We noticed strange cap of number of sales too on shutterstock. 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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on June 01, 2017, 02:07

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?

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...

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.

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.