MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Shutterstock.com => Topic started by: sharply_done on January 28, 2009, 13:34
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Compared to what you were expecting, how much did you earn on SS this month?
Edit: Changed title and locked voting on 3-Feb-09.
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Was expecting many more sales than I did get. hopefully feb will be different
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My sales are right around average. Not the BME, but certainly within the normal range for the past few months.
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Sales were off this month, but started picking up this week so better than I expected.
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Well since I haven't uploaded anything in awhile it's been awful. Dreamstime and Istock will certainly finish ahead. This will be the first month since I started Microstock in Q1 2007 that Shutterstock will not be 1st.
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Much worse for me than expected. I uploaded a fair bit of new images and never really had them take off the way new images usually do. I dunno if they just sucked or what but .. yeah, far off.
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Much worse for me than expected. I uploaded a fair bit of new images and never really had them take off the way new images usually do. I dunno if they just sucked or what but .. yeah, far off.
I can agree with you about new images. My latest several series have not gotten any sales at SS. They must have taken out the emphasis on new images in the search engine...?
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Yes I noticed the same regarding the new uploads but on the positive side my BME for on demand sales
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50% of Jan 08. 15% fewer single sales in January to December, but a nice number of OD's which make it a bigger $ month than December.
Today has to be my worst Wednesday on record.
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as expected: +30% in comparison to December earnings with ~100 more pictures in the portfolio (+15%)
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I can agree with you about new images. My latest several series have not gotten any sales at SS. They must have taken out the emphasis on new images in the search engine...?
No I think the search engine stills works the same, I think it is more likely that a few long-term subscribers have left. I've always thought that LT subscribers were responsible for the new-image-download phenomena on the basis that they had already downloaded all existing images in the subjects that interested them.
Disappointing start to the year for me at SS despite 100 new uploads. Sales are projected to be on a par with December and about 24.5% of my total revenue (down from 29.6% in Jan 2008).
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Much better than expected - up 45% so far on earnings over December.
Not taking into account a much welcome EL sale.
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Better than Dec. but not what I was hoping for, especially after quite a bit of new better than average images submitted..
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May sales there have been going down for months but they are still much higher than any other site. I did notice a bigger drop after photos.com started subscriptions. I wonder if some of the buyers have gone there? Pay per download sales are increasing, so hopefully they will one day make up for the decline in subs sales.
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They must have taken out the emphasis on new images in the search engine...?
Or the beast got indigestion. :P
I expanded my port on SS by 100 (in batches of 10, twice per week) the past 5 weeks. Normally this should give a boost of 40% but not now, although the new ones constitute still 40% or so of the downloads. My conclusion is that the bias to new images still is there, but that SS in general slowed down. I think the poll in this thread confirms that. To be honest, the on demand makes up a little bit.
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In spite of regular uploading, my income stays average. No increase since June 2008!
And I know this involves everybody, because I have less downloads for one file and it is still in the top 50, even higher. A few months ago, you needed much more downloads for being in the top 50!
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I didn't expect this month to be too good but it turned out worse than I expected. OD's have been a life saver there along with regular uploads :D
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In spite of regular uploading, my income stays average. No increase since June 2008!
And I know this involves everybody, because I have less downloads for one file and it is still in the top 50, even higher. A few months ago, you needed much more downloads for being in the top 50!
Not sure how that extrapolates to everybody.
I have never (to my knowledge) had any images in Shutterstock's top 50. But my sales there have increased steadily anyway - they are just more spread throughout my portfolio.
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Less downloads than normal, but ok money wise, thanks to some ELs. I am uploading constantly and approval rate is somewhere around 98-100%.
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Value of sales is down around 15% since January 2008, but volume is down around 50%. They represent a share of 26% of my sales now, against 32% a year ago and 51% in January 2007.
It's a bit disappointing, but not unexpected.
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Without uploading during holidays it's way down. Not unexpected though. But I voted the worst for showing my deception to have no choice except shooting continuously for getting a reasonable income from them. Even if you shoot pics of your cats, you need to feed the beast LOL
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Without uploading during holidays it's way down. Not unexpected though. But I voted the worst for showing my deception to have no choice except shooting continuously for getting a reasonable income from them. Even if you shoot pics of your cats, you need to feed the beast LOL
Which means that, for those of us who don't have a cat, there's no hop anyway. I knew there was a reason why I perform so badly in this business :-[
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It started as a real bad month for me for the first two weeks, until I received an EL. That put me just ahead of what I would normally expected.
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BME for on demand sales :)
Overall, SS is the most consistent from month to month while all the others vary radically with a relatively small portfolio and almost a year in microstock.
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+46 % than in December...
For all agencies my projection is +38 %...
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I regret to say SS has been really horrible this month. DT is almost better for me and it has never been better before.
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SS has done better this month than in the last two. It's still doing under my monthly average for them by a little over 35%
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I will be lucky if I get a payout this month. My sales on SS have been down for the past 3 months.
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The last month I have had many days each week where I sold nothing at all.. that has never happened to me before. I am not worried or gripping... I imagine it will pick up.
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Hi,
I have probably the highest rejection in January but oddly i did much better than expected !?!?
Guess just got lucky
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Need to start uploading some new stuff or my sales will stop completely ;D Just don't have time lately.
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It's much better than December; and a it's better comparing with several previous months. So far it's my 2nd BME and it's very close to become the BME
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One word: pathetic!
IS and Dreamstime are picking up the slack but SS has been very disappointing. Sigh
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slightly better than june 2007 when I had been with them 4 months and had about a sixth of the portfolio. under 1/2 of any month last year :(
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Well, I made more than I made last month....but Dec is always the worst month of the year. My sales have continued to fall slightly every month since last year. I am down about 30% from my BME in March of 2008. (With over 3000 images online) Right now I am struggling to maintain my current level and that is with adding around 200 new uploads every month. It is just getting harder and harder to have your pictures get any exposure with 70,000 new photos coming in every week.....and unfortunately I don't see anything changing in the future. A year or so ago when they were adding 20,000 new photos a week.....or 80,000 new images a month....my 200 new uploads accounted for .25% (1/4%) of the total new photos....Not much but at least I had some visibility. Now my 200 images account for only .005% ......I just can't keep up with the numbers and my images are getting lost in the Abyss.
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Just about average in spite of the fact that I haven't uploaded in a couple months. I did have an increase in 'on demand' and 'extended' sales. That was nice to see.
8)=tom
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Well, I made more than I made last month....but Dec is always the worst month of the year. My sales have continued to fall slightly every month since last year. I am down about 30% from my BME in March of 2008. (With over 3000 images online) Right now I am struggling to maintain my current level and that is with adding around 200 new uploads every month. It is just getting harder and harder to have your pictures get any exposure with 70,000 new photos coming in every week.....and unfortunately I don't see anything changing in the future. A year or so ago when they were adding 20,000 new photos a week.....or 80,000 new images a month....my 200 new uploads accounted for .25% (1/4%) of the total new photos....Not much but at least I had some visibility. Now my 200 images account for only .005% ......I just can't keep up with the numbers and my images are getting lost in the Abyss.
Totally agree with everything you said. Its not that new people are going to come in and take sales or produce better material as some have mentioned. Its the problem of being visible in the sea of new material regardless of how good it is. I can see the effects of this clearly on shutterstock. Someone mentioned in another thread how few downloads it takes to make the top 50 now on shutterstock. In the past you would need 10-20 downloads/day average to make it, now it is far less. The sky is not falling, but things are surely changing.
Getting exposure is and will get tougher and tougher. Whats the solution?? double, triple, production at same or better quality?? How about sending Christmas gifts to site admins ;D :P
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I think the problem with shutterstock is the heavy bias for new images can leave ones that should sell way down the default search. They need to find a way to bring more quality older images to the front pages, so they have more chance of being seen. I liked the Lucky Oliver sideshow where we were able to select some of our portfolio and they showed up randomly on the first pages. It would be great if they could bring in something like that.
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I think the problem with shutterstock is the heavy bias for new images can leave ones that should sell way down the default search.
I honestly believe that Shutterstock couldn't give two hoots what sells, they're a numbers game and as long as people buy their subscriptions I don't think Shutterstock care what the buyers do after that, apart from hoping they don't use their full quota obviously.
As for the OP's question, in my experience sales on SS are stagnated, it matters not whether I upload 5 or 500 a month the sales remain at or around the same level, but as strange as this may seem to some, I don't class Shutterstock as a 'stock' agency in the true sense of the word.
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It started as a real bad month for me for the first two weeks, until I received an EL. That put me just ahead of what I would normally expected.
Me too
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I did not even make payout this month at SS :-[
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Well, I made more than I made last month....but Dec is always the worst month of the year. My sales have continued to fall slightly every month since last year. I am down about 30% from my BME in March of 2008. (With over 3000 images online) Right now I am struggling to maintain my current level and that is with adding around 200 new uploads every month. It is just getting harder and harder to have your pictures get any exposure with 70,000 new photos coming in every week.....and unfortunately I don't see anything changing in the future. A year or so ago when they were adding 20,000 new photos a week.....or 80,000 new images a month....my 200 new uploads accounted for .25% (1/4%) of the total new photos....Not much but at least I had some visibility. Now my 200 images account for only .005% ......I just can't keep up with the numbers and my images are getting lost in the Abyss.
Totally agree with everything you said. Its not that new people are going to come in and take sales or produce better material as some have mentioned. Its the problem of being visible in the sea of new material regardless of how good it is. I can see the effects of this clearly on shutterstock. Someone mentioned in another thread how few downloads it takes to make the top 50 now on shutterstock. In the past you would need 10-20 downloads/day average to make it, now it is far less. The sky is not falling, but things are surely changing.
Getting exposure is and will get tougher and tougher. Whats the solution?? double, triple, production at same or better quality?? How about sending Christmas gifts to site admins ;D :P
Absolutely agree. Visibility is so much more an issue today than it was an year ago. The solution is quite clear and doesn't really look pretty. At mass uploading respond with ... mass uploading. However, it really looks bad when you see in "people" category let's say about 2-3 pages of virtually the same photo of some contributor that has 5000 images in his portfolio and if you remove the duplicates it'll remain no more than 500.
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Agree with all you three up there...
As I saw in some threads, they started to reject more images than in the past. It could be one solution. Another is the way SS give a push to new images, giving them a chance to be seen. It worked quite OK I think when there was less than 50K images added a week, but now its getting ridiculous. I don't have the recent numbers though. Then only good sellers was going on top after this. But now the newer images added get like 50 sec in the first 10 pages LOL
They could delete images that haven't sold ?? But, they didn't loose money, only us !! Nobody will won by increasing the main problem, mass production ! But again, nobody will take care of this problem, as the only photographers weapon seem to be mass complaining LOL
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Oh god, this month seems to be even worse than the previous one! SS has been really terrible at sales recently despite my uploading several times a week. The new images do not even seem to take off. SS is my 3rd earner this month and it has never been that bad. ???
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I wish SS and other sites would follow iStock's lead and institute upload limits. I know everyone complains about them, but upload limits would force people to become much more selective about what they upload, and the overall quality of the collections would improve. The end result would be smaller libraries with higher quality images, and we would all benefit. With these huge libraries, due to the dilution effect, it will eventually reach the point where the only people working in microstock and making any real money will be the agencies.
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Jan was good, Feb was my BME and now March beats it! :) It is my BME on SS.
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Jan was good, Feb was my BME and now March beats it! :) It is my BME on SS.
Same here. I got my EL today already before 2pm CET so it's a European customer. Mostly sales start to roll in when the Californians had their lunch, and wednesday seems to be the top day at SS. Add the frequent ODs to this and I start to wonder who the real subscription site is now...
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I wish SS and other sites would follow iStock's lead and institute upload limits. I know everyone complains about them, but upload limits would force people to become much more selective about what they upload, and the overall quality of the collections would improve.
What kind of upload limits you had in mind? I think 10 per day won't help, people would just spread it out more. The QC of SS is getting pretty high now and you are forced to upload your bests, as we all do spontaneously, no?. This ain't 2006 any more. I don't know about others but I can't postproduce 10 images per day on a sustained base. I'm happy to have 40 salable images per month. So actually, unless you have to upload an existing port to a new site, the upload limit of IS of 60/month is more than enough for most. Uploading similars is a bad strategy since you come into competition with yourself.