss could just be moving into traffic like dt with ads or whatever those social media earn their keep sustaining boredom pop of nerds airing their dirty laundry.

what dya think???

They can make the entry exam more difficult, it is already more difficult to get into ss than elsewhere.

But more People getting connected and armed with smartphones or tablets means more people coming in.

The apps will improve to make uploading easier, just like the Upload interfaces of the websites improved...

There will not be less competition.

The app works fine, the process of typing on a smartphone is cumbersome. I have a 10 finger blind typing diploma (got it when I was 12 or so, lol) at 160 strokes per minute. Nothing special, but I cant do that on a smartphone, not even with Swift Key.

I have an Samsung S5, one of the biggest smartphones out there. Each to his own, I dont like and I wont use it.

Do you guys know if smartphones pictures at stock agencies are labeled with some note that they are actually produced with smartphones? Because, if not, it's really bad for buyers to buy low quality pictures without knowing it. And if they are labeled, noone will buy them for any serious project, at least not in the next few years.
I'm with Semmick here, I just don't take smartphone pictures seriously.

Quote from: ruxpriencdiam on February 11, 2015, 09:17

There is a post from Jon Oringer that states there are now over 70,000 contributors.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 11, 2015, 09:10

And I wonder if like some places, they will stop taking new contributors? Same logic, why do they need more? Have applications once a year, based on portfolio, not a few images as samples.

SS Members by registration year rounded.
2005 - 4300
2006 - 3900 = 8200
2007 - 3800 = 12,000
2008 - 5500 = 17,500
2009 - 7200 = 24,700
2010 - 5000 = 30,700

I don't have data for years after that. I will make an assumption (without proof) that other agencies had similar growth in new members.

What I'm getting at is this. Not only has the volume of images increased greatly, the number of competitors has also grown.

Quote from: No Free Lunch on February 10, 2015, 10:13

I wonder if someday, like GL stock, they will stop taking anymore images? How many images do you really need for the buyers? This does concern me about how rapid the libraries are growing.

For this one I'd say - shoot them and don't tell anyone else what you found.

Of all the searches above which are very famous they just have so many images on the site that the buyers don't need to go anywhere else chit SS has 48 million images but hardly any of the ones I as a buyer could be looking for to use because no one has shot many of them yet but they are there and they are very popular.

That figure from Jon Oringer is an exercise in BS I checked the forums from 2005 and does he realize how many of those original contributors have not uploaded a single image in over 5 years?  Plus there are lots of contributors who never made it through the initial 10 image acceptance plus SPAM accounts and accounts with a handful of images.

It would be more interesting if we could see how many contributors were still active in the last two years.

How is there a spam account if they chack id?

Just as Ron said

I have a contributor account and a sales account too.

The sales account didn't require ID or credit card details. 

Oh yes lots of images coming in BUT...

I've noticed another pattern lately that will surely shake things up a bit in the coming years.
The more successful photographers and designers, those with their unique quality, style and concept are barely uploading anymore so either are moving elsewhere or have already done so. Once and a while they will upload their leftovers to the greedy bunch but that's about it. These people have realised or starting to realise their work and talent is worth far more then pennies and it shows in their sales outside of microstock. Not only the lack of sales but the treatment by agencies and their staff is what makes this even worse. This has gotten a lot worse in the past years too. So to me those numbers are not equal to success, especially not long term.

Anyone else noticed the same pattern? more people being fed up, especially in the past few months?

I can see that happening just from what I've read on MSG in the last year.  Many of the most talented people have moved on to other things, leaving the toothpaste-smile factories and the herd of newbies.   The one-size-fits-all pricing has eliminated the market for niche subjects and any offbeat or unusual work that takes time and investment.   

There are actually lots of things I'd submit to SS if I could get $1 per subscription download.  But at 36 cents, deal me out.   

My point was that they'll be getting tons of smartphone photos from people who don't understand keywording and won't even bother with it.  They'll add a couple and click 'submit'.

so much the better, the more the merrier. u know and i know that keywording is the key to success in microstock, that's why top-sellers are top sellers. we only start to earn $ when we learn keywording, as too many keywords or too little will only end up with your pix buried and forgotten.
so let the smartphone come in.
the clients already know who has the stuff they need. i am sure they already bookmarked those ppl, (like myself, lol), and they come back to see if we have new stuff for them.
even if they, like pixelbytes fear, clog up the new images page, clients i am sure do not look at the new page like we think they do. if they did, we would not be getting those dls that someone else here mentioned of old forgotten pix of ours.  it only means the clients come back to your /my port to buy and buy from us. i know it is so because the dls are from the same area on the map.

bam bam bam ba da boom... same spot on the world map.. dl dl dl..
smartphoners will like all those newbies lose interest once they see no dls. and they will go back to play games on their smartphones and go back to texting their friends to death as before.

I dont see how too many keywords can bury an image? And too few keywords dont bury an image either.