I think it also means that SS sells more image licenses than iS. IF the iS average sale value (including exclusives) is five or six times higher than for SS, then iS would need a weekly payout approaching $5m - and I am sure they have never claimed that much.

Why is it: "reasonable to assume that 80m of those sales were in the last 12 months"
Maybe its 50m ? maybe its 100m

"Assumptions is the mother of all f*** ups"

I think it is reasonable to assume something of that order because of the effects of continuous growth from a negligable base. If it was 50m the collection growth would be outstripping the earnings by a wide margin; if it was 100m then the earnings would be outstripping the growth by a wide margin, which is also not being reported.

Sure, it could be almost 90m or 65m but I don't see how it could be outside those limits from what we have seen about collection size and contributors' earnings reports. But if you factor in either of those numbers you don't shift the monthly pay-outs wildly away from what I said and both figures would still fall short of iStock's.

Assumptions are the best we are going to be able to do in trying to understand what is happening in the market, since very little information about sales volumes is released by anyone. The alternative is simply to say we have no idea what is happening and shouldn't speculate about it.

"The alternative is simply to say we have no idea what is happening and shouldn't speculate about it."

Sounds good to me.

Suit yourself.

So you're saying that for every 20 sales at SS, you get 11.5 at iS?  Yes, I'm pretty close to that, but I don't understand what that fact means.

My all time average earnings per dl at SS are about 41c, my current earnings are about 50c.

If you multipy the 41c by 200m, it would suggest an all-time payout of $82m, even if you multipy it by 33c to take account of lower level sales, it is $66m.

Taking the linear calculation on $66m, last year's commissions would have been about $19m, or $400,000 a week last year, which is only half my initial guesstimate (though I was basing it on my current 50c per sale).

I don't think the sales growth has been linear, though. I think it is somewhere between linear and exponential; sales growth actually seems to be faster than the growth in the collection, which has been phenomenal recently. So I still reckon it is way above what linear growth would suggest. Imagine what the first year payouts would have been if there were 7m dls when there were so few contributors/files.

So assuming more than linear but less than exponential sales growth, the figure would be significantly more than 50m .... I'll still with at least 65m as being probable.

I don't think it is safe to assume the payout is 33%. We haven't had any statement on that for a long time.

Your average is higher than mine because you have sold about 50% more files than me, all at the higher rate (and maybe you have a slightly higher proportion or ELs) - so we do at least know with a fairly high degree of accuracy what the total SS payout has been.

Does anybody recall what iStock's last announced payout rate was? Someone was quoting it recently but I forget in which thread.

My SS average for the last 6 months, with very few photos added to my portfolio, is 69.3c per license.

Well, iS was PREDICTING an increase back in 2010. A year later, the bloke in charge had been demoted and now he's been kicked out of the organisation so it is very, very possible that reality did not match his predictions.

But taking that stated payout back in 2010, it's obviously much larger than SS's. At $1.7m a week, iStock's payout in a single year would be around the same sum as SS has paid out since it began.