Quote from: Wilm on July 15, 2022, 03:21

I can't judge at all how buyers behave in general.

But since my office buys pictures, I can at least say something about it from my personal point of view.

We had one customer account with Shutterstock and one with Adobe Stock. Today we only have the one at AS. We cancelled the one at Shutterstock 3 years ago.

Why?

Well, it's mostly because of the search results.

If you have to make ads in a certain region for the target group in that region with products typical for that region, it is important to be able to find images that fit that target group.

Two examples:

Search term "house"

If I search for images of houses on shutterstock, I get a lot of images that do not show any houses in Germany/middle Europe at first glance. It doesn't matter whether I choose the German or the English language for the search. The results are almost identical. So I have to search much longer at shutterstock to find the right images for my region.

If I search for pictures of houses at AS, I can set the search region. If I search for houses in German, I get very specific houses that fit here. If I change the search to USA, I get mostly houses that look American. Here the search is clearly better.

Search term "family"

Here the same problem arises as with the search term "house". With shutterstock I get a lot of images that just don't fit my region. Here, too, the search results at AS are clearly better adapted to my search region.

From my point of view, the algorithm at AS is much better than that of shutterstock. In addition, from my point of view, shutterstock is more internationally oriented, while AS is more at home in the European market. However, I cannot judge at all how the search results look like in other countries. And of course I have no idea if other customers see this problem as well and therefore change the agency.

Perhaps learn how to use a search bar on any agency. "house' overall does yield houses in America, at least from where I am sitting. "house germany" yields nothing but houses in Germany.

Common sense.

Thanks for pointing that out, but since I've been doing this for a few decades now, I'm quite familiar with searching and entering search terms.

"House Germany" does not bring up what I meant by the desired search result. And I would never enter it that way either. Because the search would be reduced by the countless good search results that show houses in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy, western France, the Czech Republic, Poland, etc..

Since many contributors know that some of the architectural differences in this Central European region, which includes all these countries, are small, many use the country as a keyword only when it is relevant to tourism, not architecture. The result is then more like what Big Toe wrote. The contributors would dramatically limit their circle of buyers, which cannot be in their interest.

After all, there are agencies where a country has to be assigned when uploading. In my view, this is also not expedient in some cases. Instead of "Germany", the assignment "Central Europe" would have to be possible in the example in question in order to provide the buyers with a suitable selection. That would then be common sense.

It is the companies that are ready to pay a lot of money that the agencies want and that we want.

Again, I disagree. Agencies are pushing subscription plants like crazy. That's what they want the most, but not what we want as for us that's the 0.10$ sales. And these costomers - the ones with subscription plants for 750 images per month are very often the customers that need hundreds of images per month for random news articles online and will not hunt down the best quality image for each of these 750 images.

or I may have to make a decision to turn off my photos on Shutterstock and see if photo sales on Adobe Stock increases.

Adobe Stock is not the cure for more revenue or more downloads.
1) You are now selling videos for �2.80. Before it was 28,-�.
2) You sell only one image/video when Shutterstock sells 10 images/videos.
3) Adobe Stock closes portfolios if they don't like the contributor. They closed my portfolio and won't tell me why.

I just checked my Shutterstock photo sales from last year.  Revenue per a photo sale/download was constantly above $1 in probably half of months last year.  This month, it's less than $0.35 per download.  Everybody seeing the same trend now?  This is so demoralizing.

Disagree for this one.

2) You sell only one image/video when Shutterstock sells 10 images/videos.

And they fetch about 1/10 of AS per sale. Selling at lower price hurts the agency too.
I'm talking about images only, BTW.

it's around 50-60 cents per image for the last few months on SS.

it's around 1 dollar per image for the last few months on Adobe, but Adobe sells just 1/3 of SS sales.

I do not plan to disable SS, because there are lot of copypasters in my niche on SS, so disabling my SS portfolio will give them advantage.

I just need a couple of $100/download photo sale on Shutterstock to make it above $1/download this month.  lol.  Otherwise, I'll disable my photos on Shutterstock in August to see my photo sales on Adobe Stock will go up to the level before I re-enabled Shutterstock photo sales.  I suspect there is a co-relation there.

since individual months sales are near random, esp'ly for low # od DL, you won't learn anything from a 1-month change (1 large sale will skew your results) - correlation is not causation

Just un-published my photos.  I'll re-publish a month later for a few weeks at least to see if I get high price sales.  Otherwise, Shutterstock is the new Storyblocks imo.

Quote from: blvdone on July 19, 2022, 08:23

Just un-published my photos.  I'll re-publish a month later for a few weeks at least to see if I get high price sales.  Otherwise, Shutterstock is the new Storyblocks imo.

i've found my AS sales are most affected by the phase of the moon

LOL! Are you implying that Adobe customers are lunatics???!! 

Quote from: cascoly on July 19, 2022, 13:31

Quote from: blvdone on July 19, 2022, 08:23

Just un-published my photos.  I'll re-publish a month later for a few weeks at least to see if I get high price sales.  Otherwise, Shutterstock is the new Storyblocks imo.

i've found my AS sales are most affected by the phase of the moon

LOL! Are you implying that Adobe customers are lunatics???!! 

visiting the OR coast where one of my favorite restaurants is Luna Sea

So, I turned off my Shutterstock photo sales this week.  So far Adobe Stock photo downloads (how many, not $ revenue) went up about 20% from previous 3 weeks I had Shutterstock photo sales enabled.  It's back to the downloads amount before I enabled Shutterstock photo sales at the beginning of July.  This may be a coincidence, but I really suspect $0.10 photo sales on Shutterstock were eating up sales on Adobe Stock.  Also, seeing those parade of $0.10 one after another on Shutterstock is emotionally painful.  I didn't have that pain this week I just realized. 

Anybody having the similar lower sales on Adobe Stock during previous 3 weeks like me?

Yes, i had the same low numbers on AS during the last 3-4 weeks - about 50-70% of the 'normal' sales.