MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Shutterstock.com => Topic started by: derek on March 22, 2017, 14:16
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I simply have to share this just to see if anybody have experienced the same. To me it seems very very odd indeed.
Last week. thursday. $. 43.02
friday. 43. 93
Monday 44.34
Tuesday. 43.77
It just seems very funny to me. Is it some sort of a machine haha! determing how much we are going to earn? ;D
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There was a time I would have laughed off SS capping sales but not so much anymore.
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Oh they cap them alright
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pugh! I just find it incredible but why? what would they gain? I cant work it out.
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I simply have to share this just to see if anybody have experienced the same. To me it seems very very odd indeed.
Last week. thursday. $. 43.02
friday. 43. 93
Monday 44.34
Tuesday. 43.77
It just seems very funny to me. Is it some sort of a machine haha! determing how much we are going to earn? ;D
Here similar but a little different:
thursday 5-10
friday 60-70
monday 5-10
tuesday 60-70
Yesterday 70
Today 10
Weird!!! Coincidence??
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I do believe in the 'cap sales theory'
I guess with such an insanely huge library, by capping it will a/ distribute sales to more contributers and b/ make sure that the image library gets churned for searches, so that a wider variety of images have a chance to sell
We will never be privy to any micros way of conducting business, but there are too many contributers who see patterns like this for it to be merely coincidence
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(https://preview.ibb.co/mxgv1F/frk.jpg) (https://ibb.co/bJzhgF)
patterns or not ??
I got this "train" of duplicates from time to time :|
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How do they chose where to cap? Why would they cap someone at 20 dls and someone else at 250 dls?
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Earning Cap theory?
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pugh! I just find it incredible but why? what would they gain? I cant work it out.
Why? Think about it if they had a boat load of people with small ports who earned nothing then those people would be disinclined to submit further images. The library would not grow.
The big boys like Africa Studio Wavebreakmedia et al have to be kept happy or they'd stop uploading and you bet your bottom dollar that's where the cash is made.
The top 100 (who make up round 20% of the 135million images in the library) probably get preferential search presentations and dedicated account managers to push their stuff on customers.
The real losers would be those on higher tiers (less profit for the agency) who are in the top 10% of contributors by volume/quantity of which there are around 14,000 (portfolios of 1,000 images and above).
Their earnings would be sacrificed to keep the newbies happy (newbies are cheap at lower tiers 25 cents etc).
And of course the big contributors are seen as the golden geese so no one touches their earnings otherwise why do they continue to pump stuff by the tens of thousand in to SS? I wouldn't unless I was guaranteed a return would you? Think about Yuri Arcurs getting all kind of schmoozing from istock/getty.
Big contributors never hit the "wall"
Newbies are always happily shouting how their month is a BME likewise they never hit the wall because they are being fed from the teat.
The others however (10%) do hit the wall and see earnings decline no matter what they throw at SS.
"That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty good so far," (Tony Stark) 8)
And that's how coldly logical it is
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(https://preview.ibb.co/mxgv1F/frk.jpg) (https://ibb.co/bJzhgF)
patterns or not ??
I got this "train" of duplicates from time to time :|
I have the same type of problem I track it day by day month by month year by year and this wretched pattern is becoming more and more "normal"
Monthly payouts are within spit of my estimates I draw up, and each month is within $20 to $30 of the previous months it been flat bearing in mind it doesn't matter if I 've added volume or hardly any
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There is no cap that I know of. My earnings has fluctuated wildly in the last few weeks. I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.
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There is no cap that I know of. My earnings has fluctuated wildly in the last few weeks. I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.
Normally I'd agree but with these posts beginning to wonder you'd need a lot more data to be sure though. I'm a sceptic because I think "hiding" stuff from buyers seems a very risky strategy.
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There is no cap that I know of. My earnings has fluctuated wildly in the last few weeks. I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.
Normally I'd agree but with these posts beginning to wonder you'd need a lot more data to be sure though. I'm a sceptic because I think "hiding" stuff from buyers seems a very risky strategy.
100+ million images and you don't think there are images close enough to any of yours that a buyer will not buy something?
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pugh! I just find it incredible but why? what would they gain? I cant work it out.
Why? Think about it if they had a boat load of people with small ports who earned nothing then those people would be disinclined to submit further images. The library would not grow.
The big boys like Africa Studio Wavebreakmedia et al have to be kept happy or they'd stop uploading and you bet your bottom dollar that's where the cash is made.
The top 100 (who make up round 20% of the 135million images in the library) probably get preferential search presentations and dedicated account managers to push their stuff on customers.
The real losers would be those on higher tiers (less profit for the agency) who are in the top 10% of contributors by volume/quantity of which there are around 14,000 (portfolios of 1,000 images and above).
Their earnings would be sacrificed to keep the newbies happy (newbies are cheap at lower tiers 25 cents etc).
And of course the big contributors are seen as the golden geese so no one touches their earnings otherwise why do they continue to pump stuff by the tens of thousand in to SS? I wouldn't unless I was guaranteed a return would you? Think about Yuri Arcurs getting all kind of schmoozing from istock/getty.
Big contributors never hit the "wall"
Newbies are always happily shouting how their month is a BME likewise they never hit the wall because they are being fed from the teat.
The others however (10%) do hit the wall and see earnings decline no matter what they throw at SS.
"That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty good so far," (Tony Stark) 8)
And that's how coldly logical it is
How are the big contributors going to be kept happy if there is a cap? Or do you propose a double conspiracy that the cap is only for contributors in the middle?
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Just read what I said
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How is it possible to have "big contributors" if their sales are capped while they are "middling contributors"? And how did mid-size contributors get their if they were capped when they were small?
Chance is a funny thing, it repeatedly throws up what seem to be patterns but aren't really, also a portfolio of a certain size and popularity will have sales that fall within a certain range on certain days, so it's not surprising if the range is, say, from 15 to 45 that a few days will turn up with 30 sales in a row. So I suspect that all people are seeing is random variation within a fairly narrow range.
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There is no cap that I know of. My earnings has fluctuated wildly in the last few weeks. I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.
Normally I'd agree but with these posts beginning to wonder you'd need a lot more data to be sure though. I'm a sceptic because I think "hiding" stuff from buyers seems a very risky strategy.
100+ million images and you don't think there are images close enough to any of yours that a buyer will not buy something?
Not mine particularly but buyers might wonder why images keep appearing and dissapearing.
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So lets just say for a second they cap the sales. In reallity that means that files are never allowed to earn its full potential and that means that we can all sit here uploading until grey and green and it wont matter the slightest but for pennies and cents. To me that seems like bad business?
OTOH I know of examples where earnings have been around $.60 four days in a row and then the next three days down to around $.15 per day.
Well I hope there is no cap because if there is one might just as well leave the portfolio as it is since any uploading would just be a waste of time.
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How is it possible to have "big contributors" if their sales are capped while they are "middling contributors"? And how did mid-size contributors get their if they were capped when they were small?
Chance is a funny thing, it repeatedly throws up what seem to be patterns but aren't really, also a portfolio of a certain size and popularity will have sales that fall within a certain range on certain days, so it's not surprising if the range is, say, from 15 to 45 that a few days will turn up with 30 sales in a row. So I suspect that all people are seeing is random variation within a fairly narrow range.
I do tend to agree though the results posted to seem statistically quite improbable...thats not to say impossible though. In the end without a much bigger sample I guess the debate will continue.
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How is it possible to have "big contributors" if their sales are capped while they are "middling contributors"? And how did mid-size contributors get their if they were capped when they were small?
Chance is a funny thing, it repeatedly throws up what seem to be patterns but aren't really, also a portfolio of a certain size and popularity will have sales that fall within a certain range on certain days, so it's not surprising if the range is, say, from 15 to 45 that a few days will turn up with 30 sales in a row. So I suspect that all people are seeing is random variation within a fairly narrow range.
Because my Dear Watson the big contributors like Africa Studio and Yuri Arcurs and others are companies or if you like image factories.
They employ photographers and keyworders and set designers. They churn out thousands of images a week.
The ones with portfolios of 1,000 to 7,000 images are usually one man bands and can not hope to compete on volume QED they are the sacrificial lambs in all of this.
Do you think an image factory is going set up and continue in business having invested capital and salaries and recruitment if they were not 100% certain of returns? Of course they get consulted and an inside track on special deals.
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Isn't it much more likely a product of the "wall". Depending on your quality and upload rate at some point your earnings stagnate at a more or less steady level. You can only increase them by improving quality or upload rate and they will only drop if get worse or upload less. As your portfolio size grows your rate of increase decreases if you have a steady upload amount until it hovers around zero, looking very much like a "cap".
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I remember when Yuri hit the "wall". He was posting a lot about it on the SS forum, how dl number just wouldn't increase. I think was somewhere less than 1000 (500?) Dls/ day for him. That was years ago, before anyone else was talking about a cap.
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Talking about Yuri. For those here that remember he did constantly warn not just us but the agencies that stuff like this would happen such as favourized searches and caps on incomes and cut off periods.
He did personally know a couple of the bigger agency bosses so he must have known something.
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It gets confusing as there is talk of a cap but also rapidly declining sales....so is it a smaller cap? Also to bear in mind the larger your sales volume the more likely it is to tend to a steady state. If you have relatively low sales a big SoD can have a dramatic effect.
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He did personally know a couple of the bigger agency bosses so he must have known something.
I personally know a couple of billionaires but it doesn't mean I've got an inside track on all their future plans.
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I started believing in the "cap theory" for two reasons:
1) As per discussion - I have 40 sales a day +-2 with very few fluctuations.
2) Additional story - I did a big push in last 6 months and increased my port size on SS from 10,000 to over 20,000 very quickly. The outcome? Sales increased from 25 a day to 40 a day - reasonable result. BUT 90% of my current sales are my new images! Only 6 months ago, I had stable 25 sales a day, now the same old 10,000 images only contributes to some 4-5 sales a day, other 35 sales a day are new images. Why aren't there 35 sales from new images and 25 (or at least 20) from the old portfolio?
My theory is the "cap". New images are obviously preferred, but earnings are capped and therefore the old images can't sell as much as they used to.
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I started believing in the "cap theory" for two reasons:
1) As per discussion - I have 40 sales a day +-2 with very few fluctuations.
2) Additional story - I did a big push in last 6 months and increased my port size on SS from 10,000 to over 20,000 very quickly. The outcome? Sales increased from 25 a day to 40 a day - reasonable result. BUT 90% of my current sales are my new images! Only 6 months ago, I had stable 25 sales a day, now the same old 10,000 images only contributes to some 4-5 sales a day, other 35 sales a day are new images. Why aren't there 35 sales from new images and 25 (or at least 20) from the old portfolio?
My theory is the "cap". New images are obviously preferred, but earnings are capped and therefore the old images can't sell as much as they used to.
So the cap goes up for you if you add images.....Its all very confusing ???
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Conspiracy theories are fun (and great excuses for declining/stagnating sales).
Who knows, it might even be true, but what would be REALLY strange is if there WAS NOT a wall or stagnation in sales. Buyers are not in infinite supply. It ends somewhere.
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So the cap goes up for you if you add images.....Its all very confusing ???
I don't think the "cap" is a fixed number. It is more like: you earned your $20 today, now your chances of additional sales are smaller, you have to give the others chance to sell as well. When you earn $40, your chances of other sales go down again."
The more you earn, the harder you have to try to earn more. Of course, I have no idea how it really is, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm would contain a "cap" formula based in my observations.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Conspiracy theories are fun (and great excuses for declining/stagnating sales).
Who knows, it might even be true, but what would be REALLY strange is if there WAS NOT a wall or stagnation in sales. Buyers are not in infinite supply. It ends somewhere.
As as been said many time supply is going up much faster than demand...it doesn't really what you are selling it can only mean lower sales and profit in the long run. It may not be quite so bad as it appears after seeing the stuff re image spamming
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Furthermore, showing 4 days and seeing patterns is not nearly enough. Where did you study statistics again?
Show me 100-200 (CONSECUTIVE) sales days and then we can start looking for patterns.
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I practically do only video (just starting to upload a few images very recently) so things may be different.
I have absolutely no doubt that there is a sale control at SS, even though I do not complain about my sales.
- Every months I have at least 10 days when the gates are closed, I mean zero downloads, and a couple of weeks with huge sales
- For 4 to 6 months I get to the same exactly total in dollars. Sometimes I get there before the middle of the months, in that case the gates close and I don't get one single download until the end of the month
- Sometimes I start the month with 10 days of zero sales, but then I sell a lot (often with very high priced sales) until I get to my allocated total
- In the weeks of good sales, a very broad range of files sell. In the bad weeks all my sales come from the same single file (which represent 50% of my sales, with a portfolio of almost 2,000 video)
- Apparently so far my allotted sales are revised every 4-5 months, so that I then get to a slightly higher level
I must add that I have been in this game for less than 2 years, so I don't have a big deal of well established files
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I started believing in the "cap theory" for two reasons:
1) As per discussion - I have 40 sales a day +-2 with very few fluctuations.
2) Additional story - I did a big push in last 6 months and increased my port size on SS from 10,000 to over 20,000 very quickly. The outcome? Sales increased from 25 a day to 40 a day - reasonable result. BUT 90% of my current sales are my new images! Only 6 months ago, I had stable 25 sales a day, now the same old 10,000 images only contributes to some 4-5 sales a day, other 35 sales a day are new images. Why aren't there 35 sales from new images and 25 (or at least 20) from the old portfolio?
My theory is the "cap". New images are obviously preferred, but earnings are capped and therefore the old images can't sell as much as they used to.
If there is any (partial) overlap in subject matter / style between your old and your new files, than that is easily explained by your new files taking sales from your old files - either they are better or appear higher in search because they are newer.
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I find it very odd these Shutterstock earning numbers. I sold 15 videos this month and they are all different numbers;
5,70 - 5,28 - 18,61 - 18,72 - 79,32 - 3,87 - 12,41 - 17,85 - 4, 19 - 12,55 - 4,19 - 5,10 - 20,40 - 11,99
How is this possible???
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I find it very odd these Shutterstock earning numbers. I sold 15 videos this month and they are all different numbers;
5,70 - 5,28 - 18,61 - 18,72 - 79,32 - 3,87 - 12,41 - 17,85 - 4, 19 - 12,55 - 4,19 - 5,10 - 20,40 - 11,99
How is this possible???
Quickly, run! Conspiracy alert, I found two $4.19! This pattern can't be denied. The big boss is doing something.
Just kidding. ;)
It's likely to be mostly Clip Pack sales right? There are at least 12 different plans to choose from so prices can vary greatly.
This means a 4k original can have (at least) 16 different prices (12 clip pack prices + 4 regular) depending on size.
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How do they chose where to cap? Why would they cap someone at 20 dls and someone else at 250 dls?
you laughed at me last days about my thought of capping..and now you ask information....ahahahah.....i already knew all about you.
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pugh! I just find it incredible but why? what would they gain? I cant work it out.
well dividing the cake between more people....let small portfolio sell something to get them busy to upload something and not stop....share sales between small portfolio so many don't reach a payout for month. instead of a single payout of 500 dollar ...beter one of 300 and 10 for 20 dollars...200 dollars less than physically leave the house:)...
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How do they chose where to cap? Why would they cap someone at 20 dls and someone else at 250 dls?
you laughed at me last days about my thought of capping..and now you ask information....ahahahah.....i already knew all about you.
I am really trying not to call you out every time you make a fool of yourself, because I have better ways to spend my time, but boy do you make it hard.
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How do they chose where to cap? Why would they cap someone at 20 dls and someone else at 250 dls?
you laughed at me last days about my thought of capping..and now you ask information....ahahahah.....i already knew all about you.
I am really trying not to call you out every time you make a fool of yourself, because I have better ways to spend my time, but boy do you make it hard.
i know you are busy counting your 20k royalty every month....
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So hard :-X
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There is no cap that I know of. My earnings has fluctuated wildly in the last few weeks. I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.
Normally I'd agree but with these posts beginning to wonder you'd need a lot more data to be sure though. I'm a sceptic because I think "hiding" stuff from buyers seems a very risky strategy.
If they cap earnings, I think they'd cap the high earners, not the low-medium ones. There is always an invisible wall that contributors need to break through, but not a wall that is imposed by an agency to intentionally cap contributor earnings.
I've seen my earnings rise steadily, and if there was a cap, I would have experienced it. Of course, there is a wall that many contributors will run into unless they improve or diversify their work. In the case of FT, rising up the weekly ranks becomes exponentially harder as you go higher, so that's a wall in a sense.
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pugh! I just find it incredible but why? what would they gain? I cant work it out.
well dividing the cake between more people....let small portfolio sell something to get them busy to upload something and not stop....share sales between small portfolio so many don't reach a payout for month. instead of a single payout of 500 dollar ...beter one of 300 and 10 for 20 dollars...200 dollars less than physically leave the house:)...
The way to do that would be by weighting in the search, to push up poor quality, newbie work to the top of the pile. It doesn't involve a "cap" for individuals. The problem is that if buyers can't find good images on one site they will go to another where they can, so the site that's fiddling the search will eventually lose out.
The same applies to a "cap". The very idea requires a belief that the sites are trying to keep most decent images down in order to favour a handful of select portfolios. If they are doing that, what's the point of hosting all the stuff that won't be sold?
And, anyway, how can they stop people buying your work when you hit your daily "cap" without an infinite number of search engine changes every day in order to hide it? Or are you saying that the are selling your work but hiding the sales once they think you've got enough to keep you quiet? If you think that why do you carry on working with them?
This cap idea simply doesn't make any sense because there is no way of applying it other than fraudulent sales reporting.
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I simply have to share this just to see if anybody have experienced the same. To me it seems very very odd indeed.
Last week. thursday. $. 43.02
friday. 43. 93
Monday 44.34
Tuesday. 43.77
It just seems very funny to me. Is it some sort of a machine haha! determing how much we are going to earn? ;D
Yes exactly, BI machine which prepares input parameters for media database search engine.
I thought I will never post again anything about microstock but here I am first post after 5 years and also first post here on microstockgroup.com forum.
Better late than never, but time has come to bust some myths.
Before my comment let me introduce myself: 8 years in stock, mostly photo and a little bit of video. Photography/videography is not my full time job, that is my hobby and microstock helps me to pay my travel and new photo/video equipment.
My main profession is IT related, BI analytics, data mining and creation of algorythms related to that.
For fun I did a series of experiments during 2016. and 2017. on Shutterstock.
In short, despite a lot of input parameters and dynamic nature of their algorythm it is very clear there is a BI machine which process and analyze sales and feed search engine with those results for every single image in a real time. Goal is obvious and it is not to help to contributors or buyers. KPIs of BI machine are set to maximize Shutterstock profits and other secondary financial parameters. Most important non-marketing related tool for that purpose is their search engine.
During experiments I tried a lot of things, some of them are illegal by Shutterstock rules and terms of usage so I won't explain them here.
Your small sample of financial data based on a things that I analyzed tells me that you and your buyers were very predictable for BI machine in a previous period of time. No big deviations from expected behaviour. So the sales are in according to that.
In general if you and your buyers are predictable (posting and buying statistics) and you are selling a lot of images every day you will see figures like that. If you continue to act like that in a long term figures will decline slowly which depending on a lot of factors. Most important one is a total number of images in Shutterstock database. Decline could be masked in a few different ways so it won't look the same but if you are persistant and predictable and sales a lot of images everyday you could predict your decline very precisely on a yearly even monthly basis if they are not messing around with parameters which they do from time to time.
I read all comments from this topic and based on my learnings I could give explanation for every behaviour if I have enough informations and time for that.
Some things are not obvious, because machines still can't control humans so if buyers are searching for exact things(artist, picture number, very specific keywords) search algorythm must show your images. There were some reports that in a case of a very specific keywords images were removed from search results but I didn't manage to proove that the images are completely removed from search results. Also contributors and buyers could act unpredictable but BI machine is permanently trying "to fix" that unpredictable behaviour with lower rating of your images.
It is not simple to understand but in general if you are statistically significant seller changing in your sales is directly related to changing your behaviour/status or your buyers behaviour/status or even other contributors status/behaviour with which you are competing for a position in a search engine order.
All of you are probably interested in an answer is it possible to beat their BI machine to get more income with less work instead opposite?
From everything I learned so far the answer is Yes but a) it is not legal, b) it can't be done permanently, c) it is complicated/time consuming
If you want to play legal I think you will have better chances in a casino.
p.s. Sorry for my English, it is not my native language.
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For several years I have been uploading very little, and surprisingly my monthly earnings continued to move within a very narrow band. There was an amount which I identified as "my minimum" and my monthly earnings usually were within the range: minimum + around 15%. Sometimes a fluke at the end of the month could have made it: minimum + 20%. I could not complain about it because I wasn't uploading very actively. If a had an excellent start of the month, later weeks sucked really bad.
Call it a cap, or "more even distribution of revenue", I didn't mind it.
The problem for me is that in November somehow they "seem to have suddenly lowered my minimum amount" by about 25-30%. My monthly earnings still move within a surprisingly narrow range, but this range is much lower than in the past and that sucks.
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For several years I have been uploading very little, and surprisingly my monthly earnings continued to move within a very narrow band. There was an amount which I identified as "my minimum" and my monthly earnings usually were within the range: minimum + around 15%. Sometimes a fluke at the end of the month could have made it: minimum + 20%. I could not complain about it because I wasn't uploading very actively. If a had an excellent start of the month, later weeks sucked really bad.
Call it a cap, or "more even distribution of revenue", I didn't mind it.
The problem for me is that in November somehow they "seem to have suddenly lowered my minimum amount" by about 25-30%. My monthly earnings still move within a surprisingly narrow range, but this range is much lower than in the past and that sucks.
or maybe they just gave a boost to newer images at that time and since all your images were older...
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The way to do that would be by weighting in the search, to push up poor quality, newbie work to the top of the pile. It doesn't involve a "cap" for individuals. The problem is that if buyers can't find good images on one site they will go to another where they can, so the site that's fiddling the search will eventually lose out.
The same applies to a "cap". The very idea requires a belief that the sites are trying to keep most decent images down in order to favour a handful of select portfolios. If they are doing that, what's the point of hosting all the stuff that won't be sold?
And, anyway, how can they stop people buying your work when you hit your daily "cap" without an infinite number of search engine changes every day in order to hide it? Or are you saying that the are selling your work but hiding the sales once they think you've got enough to keep you quiet? If you think that why do you carry on working with them?
This cap idea simply doesn't make any sense because there is no way of applying it other than fraudulent sales reporting.
It is not that some single contributor is the only one with "decent" (as you say) images in a specific search. There are LOTS AND LOTS of "equally decent" images for most searches. The number of transactions is gigantic, the number of good files is gigantic, the number of parameters in the search algorithm is very high. They can selectively tweak the algorithm for example in certain regions if they wish, or based on any other parameter.
I don't know if there is a cap. But it would be definitely possible to implement, if they chose to do so. The amount of data that they have collected is huge and they can process it in any way they want. This is big data.
If they have decided that it is the company's policy to "keep as many contributors happy as possible" (because happy contributors are good for business), then they would have a reason to try to distribute the earnings more evenly, and they could do so without sacrificing the quality of search results. They have a huge amount of data, and you can't compare them with some small-scale business.
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or maybe they just gave a boost to newer images at that time and since all your images were older...
The problem with that theory is that new images hardly seem to sell these days. My bestsellers from 2010-2013 still sell kind of all right.
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Yes, I believe there is an algorithm that caps earnings. I've noticed that whenever I get an extended licence or a SOD of decent value, the next few days my 'ordinary sales' drop by a significant amount. It looks like the following days are lower in order to 'adjust' for the sizeable income from the extended licences or SODs. Happens every time and is obvious.
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No selling of new files (for most of the contributors and most of the time) looks confusing because it is not related to financial results but it is Shutterstock method of fighting against different kind of spams.
Other methods and campaigns so far were unsuccessful and other potential solutions costs too much.
Spam sells very rarely, so they prioritizes old stuff which had sales.
Algorythm is a little bit different for brand new contributors but it equalizes after a few months.
It is very rigid now and I expect some refines because it is almost impossible to sell good new stuff these days.
My expirience of that behaviour is that sells only stuff directly targeted from buyers by very specific keywords, artist id...
Everything else newly uploaded is a collateral damage of spam wars.
Some contributors which stops uploading are partially right because that stuff will never sell well even if they refine their algorythms.
But on the other hand they are wrong because lower intensity and frequency of their uploading activity counts also in search engine ordering.
So how to fight against that?
How to upload new stuff which will never sell with minimum effort?
Answer is: become a spammer (to keep frequency and intensity with minimum effort)
Because it is a paradox and they will become aware of that if they are not already, treatment of a newly uploaded stuff must be refined in the future.
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We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock (http://video-stock.org/shutterstock-number-of-sales-rise-but-income-is-lower/). We had hundred of images for half a year and they were just crushing down our video sales. We will see what the next few months will bring after we deleted them.
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We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock ([url]http://video-stock.org/shutterstock-number-of-sales-rise-but-income-is-lower/[/url]). We had hundred of images for half a year and they were just crushing down our video sales. We will see what the next few months will bring after we deleted them.
Depending on their behaviour and behaviour of their buyers some users will notice cap for the number of monthly downloads but I didn't find that downloads of photos and videos are related, so it probably won't help but if you delete your images and keep the same cap of monthly downloads than great for you.
Not directly related to your comment but it is related to deleting:
As far as I know deleting images won't change anything significant in a search position of your files.
Btw until those search engine changes were implemented in the second half of 2016. newly uploaded files had high priority.
That was the old search engine logic "customers wants new content" so prioritize new content.
Problem with that logic was that it could be easily exploited by contributors with massive deleting and adding the same files again and again.
Using that perfectly legal spam technique it was possible to significantly raise your income.
Among other spam pratices that was also "fixed" in the second half of 2016. so new files now have minimum priority.
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I don't care what your theories are mb, I will never spam my images. It isn't in my blood.
You mentioned:
"But on the other hand they are wrong because lower intensity and frequency of their uploading activity counts also in search engine ordering."
I'm not sure if this is entirely correct. I was uploading more in the beginning of the year and my sales actually went DOWN. I have stopped uploading and my sales are stabilizing - but never like before the crash in 2016. I'm still down 35-40% of what I was making but at least my earning are not going down past that ....
I appreciate your input though. You are right about new images not selling at all.
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We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock ([url]http://video-stock.org/shutterstock-number-of-sales-rise-but-income-is-lower/[/url]). We had hundred of images for half a year and they were just crushing down our video sales. We will see what the next few months will bring after we deleted them.
This is extremely interesting.
I have been in this game a bit more than two years. Until a couple of months ago I was uploading just video, I started to do a bit of photo in the last 2 months, so far just about 500 images.
I have not noticed a decrease of video sales. Actually this month is just closing as my BME for video at SS, in spite of the fact that the average price of downloads has gone down in the last 2-3 months. So I assume that my number of video downloads has gone slightly up.
Too soon to draw conclusions, but I will definitely keep an eye out for what you are saying
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I don't care what your theories are mb, I will never spam my images. It isn't in my blood.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to you or anybody else that you should spam Shutterstock.
I'm just explaining existing reality and off course I appreciate your attitude.
I'm not sure if this is entirely correct. I was uploading more in the beginning of the year and my sales actually went DOWN. I have stopped uploading and my sales are stabilizing - but never like before the crash in 2016. I'm still down 35-40% of what I was making but at least my earning are not going down past that ....
If new images are not selling at all there is very little you can do to raise search engine positions of your images.
If you didn't change your marketing approach, fluctuations of your sales mainly depends on a periodical market fluctuations and current market conditions for your type of images.
In short I don't have enough information but there is a reason for that behaviour and if you continue not to post your images until the end of the year it will unfortunately continue to go down.
I appreciate your input though. You are right about new images not selling at all.
Keep an eye on that I am expecting that to be changed in next few months and I'm expecting that contributors which are not posting at all to go down even faster when that happened. My advice is: don't be lazy, keep uploading and keywording but don't publish them until new stuff will start to sell again.
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What you write is quite interesting, mb.
We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock ([url]http://video-stock.org/shutterstock-number-of-sales-rise-but-income-is-lower/[/url]). We had hundred of images for half a year and they were just crushing down our video sales. We will see what the next few months will bring after we deleted them.
Hmm, around 2011 I deleted and tried to re-upload 1 photo, because it hadn't taken off and I thought it was a good one and deserved more downloads. What happened then: the photo was rejected because the system recognized that it was re-uploaded and I got a warning.
I don't know how they treat this these days...
Back then, I think a second or third warning meant you were a goner.
As you write, you don't intend to re-upload them, but I don't think having more images in the portfolio can hurt your video sales... It would make no sense. Why should the algorithm reward contributors who delete their stuff? How does it benefit SS? Correlation does not mean causation.
If that was helpful, people would just delete their stuff to game the system and grow their earnings. It would make more sense to penalize people who regularly delete their stuff.
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It is not simple to understand but in general if you are statistically significant seller changing in your sales is directly related to changing your behaviour/status or your buyers behaviour/status or even other contributors status/behaviour with which you are competing for a position in a search engine order.
Your post is really interesting and I believe that something is true.
But the whole line of reasoning has no commercial/economic sense at all.
About financial reason, if SS intention would be to reduce the money monthly payout to contributors, why some months ago they gave opportunities to lower the minimum payout? At the contrary they should increse it. Now they have to pay people that earn 30$/month only. Why?
About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?
I think that all is connected to number of new files uploaded.
Number of file makes day by day harder to be in good position, simply this.
Obviously, for sure, there are search algorythm adjusting: and it's absolutely obvious that sometimes new contributors could have good rating, because they give more money to the agency. But giving this as a normal rule would expose the agency itself to a great risk.
So what you are not calculating in your statistics is the risk of the agency to give its buyers low value images. And this is still a point for big buyers (surely not for a single buyer)
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About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month.
I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.
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I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.
I know very well. It would be very easy to do it here, just screenshot from different user from all over the world. If I remeber well, this happened in the past, without evident results.
And, more important, ok SS could give different results, and so?
Which is the advantage for the agency to have so complicated and endless calculating for giving different results in different parts of the world?
I cannot understand this from any point of view.
For example, it's better to give more space to new images for european buyer search? Or for american ones?
Well, this kind of complication is completely useless from my point of view :)
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Super interesting read, mb! Thanks a lot!
Keep an eye on that I am expecting that to be changed in next few months and I'm expecting that contributors which are not posting at all to go down even faster when that happened. My advice is: don't be lazy, keep uploading and keywording but don't publish them until new stuff will start to sell again.
Does that mean that the search algorithm actually "reacts" to *uploads* rather than images someone gets *approved*?
Say, if I'd upload and keyword them, but don't send them to the review team, they'd still positively influence the placement of my port/active images?
And wouldn't those images be already buried (due to their older image number and date they were uploaded) when I finally publish them later on?
Sorry, if those are noob questions to you - I'm not into those things at all. :)
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There are 2 million video clips on SS. What is there to figure out? The video market is starting to saturate and competition is getting tougher. It happened to photos a while ago. Vectors wasn't too far behind.
Nobody want to admit their work isn't the best available, but buyers are truthful. They download what they want to download. There are no caps on SS. There is growing competition, and growing portfolio of content. Good content and good keywording are the keys to success.
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There are 2 million video clips on SS. What is there to figure out? The video market is starting to saturate and competition is getting tougher. It happened to photos a while ago. Vectors wasn't too far behind.
Nobody want to admit their work isn't the best available, but buyers are truthful. They download what they want to download. There are no caps on SS. There is growing competition, and growing portfolio of content. Good content and good keywording are the keys to success.
Really?? oh well if you say so. ;D
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Really?? oh well if you say so. ;D
I know a number of people whose earnings fluctuate wildly. My earnings fluctuate wildly throughout the week. Sometimes, the difference between 2 days can be a 100% increase or a 50% decrease. And I'm not talking about a few dollars.
So far, nobody has been able to prove that there is a cap.
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There are 2 million video clips on SS. What is there to figure out? The video market is starting to saturate and competition is getting tougher. It happened to photos a while ago. Vectors wasn't too far behind.
Nobody want to admit their work isn't the best available, but buyers are truthful. They download what they want to download. There are no caps on SS. There is growing competition, and growing portfolio of content. Good content and good keywording are the keys to success.
Then explain me, why we see in three year analysis number of sold files per month slowly rising with number of uploaded footage, and those sold files per month are always in +-10 %. We've never seen one month being sold 10 files, and another 100. There is always between 50-70 files sold. This is clearly their capping system that gives priority for some factors we don't know yet.
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Then explain me, why we see in three year analysis number of sold files per month slowly rising with number of uploaded footage, and those sold files per month are always in +-10 %. We've never seen one month being sold 10 files, and another 100. There is always between 50-70 files sold. This is clearly their capping system that gives priority for some factors we don't know yet.
This means nothing, it's perfeclty obvious that on long terms the numbers tend to be more stable, much more than day by day numbers.
Another important thing is that your assumption means that agency changes clips ratings in search results to adjust number of sells and earnings.
But the assumption has no strong basis: maybe for photo a buyer stops on first page and choose the image paying few pennies, but I don't think that this works for someone who spend hundred of dollars. This person will probably search very well and deep before buying a clip.
So it would be quite impossible for agency to push some clips and change the buyer direction in easy "search results" way.
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If google can adjust your search results based on location you live, what you usually search, what is currently interesting, what had more views and many other factors, why would be impossible to adjust such a small scale database for many other reasons? Don't underestimate the power of code. Never.
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If google can adjust your search results based on location you live, what you usually search, what is currently interesting, what had more views and many other factors, why would be impossible to adjust such a small scale database for many other reasons? Don't underestimate the power of code. Never.
Maybe I'm not explaining this very well ;-)
I'm sure that a lot of adjustment are done on database results for a single search. I simply don't believe that locking earnings on a specific amount for each buyers is one of this adjustment :)
I can believe that some contributors could have a generic rating that push their images or clips up and down, but this has nothing to do with selling the content. It depends on new content pushing, mixing with old ones, and better content with same subject moving up.
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They're just capping lower contribution margin sales, grocery stores do this by moving things in the store, like the $1 or whatever they keep from subs isn't as nice as the on demand buys, ELs and stuff ... and they have to toss smaller contributors some quarters to keep them playing the game.
They've got these numbers down to a science, you can be goddamn sure that they're capping sales and changing search all day every day. Much the same way airlines adjust ticket prices daily ...
In fact, if you've been in business for a few years ... you probably know your breakeven, contribution margins, and possibly even have those broken down by category.
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Then explain me, why we see in three year analysis number of sold files per month slowly rising with number of uploaded footage, and those sold files per month are always in +-10 %. We've never seen one month being sold 10 files, and another 100. There is always between 50-70 files sold. This is clearly their capping system that gives priority for some factors we don't know yet.
This means nothing, it's perfeclty obvious that on long terms the numbers tend to be more stable, much more than day by day numbers.
Another important thing is that your assumption means that agency changes clips ratings in search results to adjust number of sells and earnings.
But the assumption has no strong basis: maybe for photo a buyer stops on first page and choose the image paying few pennies, but I don't think that this works for someone who spend hundred of dollars. This person will probably search very well and deep before buying a clip.
So it would be quite impossible for agency to push some clips and change the buyer direction in easy "search results" way.
Incredibly easy ... when people purchase just write a cookie ... Ever been shopping on Amazon and then see the ads for the same item on Facebook?
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Incredibly easy ... when people purchase just write a cookie ... Ever been shopping on Amazon and then see the ads for the same item on Facebook?
Not when you're spending hundred of $ for a clip.
When you're looking for something of 100$ value do you just click on the first ads choice? I don't think so.
And you're talking about manipulation from the buyers point of view. This is absolutely normal, it's marketing.
Manipulate the contributor side is a completly different thing.
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i agree with mb.
for the last few months i have tracked times at which i got sales using a javascript published earlier at ss forums. i have data for 3386 sales in saved in that period and i am attaching the histogram: x-axis shows times between sales in 5 minutes periods and y-axis shows number of sales. there are peaks at 3 and 4 hour gaps between sales that i frequently observe. every day i get a few of 2 or 3 hour gaps between sales. i'm not a data expert; can anyone who is conclude anything from this distribution? it seems to me that 200+ minute gaps should decrease, but they increase in this chart...
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It is not mathematically possible to earn more monthly than the market value produced by a contributor per month. That's your cap, right there, everyone's got one, and everyone's is different. Unless you consider the market value of your every image/pic/clip infinite. Then we are talking about a different kind of cap altogether...
I also noticed that while my total income is at expected levels, the income distribution between agencies fluctuates from month to month. If SS artificially caps someone's earnings, they are just capping themselves by giving the market share to someone else. Somehow I doubt they would be excited about that.
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It is not mathematically possible to earn more monthly than the market value produced by a contributor per month. That's your cap, right there, everyone's got one, and everyone's is different. Unless you consider the market value of your every image/pic/clip infinite. Then we are talking about a different kind of cap altogether...
I also noticed that while my total income is at expected levels, the income distribution between agencies fluctuates from month to month. If SS artificially caps someone's earnings, they are just capping themselves by giving the market share to someone else. Somehow I doubt they would be excited about that.
Correct. The only cap is the images we have uploaded. The quality, diversity of subjects, number of images and the competition for the same. Average sales per day vs competition, in any business is not a cap.
There are good days and bad and periods where demand will rise or fall, but the average day, based on portfolio is not a cap. My sales are stable for the content I produce. That's not a cap. It's actually nice to have consistent numbers most days, and I know my weekends are lower.
I have a small number of images that sell almost daily and are at the top of the search. This is over ten years. Some images are better and succeed better, while most fall into the heap of similar and common subjects and scenes. I think everyone here has some stand out images, and then we all have some that are Common Microstock. The common are like sand on the beach, among 150 million other grains of sand. They aren't going to sell or be noticed.
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Incredibly easy ... when people purchase just write a cookie ... Ever been shopping on Amazon and then see the ads for the same item on Facebook?
Not when you're spending hundred of $ for a clip.
When you're looking for something of 100$ value do you just click on the first ads choice? I don't think so.
And you're talking about manipulation from the buyers point of view. This is absolutely normal, it's marketing.
Manipulate the contributor side is a completly different thing.
If it's something that I'm in the market for, you're * right I click the ad.
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Your post is really interesting and I believe that something is true.
But the whole line of reasoning has no commercial/economic sense at all.
About financial reason, if SS intention would be to reduce the money monthly payout to contributors, why some months ago they gave opportunities to lower the minimum payout? At the contrary they should increse it. Now they have to pay people that earn 30$/month only. Why?
There is a lot of reasoning but you have to think like a Shutterstock management. Keep in mind that I didn't said that they want to keep contributor's money as long as possible. Collecting debt is not good for a "healthy" business. They just wan't to sell as more as possible while paying to contributors as little as possible. One example is by proritizing contributors with lower fees/rates.
About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
Sorry I can't tell you that exactly, lets say that I was playing with a portfolio of 5000+ images in a different period of time testing different kind of exposures depending on my status, on my content, on my uploading behaviour, my buyers behaviour...Sorry I can't tell you anymore.
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?
Does those images have similar relative position if you search for them with more specific keywords?
I think that all is connected to number of new files uploaded.
Number of file makes day by day harder to be in good position, simply this.
That is not so simple but in general, yes it is true.
But I think that only images which have at least one sell counts.
Obviously, for sure, there are search algorythm adjusting: and it's absolutely obvious that sometimes new contributors could have good rating, because they give more money to the agency. But giving this as a normal rule would expose the agency itself to a great risk.
So what you are not calculating in your statistics is the risk of the agency to give its buyers low value images. And this is still a point for big buyers (surely not for a single buyer)
There is some period for a new contributors to establish their sales and rules for their images are different during that period. Best approach for "newbies" is to prepare thousands of images in advance and than start to publish them with high frequency and high rate, as example 100 images every day.
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Hmm, around 2011 I deleted and tried to re-upload 1 photo, because it hadn't taken off and I thought it was a good one and deserved more downloads. What happened then: the photo was rejected because the system recognized that it was re-uploaded and I got a warning.
I don't know how they treat this these days...
Back then, I think a second or third warning meant you were a goner.
All you have to do back then and now is to change file name and file checksum. There are very simple utility programs for batch processing names and check sums of your files. If you change the name and content for 1 single byte file is not the same. I also batch changed some exif data but that is not necessary.
As you write, you don't intend to re-upload them, but I don't think having more images in the portfolio can hurt your video sales... It would make no sense. Why should the algorithm reward contributors who delete their stuff? How does it benefit SS? Correlation does not mean causation.
If that was helpful, people would just delete their stuff to game the system and grow their earnings. It would make more sense to penalize people who regularly delete their stuff.
I didn't said that, I replied to Video-StockORG comment with this:
"Depending on their behaviour and behaviour of their buyers some users will notice cap for the number of monthly downloads but I didn't find that downloads of photos and videos are related, so it probably won't help but if you delete your images and keep the same cap of monthly downloads than great for you."
As you see I also wasn't sure that would help because I wasn't tested mixed photo/video content at the same time. But if Video-StockORG really suffers from downloads/period cap it could help to delete photos because videos have greater value per file.
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About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month.
I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.
For those testing Ghost VPN works excellent, you can jump quicky from one country to another. Also new anonymous browser session will get rid of a cookies from previous session.
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Super interesting read, mb! Thanks a lot!
Keep an eye on that I am expecting that to be changed in next few months and I'm expecting that contributors which are not posting at all to go down even faster when that happened. My advice is: don't be lazy, keep uploading and keywording but don't publish them until new stuff will start to sell again.
Does that mean that the search algorithm actually "reacts" to *uploads* rather than images someone gets *approved*?
Say, if I'd upload and keyword them, but don't send them to the review team, they'd still positively influence the placement of my port/active images?
I think that search algorythm reacts also to uploads only but it is so not important factor.
That is a part of measurement on contributor activity which also has influence of your ratings.
If you are not active rating of your files will become lower, but it is not simple and linear for all files.
It depends on a various things from files "history".
Not sure about this, but my expirience also is that there are some "thresolds" for inactivity. If you are inactive for a certain period of time you won't experience constant drop of sales, but at some point there will be a huge drop and after that if you continue not to publish your files you will have another period of constant sales on that lower level until next threshold.
More important why I said that is that because current solution of a spam problem is not viable in a long term. There are millions on new files every month which are not selling at all. IT costs raises and there is no income from new content to cover those costs. Algorythm must be changed in next few months, new files from old contributors will probably get higher priority and when that happened it will be good to have a lot of new files prepared for immediate publishing.
And wouldn't those images be already buried (due to their older image number and date they were uploaded) when I finally publish them later on?
No they won't, approval date counts for "new image" status, not upload date or image id.
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It is not mathematically possible to earn more monthly than the market value produced by a contributor per month. That's your cap, right there, everyone's got one, and everyone's is different. Unless you consider the market value of your every image/pic/clip infinite. Then we are talking about a different kind of cap altogether...
Regarding cap, this is not my direct answer on your comment but I would like to share something special that happened to me these days.
Ok, story goes like this, seems like two of my buyers forgot to spend some money on images before the end of the month. They are from two different continents, they are buying different content and there is no chance that they know each other. On Tuesday 30th of May one of them from Europe targeted directly one of my sets bought huge number of images, actually more than my weekly sales from all customers. I had sales of big licences in the past but never so much downloads in one day. On Wednesday 31th of May happened something very similar, another customer from a different part of the world targeted directly my images bought even bigger amount of images from a few different sets but there is obvious consistency between those images and I was very happy because that looked like a legitimate sale and I was also happy because those two almost doubled my monthly sales on Shutterstock.
But most interesting things happened yesterday and today. Before that I would like to explain someting about my sales. I'm selling a lot of images, for years I didn't have a day without sale, mostly because of good diversity of regional and niches coverage. For that reason big holidays, weekends, seasonal fluctuations are not hurting ma sales too much. Even on a worst day of a year I'm selling at least dozen of images on Shutterstock. Ok let's get to the point now. Yesterday on Thursday 1st of June after 2 consecutive days of huge sales I had 0 sales. That happened on Thursday which is statistically my best selling day in a week for a years on Shutterstock. I'm writing this on Friday, it is 5pm in Europe and I also have 0 sales today. I tried to calculate probability for this to be happened accidentaly but I stoped when it passed 1:1.000.000.
After this if you are still not convinced that search engine cap exists then you'll never be. Search engine recognized huge deviation in my sales caused by those two customers and now it is trying to "fix" that during next period.
p.s. There is a possibility of some technical error on Shutterstock servers for last two days but nobody reports it so I assume that I have a problem with search engine because of previous "unexpected" sales
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i agree with everything mb wrote. my experience can back every claim he makes.
would it be possible for you to comment on my histogram i posted on the third page of this thread? is it of any relevance and can anything be deduced from it?
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" 100000" % agree with MB.
Nothing new at all.
Today I have the same situation: zero DL after yesterdays great sales.
Shame on SS !!
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And the same here a really good day on June 1st in fact really surprising considering how bad things are.
Then Friday nothing a few subs more like a Sunday.
I track sales and the statistical likelihood of having the same numbers day in day out if it were random buyer behaviour would be very low. But each month the same old pattern day in day out.
The monthly figures are within >5% of eachother.
The same goes for yearly sales and more whacky is 2015 compared to 2016 overall annual sales revenue varied by $57 over a total of thousands of dollars.
Even though I added images and improved keywords on old images.
The game is rigged
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But what would be the statistical likelihood of having variance of more than 5% every month? Surely a plus or minus of less than 5%, is more likely than a plus an minus of more than 5%? And it sounds like it's even less than 5% over the year... that's just how it works... if you flip a coin and get heads five or ten times in a row, that's pretty rare, but nothing to write home about. If you get heads 500 times in a row, then something strange is going on.
The 'cap' is how much you sell. If you upload more stuff, and better stuff, and improve your keywords, the 'cap' will probably increase... what a strange coincidence! I mean, how would they decide what your cap is, and how would that vary from one person to another?
I'm pretty sure it's not rigged. Consistent sales over a month or a year is hardly evidence of a rigged system. And some outliers when it comes to zero sales days isn't either. People are talking about the statistical improbability of having a zero sales day, but they mention nothing of the statistical improbability of having a weeks worth of sales in one day. If sales were massively inconsistent from one month to another instead, I'm sure somebody would come up with some theory to explain why that's rigged as well
Surely an anonymous ex-employee would have 'blown the lid' on this capping system by now?
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honest question: does this discussion make sense? Which result do you expect at the end of the day? any profits?
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honest question: does this discussion make sense? Which result do you expect at the end of the day? any profits?
You are right really this has been rumbling for years in the end they have a cap or they don't not much we can do about it by discussing it. Like most discussions about conspiracy theories doubt anyone will change their mind.
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honest question: does this discussion make sense? Which result do you expect at the end of the day? any profits?
Honest answer? I would expect to be able to put images and video up for sale without and agency manipulating earnings.
And these discusions do make sense otherwise we end up blindly rolling along thinking all will be well when it is clearly not.
We are not sheep
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Honest answer? I would expect to be able to put images and video up for sale without and agency manipulating earnings.
So would I, but I've not been presented with any compelling evidence that such things are happening.
...all will be well when it is clearly not.
Might be clear to you, but not to me!
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honest question: does this discussion make sense? Which result do you expect at the end of the day? any profits?
Honest answer? I would expect to be able to put images and video up for sale without and agency manipulating earnings.
And these discusions do make sense otherwise we end up blindly rolling along thinking all will be well when it is clearly not.
We are not sheep
You are not forced to sell there if you think they are really that shady. I just don't see how the discussion improves things...
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Agree with..after good period of sale a friday with 4 sale, never happened, todya 2.
Maybe they had problm generally cause friday i had a modl felease not accepted i dont know why, there is a similar post also, and still they zeroed the june month, i still have may earning
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Agree with..after good period of sale a friday with 4 sale, never happened, todya 2.
Maybe they had problm generally cause friday i had a modl felease not accepted i dont know why, there is a similar post also, and still they zeroed the june month, i still have may earning
Do you mean 4 sales total on one day?
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After this if you are still not convinced that search engine cap exists then you'll never be. Search engine recognized huge deviation in my sales caused by those two customers and now it is trying to "fix" that during next period.
You are missing my point. First off, I am not denying the existence of search engine algorithms helping companies to move their assets. Early "search engine algorithms" existed even when Mesopotamian merchants were bringing textiles by donkey caravans. Well selling "popular" merchandise was placed right in front of prospective buyers so they'd be able to find it easily. Second, I don't know what a "search engine cap" is. It's probably something that is akin to hiding well selling stuff from buyers' eyes. Sounds like a winner to me. But you can never overestimate the operational silliness of a corporate environment.
Nevertheless, my point wasn't to criticize or comment on a particular stock day-to-day business operation. My point was that as much as I adore people's fascination with search engines, no reasonable contributor relies on a single agency and builds their strategy based on daily fluctuations of sales produced by technical or not so technical events/approaches. Long term sustainability is much more important.
If your job is/was to provide a specific agency with a little bit of edge in daily sales, that's fine with me. It has no relevance to my success and strategies though.
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honest question: does this discussion make sense? Which result do you expect at the end of the day? any profits?
Honest answer? I would expect to be able to put images and video up for sale without and agency manipulating earnings.
And these discusions do make sense otherwise we end up blindly rolling along thinking all will be well when it is clearly not.
We are not sheep
You are not forced to sell there if you think they are really that shady. I just don't see how the discussion improves things...
Because a year ago I was blissfully unaware. Full of the woo yay! I got a sale things were growing.
But things faltered and even though I kept uploading things continued to falter.
I wanted to know why and threads like these point you in the direction to find underlying causes and also threads like these:
https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-ceo-says-new-business-plan-hinged-upon-total-overhaul-of-it/ (https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-ceo-says-new-business-plan-hinged-upon-total-overhaul-of-it/)
Checking out glass door where some ex-SS employees admit the contributors are being manipulated and shafted just confirms a lot.
As to you comment "you are not forced to sell there" well you are right and I was happy to ditch Fotolia with their crappy dollar photo club and then iStock with their continued shafting of contributors.
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Because a year ago I was blissfully unaware. Full of the woo yay! I got a sale things were growing.
But things faltered and even though I kept uploading things continued to falter.
I wanted to know why and threads like these point you in the direction to find underlying causes and also threads like these:
https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-ceo-says-new-business-plan-hinged-upon-total-overhaul-of-it/ (https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-ceo-says-new-business-plan-hinged-upon-total-overhaul-of-it/)
Checking out glass door where some ex-SS employees admit the contributors are being manipulated and shafted just confirms a lot.
As to you comment "you are not forced to sell there" well you are right and I was happy to ditch Fotolia with their crappy dollar photo club and then iStock with their continued shafting of contributors.
I don't see anything about manipulation.
Shutterstock is located in NYC, where very few workers are actually happy. I worked in New York for years and people only care about money. Competition for jobs is tough, so it's easy to replace employees. Good work-life balance is hard in a city that moves so quickly, especially with so much competition.
SS as a company is doing well, so they're doing something right regardless of what disgruntle employees are saying. A lot of software engineers love trying new tech stacks. Sometimes it's not the right decision, but don't tell that to know-it-all software engineers. Everything has to be managed well, or the product will be like Frankenstein. I'm not saying the managers know what they're doing, because many don't, but you can't formulate a concrete picture just by looking at negative reviews.
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"Checking out glass door where some ex-SS employees admit the contributors are being manipulated and shafted just confirms a lot." Not seen where they have said this? The most likely explanation of faltering sales remains that of increase in supply vastly exceeds growth in demand.
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The majority of employees from the beginning of time have at some point thought that their manager is useless and doesn't know what they are doing. That doesn't automatically mean it's true though.
Take the Donald. Obama was rubbish, all these problems are easy, I'll sort them all out etc... then when you become the actual 'manager' you realise it's not all that easy!
But still, was there any mention of the 'cap' in the reviews? I didn't see any. Some of them don't hold back, so it would seem the ideal place to blow the lid on it.
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The majority of employees from the beginning of time have at some point thought that their manager is useless and doesn't know what they are doing. That doesn't automatically mean it's true though.
Take the Donald. Obama was rubbish, all these problems are easy, I'll sort them all out etc... then when you become the actual 'manager' you realise it's not all that easy!
But still, was there any mention of the 'cap' in the reviews? I didn't see any. Some of them don't hold back, so it would seem the ideal place to blow the lid on it.
Personally I think its plain to see that SS is not as well run as it once was...but thats a completely different question to the "cap" ...what I never get is why buyers aren't up in arms about disappearing content their favourite authors being hidden etc etc.....
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Guys I don't talk here much, but I've earned a full time income on microstock in the US since 2008. It's very sad for me, but to be totally honest; I'm now viewing microstock royalties and their dwindling returns as a sort of "unemployment" compensation. It's going to continue, but will also continue shrinking. There are so many other ways I can use my time during the week to generate income, that I really can't see pissing in the wind or chasing this runaway train any longer. I believe that the wave has finally crashed for individual contributors who are looking for a full time income from this, regardless of your content or your skill level. If you want to make enough to pay your cell phone and grocery bill, and don't mind countless hours of work for less than minimum wage; then go for it.
I had a 1 hour on discussion on the phone a few weeks ago with the contributor relations head of a major agency in the big 4, and explained my feelings. YES, there are still niches in the image banks that need to be filled with a lot of earning potentional, but to me, earnings also are not guaranteed to be enough to justify their costs (in both production, orchestration, and planning time).
Like many others here in this thread, I too have never seen a tank in sales on Shutterstock any larger than 2016-2017. I barely produced anything from 2012-2015 and still was able to generally maintain my royalty levels. If Shutterstock is trying to punish those who don't frequently upload.
I have thousands of images left on my backlog that I might eventually submit, but only when I am extremely bored or feel like experimenting. I heard that review times are crazy fast and extremely easy to pass, lately. They must have beefed up their reviewer team.
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Very good post, ArenaCreative.
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Okkydokky, this is my experience. If you don't believe it it is your problem, I do not care that much.
I practically do only video, so my experience might be very different from people here doing other kind of funny stuff.
More or less every month on SS I have a sort of cap, based on dollars, not on downloads.
This cap stays the same more or less for 3-4 months, then it goes up a bit (I upload a couple of hundreds of clips every months).
Sometimes the month starts great, and by the 15th of the month I have reached my allocated total, so I think "great, this month is going to be fantastic!".
After that for about ten days not a single sale, so that I end my month to my allocated total, where I am supposed to be.
Other times the month starts without any single sale for about ten days and you start to think "OK, this is the end". But then all of a sudden sales start pouring from everywhere, until I reach my allocated total, sometimes in the very last few days I get some incredibly expensive sales just to make sure that I reach my cap.
This thing keeps going every single month: 10 days without any sale every month and then deluge of sales. I am sorry, but this is not statistically real.
I must add that I am not complaining at all: SS is my best selling agency by a country mile and doing stock video is one of the coolest way you can imagine to earn your living.
Sales are manipulated big way, no doubt about that. But perhaps this is not wrong at all.
SS is the number one agency, maybe they have figured out that keeping everyone happy is the best way to go. They often say that they don't want customers to see the most popular to be the same all the time, so maybe they modify the algorithm for this reason.Maybe they are right and they are doing a good job.
I am happy with that.
Keep on smiling :-)
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For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?
Does those images have similar relative position if you search for them with more specific keywords?
Thread is very interesting, and I'll try to answer from my point of view. I'm not a db algorythm expert as you :-) I will just try to give myself an answer.
First of all, I see a little bit confusion and misunderstanding about the point. People here often talk about three different events:
1- constant drop of earnings
2- alteration of search results depending on buyer (area, past search, preferences...)
3- alteration of search results to push a cap on contributors earnings
Points 1 and 2 are absolutely real, with no doubt, for many reason. But have nothing to do with point 3.
We're discussing point 3. Ok.
Wich are the reasons for an agency to play in this way?
I see a couple of reasons: one is to pay less royalties giving advantage to new "0,25c$ level" contributors, other is to give buyers always new files to choose.
Can you imagine other reasons to cap earnings? I can't see any.
How to do this? The only way (only legal way!) to do this is to costantly change search results, mixing rating for every single image with contributor rating... it's really complicated, I know, but it can be done.
Giving the high numbers of new files every day the result should be to have a completely different search result page quite every minute (or second...).
But the point is to bear in mind the buyers advantage: agency probably want to give them a good mix of new and old good images. How can i cap earnings of old images? Simply impossible, as they should just disappear from search results. And if ALL good earnings should disappear from search results the buyer would be not very happy to find different images every day.
About contributors: ok, I could give a contributor rating, instead of image rating. I could, let's say, give a maximum rating for total images of a single contributor and push up and down his images (so his earnings) until a maximum amount. In this way, contributors with many images would be strongly punished!
No sense at all.
What I really think is that the growing mountain of images tend to make this calculation quite impossible, and any statistics is unreliable, as should depends from number of total files and number of files uploaded by single contributor.
What I really think is that there is a big contradiction between people who cry about drop in earnings and people who cry for stable earnings (too much stable?). The two points of view are at the opposite, but often we read both in the same thread, as in this.
Finally I cannot be sure about the real answer, of course :)
And, as I told before, I think Mb post is really interesting and I can imagine that something is true. What I believe is that final purpose of manipulation is NOT to give cap on earnings, as I can't see a clear reason to do this without big risk to penalize buyers.
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If I was in business of owning a stock-agency! well its quite obvious I would let the money go towards the parts of the world that uploaded the most that gave me the most assets. In this case files being assets. If I didnt do that I would be a stupido and not worthy being the owner. :D quite simple actually.
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If I was in business of owning a stock-agency! well its quite obvious I would let the money go towards the parts of the world that uploaded the most that gave me the most assets. In this case files being assets. If I didnt do that I would be a stupido and not worthy being the owner. :D quite simple actually.
I don't really see why it would matter where the images originated from....I thought it was newbies below the higher payment levels who were being favoured not the larger set ups. Oh and new uploads being passed over
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If I was in business of owning a stock-agency! well its quite obvious I would let the money go towards the parts of the world that uploaded the most that gave me the most assets. In this case files being assets. If I didnt do that I would be a stupido and not worthy being the owner. :D quite simple actually.
Well surely you'd want to send the most money to people who sell the most amount of items so they stay and upload more items that also sell well?
If you just send all the money to the people who upload the most stuff.... people will just make more simple vectors with minute differences between them.
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Depends! a friend or somebody I know in Poland told me theyve never had it so good. you see $ 10 a day there goes a long way. he keeps uploading like mad all middle of the road sort of images and his takings are just increasing all the time. He has a port of 900 files and takes around 800-900 dollars a month which I recon is quite impressive for such a smallish port.
I mean really lets face it the days when one could sit and produce HCV files involving people and props this and that thinking you increase earnings are long gone. Today its just a matter of bunging them in thats it.
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well well. too many unexpected sales yesterday (one buyer took 23 subs), so punishment today: no sales for 10 hours. happens only on weekend to have 0 at this time of day.