Since the spring, new images started selling better for me than they had in a while. My actual income and the percentage of income from new images has risen appreciably for me, even though I haven't uploaded a lot of new work.

I had a big drop off in new image sales back in 2014 - not sure if it's cyclical with SS or just has to do with what type of image you upload and the luck of a percentage of those new images catching on and getting regular sales.

For me, current best-sellers among my new work include some concept stuff which I expected to do nicely as well as a beautiful empty beach image which I didn't even expect them to accept. I think that the luck of new work catching on as well as finding the right trends has a lot to do with it.

All very well but on the whole they are selling and promoting old material. Playing it safe of course. They have to answer to a bunch of share-holders and heaven forbid if there is a penny short.

As far as we are concerned one might ask what's the point in uploading fresh material when it's not given a fair chance to be seen.

Shutterstock is all messed up. What a bunch of amateurs running that place.

uploaded 2 days ago 5 images of a CNC milling machine...4 sales after one day online....i think really depends on the image subject

I uploaded a new big bunch of images last month and they were selling very well until the 1st October. This month I suddenly have days with no sales and almost all sales are very old images.

I think they are rotating the content and they arrived at the point where the rotation is back to my old content which was of course lower quality because I was a beginner back then.

I felt the effect too, looking at my stats sales suddenly slowed down on October 3rd - 1 sale for the whole weekend - and then I also had one Wednesday without a single sale which is really weird coz Tue to Thur were always the best days, this last weekend was slow too

Also noticed a considerable drop in sales as of October, with few days already with 0 sales, and few more days with only 1-3 sales only. Even holiday-quiet August was way better. Seeing others here reporting similar trends, my understanding is that it's not about my images but rather a general shift in their system/policy, be it images reshuffling, upgrading or anything else.

This question comes up periodically. The reality is that while some new images pop to the top of the list, it takes a while for images to be downloaded no matter what distributor.  I've mined some data from my portfolio and one way to see this is to see how long it takes for an image to sell. Looking at Shutterstock, the following table shows that of images I uploaded in 2005, 100% have sold. However, of those that were uploaded in 2015, only 44% have sold (so far):

The third column shows the total for 8 different agencies:  BS, CS, CR, DP, DT, FO, IS, and SS. The overall results are clear:  SS is ahead of the average, and often substantially so, for each and every year.

YEAR         SS Only     ALL
2005    100%   82%
2006    96%     70%
2007    92%     60%
2008    98%     58%
2009    93%     52%
2010    89%     45%
2011    84%     42%
2012    75%     39%
2013    68%     36%
2014    47%         20%
2015    46%     15%

I am not defending Shutterstock and have no idea if/when they tweak their search engine. Just pointing out that new images always struggle but that, over time, they do tend to get downloaded at least once. It would be interesting to repeat this to weight this by the number of downloads by year -- but that's not as easy to sort out across the agencies.

As always, your results may vary. This is only my portfolio.

Figured out a way to do similar for my portfolio. Looking at number of downloads, the results show the same concept that newer images do better than the older images; however, the magnitude of results is clearly different from YadaYadaYada's. I've always thought that my portfolio is perhaps less commercial but has more of a long tail for specific images. Anyway, looking at just the last 12 months:

Oldest 10% of images:  72 downloads.
Newest 10% of images:  133 downloads.

It's worth noting that the newest 10% only counts images accepted over the last 12 months (from Oct 15, 2014), so they have been online for only an average of roughly 5-6 months while the oldest 10% was online for the full 12 months. If you doubled the results of the newest 10% for a full 12 month view, you would have 266 downloads which means that they are generating almost 4X the number of downloads of the oldest images.

Good luck.

I feel like my portfolio has suddenly gone invisible, only 2-3 of my bestsellers are still selling, the rest of the photos - no more, not even those that generated good steady sales over the last months..

I've noticed a huge drop in sales at SS too, 6000+ port.
Down about 60-70%.
I earnt just under a hundred bucks in my first month there 2 years ago and I'm scraping along today at $208 so far. It'll be hitting iStock territory soon.
Canva is $438 so far this month....

Change in the search algorithm???

Having hard time believing you, you've only earned 200$ with 6000+ photos.