Hi all,

Some people claim that SS gives something like a grace period of couple of months (6?) to new contributors by making their pictures sell no matter what, with good numbers. So as to create an illusion of extremely easy and profitable business with them. I kind of didn't believe this and still have some reservations as to this theory, however, my own statistics of 1.5 years' experience with SS basically supports this claim:


(greyed area - uploads, red line - downloads, blue boxes - revenue)

As you can see, my upload rate was always quite stable, without much interruptions. Basically, in these 1.5 years my port increased almost 600%, and while the very first 6 months my revenue increase rate followed uploads, as of 7th month everything just fell to the levels of the first 4th-5th months where it stays until nowadays, no matter how many material I upload.

Of course, there's always the fact of insane increase of their library (almost 1 million per week!) which dillutes everything, but back in mid-2015 their library was also increasing significantly each month (300K-500K per week?).

From the very beginning SS was my Top-1 earner, hence all the motivation. But it's clearly loosing steam very quickly, and the problem is that none of other agencies can make up this loss (even Fotolia's recent increases are still a matter of statistics, not a real substitute to SS).

Oh, and my only 4 or 5 ELs so far sold with SS were made in those first 6 months...Not a single EL since then (i'm still opted in).

Some food for thought.

Thanks, Lana. Neither am I sure as to why. Although I'm not yet ready to share my port here for any evaluation, I'm confident it's a good quality port, sufficiently diversified as to the subjects provided, and as large now (1000+) as to return at least as much as I did in my 6th month which is still my best so far (November 2015). I'm just puzzled and not sure whether and how to continue enlarging my port at SS.

Grace period, definitely. When I was new there a few years ago I was very excited by my instant sales. My port took a few years longer than yours to even out, but this year my income there is dropping rather than growing, despite adding new images regularly. And I see newbie stuff selling over mine all the time. If you look at most popular you'll usually see a bunch of newbie images clumped together on page 1 along with the cream that's risen to the top.

Are you contributing to other agencies? Do your Fotolia sales grow?

Fotolia. Yes, I do. As noted in my original post, FT does indeed pick up slowly in recent weeks (see the projection for October in last bar on the graph below), but overall it has a similar trend with SS, peaking in Feb-Apr 2016 and then stagnating suspiciously ever since (I had almost identical number of downloads in four consecutive months this year, isn't it abnormal with increasing port?). It's still roughly 50% of what SS generates for me. In other words, with stagnant SS and very slowly increasing FT, I don't feel the right feedback from what and how I upload. But that's not the point of my original post. It's about the anomaly in sales/revenue of SS.

Why don't you look for critique directly at SS forum if you don't want to share your work here? The truth is out there

As far as critique of my port is concerned, that's not my objective now, as I'm more or less confident in quality and content of my port by comparing it with others'. Same goes for keywording as it's done very precisely and targeted (no spam, no irrelevant words, etc.)

My only guess is that SS is stagnant in my case despite constantly increasing port is due to a combination of (potentially) sweeter conditions for newbies + insanely increasing library of the agency.

From my experience, I don't see any grace period. I've anticipated it after 6 months, but nothing changed. I've been at SS for close to 2 years now and sales hasn't decreased. Not every image is going to sell and images that do sell need to gain momentum quickly or they will start falling down the search results.

Every portfolio is different obviously. I know you're not ready to share your portfolio, but it was easily found on Google, so you might as well share it. You have a lot of travel photography, which is one of the most difficult segments to compete in.

Grace period? selling no matter what?  funny I've never heard about that. The only way they could try to make that happen is of course to give preference in search to new members content and thereby demoting pushing back old members established files.
Well if this is true its a pretty nasty way of treating older members since its bound to have a direct slope on their earnings.

I hardly ever go to the SS forum but I remember its been lots of posts from long time members regarding falling sales and apparently for no reason at all and this could explain quite a bit of it.

Hi all,

Some people claim that SS gives something like a grace period of couple of months (6?) to new contributors by making their pictures sell no matter what, with good numbers. So as to create an illusion of extremely easy and profitable business with them. I kind of didn't believe this and still have some reservations as to this theory, however, my own statistics of 1.5 years' experience with SS basically supports this claim:


(greyed area - uploads, red line - downloads, blue boxes - revenue)

As you can see, my upload rate was always quite stable, without much interruptions. Basically, in these 1.5 years my port increased almost 600%, and while the very first 6 months my revenue increase rate followed uploads, as of 7th month everything just fell to the levels of the first 4th-5th months where it stays until nowadays, no matter how many material I upload.

Of course, there's always the fact of insane increase of their library (almost 1 million per week!) which dillutes everything, but back in mid-2015 their library was also increasing significantly each month (300K-500K per week?).

From the very beginning SS was my Top-1 earner, hence all the motivation. But it's clearly loosing steam very quickly, and the problem is that none of other agencies can make up this loss (even Fotolia's recent increases are still a matter of statistics, not a real substitute to SS).

Oh, and my only 4 or 5 ELs so far sold with SS were made in those first 6 months...Not a single EL since then (i'm still opted in).

Some food for thought.

Thanks for posting this because I was thinking about slowing down uploading to SS as well.

 �Grace period� of course.
I have a Referred Contributor for a couple of months now. Of course he has a much smaller port than I have. As the number of images he sold are mirrored on my earnings page I can see what's happening.

Interestingly there is an repeated up and down. I will say that days when I sell fewer images than �average� he sells quite well and days when i sell quite well he sells a bit less.

Nevertheless over the entire period I can see the number of  images sold are not proportial to the port size. I will say that the number of images the referred contributor sells in relation to his port size is much larger than what I sell now.

I don't think there's a conspiracy. New images will have a better position in the search and as time goes by they will tend to sink, displaced by newer material.
Also, look at the maths: If you upload 50 images a week, then in the second week you double what you had in the first week, and your income doubles, in the third week you add another 50 and your portfolio grows by a third, along with your earnings. by the 25th week, adding 50 more images only increases your portfolio by 4% - and at the same time your early images are starting to fade down the search. So you hit a plateau, where adding more images at a steady rate doesn't have much impact on your overall portfolio size and the time-benefit of new images is countered by the fall in search ranking of the earliest images.
The plateau effect is noticeable on SS because they have quite a rapid rate of sales, but we used to see the same thing happening on iStock and DT in the days when they were doing better for individual contributors.
So it's all a perfectly natural mathematical effect, no "grace period" involved.

baldrick is spot on. but by all means people stop uploading. better for me

I agree that a port will eventually plateau, but I also believe SS promotes new contributors' work over older contributors'. Just a glance at a most popular search in a category will show a bunch of images from one series of one contributor on page 1 of the search, and the contributor in question will be new. I think they do it to encourage people to stick around and keep uploading. We all benefit from it at the beginning. I see it in my own port...old work uploaded when I was new sold immediately, became popular and still sells today, while recent work (though better than the old work, in my opinion) goes nowhere. So in addition to the relative slowdown of portfolio growth over time, you also suffer from the newer people's work being promoted, as yours was when you first joined. (I see it on Fotolia, too. I'm "new" there, and my new work is selling there but going nowhere on SS, where I'm "old.")

...and as I'm working in one particular area, I check to see most popular for this search term, and page one has completely changed since an hour ago...it now features FIFTY images from one new contributor...fully half the popular images on page one were forced off the page by this flood of one new contributor's images. Incredible.

Edited to add: I checked through page 12 of most popular, and every page is dominated by this one contributor's images, all uploaded and approved today, even though most have nothing to do with the search term in question. After page 12 I gave up looking because it was too depressing. Some "real" page one results have now been pushed back to page 12 and worse.

Edited again to add: Not knowing these search terms would be flooded with hundreds of images today, I'd submitted three this afternoon. Just to see if my stuff would also show up on page 1 of most popular (which would mean things aren't weighted towards new contributors, but everyone gets on page 1 at first) I checked again. Sure enough, the new contributor's images still almost filled the first pages. I gave up looking for my new images when I got to page 30...after thousands of images that had no relevance to the search terms. I tried adding one more term that would narrow the results significantly, and there it was...so it's searchable. Just completely buried.

Is it just me that's seeing something completely different when looking at that chart? I'm not seeing a suspicious drop from one month to the next, I'm seeing a gradual month on month increase that just happens to have two months where you got lucky.

I mean if the grace period is intended to provide sales that make people want to stay and upload more stuff... why did they wait until months 5 and 6 to start giving you some decent sales?

Ignore the fact that one person has a reasonably steady growth in sales (with a couple of spikes) while consistently uploading more content? How on Earth does that indicate artificial sales? As for the more you upload the more you earn... that's what's happening in your chart. You've been uploading plenty of stuff and your sales have been steadily growing. The only exceptions are recently where you've been uploading less than you normally do... or at least your downloads are levelling out.

I'm with increasingdifficulty... people see far too many patterns that don't really mean anything. Correlation not causation is one thing, but seeing a correlation in one person's figures and determining that there's something crazy going on on a site-wide basis... is entirely different. 

Ignore the fact that one person has a reasonably steady growth in sales (with a couple of spikes) while consistently uploading more content? How on Earth does that indicate artificial sales? As for the more you upload the more you earn... that's what's happening in your chart. You've been uploading plenty of stuff and your sales have been steadily growing. The only exceptions are recently where you've been uploading less than you normally do... or at least your downloads are levelling out.

I'm with increasingdifficulty... people see far too many patterns that don't really mean anything. Correlation not causation is one thing, but seeing a correlation in one person's figures and determining that there's something crazy going on on a site-wide basis... is entirely different.

There you are. The harder you work and so on. No and it hasn't applied for quite some time now. Shelma-1 observation is spot on! of course they fill up the entire first one or two pages with new members files and they go for 0.25c. I mean fair enough its no conspiracy since its called business but you dont exactly have to be a genius to see whats going on.
Commercial and high quality files are getting burried in such deep waters I doubt they will ever see the light again.

pauws, doesnt mean that what they see for their port isnt true, but i agree, to take one result and then assume it is true for everyone is silly

It may be true but its the extraordinary leaps of faith people are prepared to make based on so little evidence that amazes me. Unfortunately the reliable stats we have about the industry are negligible. What we do know is that the number of images on shutterstock is growing faster than income generated...therefore ON AVERAGE income per image will go down. Some particularly talented people may buck the trend and some will suffer more than others and for every change in the algorithm there will be winners and losers. Whose to say that the previous high incomes were any more "fair" than others getting the sales as presumably buyers only buy files that meet their needs.

Well, some of the comments become quite personalized here, questioning even the validity of my reading of my own stats or my assumptions, so I won't engage into this kind of debate. I just want to point out that my original post was a mere assumption and a call for discussion, rather than anything else.

And secondly, I think it's difficult to argue against the fact some people raised here that new contributors' material is placed on top of the search whereas established contributors very often (if not always?) get buried among dozens or hundreds of pages. This fact alone may support the idea that earnings/downloads at SS are directly or indirectly regulated by the agency. The question of 6 months or 3 months or 12 months etc. may be irrelevant after all. It's more about how SS wants to (artificially) help one group of contributors at expense of another, rather than precise timing and duration when this happens. "6 months grace period" was just based on reading of my own stats and hearing this on multiple occasions from others on this forum, and may vary from one contributor to another.

Bull. I did not sell anything there for about three months, then it picked up.

Well, some of the comments become quite personalized here, questioning even the validity of my reading of my own stats or my assumptions, so I won't engage into this kind of debate. I just want to point out that my original post was a mere assumption and a call for discussion, rather than anything else.

And secondly, I think it's difficult to argue against the fact some people raised here that new contributors' material is placed on top of the search whereas established contributors very often (if not always?) get buried among dozens or hundreds of pages. This fact alone may support the idea that earnings/downloads at SS are directly or indirectly regulated by the agency. The question of 6 months or 3 months or 12 months etc. may be irrelevant after all. It's more about how SS wants to (artificially) help one group of contributors at expense of another, rather than precise timing and duration when this happens. "6 months grace period" was just based on reading of my own stats and hearing this on multiple occasions from others on this forum, and may vary from one contributor to another.

Look I fully agree with you and its no a secret that some agencies help a group at the expense of others. Take dreamstime who basically admit everything has to be fair for ALL members and there is no reward for hard work. SS is basically doing the same and in order to keep new people they will dangle a carrott as a bait. The people here who are trying to find any logic or dismiss this fact are probably low to medium earners with average sized portfolios and are yet to experience this with perhaps a few exceptions.
I speak to " factories" with over 100K files portfolios and they are in the same boat so we are NOT imagining this.

Another thing FT/Adobe no matter what must have some influence on some members. Personally my earnings at FT have trebbled since the merger.

However SS keeps them coming new members with more files. Why? well the more files more equity more assets. Its self explanatory.

everybody should quit ss honestly 

"The people here who are trying to find any logic or dismiss this fact are probably low to medium earners with average sized portfolios and are yet to experience this with perhaps a few exceptions." Another assumption based on zero evidence

I don't know how anyone can claim something as a fact when it isn't. It's a fact that your sales hasn't grown, but it's not a fact for others.
This isn't the first or second time someone claim there is a conspiracy going on.

Well, you contradict yourself, by admitting that people have raised this theory before me. If they did that, they had certain grounds for that, be it a math (graph) or just pure intuition based on anything else. So I'm not the only one on here. However, again, I'm not counting how many people are in each camp, just to be clear.

Your titles and keywords are more important than ever when there are so many images on SS. I said this almost 2 years ago and it's even truer today. You must have exceptional metadata to have it discoverable.

What if my titles and keywords, being indeed important, are already exceptional and of high quality? I spend similar time to keyword my assets as to develop them from RAW knowing this, and still the underlying issue of my OP remains there? Your solution to success doesn't appear to be valid. (By the way, the quality of my keywording wasn't that good during the first 6 months, and still my material enjoyed a greater success, nothing like afterwards, with better quality of assets including better and richer metadata. Just in a span of 1.5 years time. Try figure that out.).

There is NO conspiracy here. its entirely the agencies prerogative to change and wheel and deal whatever they see fit and there will always be negative and positive outcomes. Thats business and we all know that but somewhere one have to start using ones own intelligence based on not just one observation but hundreds of almost identical observations not just here but even in non public private forums run by photographers.
I personally could easily live well on my SS income alone so on that score no complaints here.

Along comes the OP and inform us about a "grace" period and selling no matter what. Well that sounds very much like the "Robin Hood" taxation system in some of the richer countries namely to make the well off pay more tax in order to make the poorer pay less. Fine! I got no problems with that but this is business and I'm afraid in business these morals do not apply. In our business hard work and graft combined with skill and excellence should be encouraged and rewarded not the opposite. If so then something has gone very very wrong. Now surely as photographers you have to agree on this.

(By the way, the quality of my keywording wasn't that good during the first 6 months, and still my material enjoyed a greater success, nothing like afterwards, with better quality of assets including better and richer metadata. Just in a span of 1.5 years time. Try figure that out.).

What evidence do you have that your keywording is better? Your sales went down. They were up when you had "worse" keywording. Did you use nicer words? "Good" or "Bad" keywording is different on each site and has everything to do with how the search engine works, and entering the mind of a buyer, not how "good" the words are.

I think the thing is simpler. The demand of similar images does not grow as fast as SS's database, so that the payouts are distributed to more and more contributors.

Although not strictly about the original topic, but 4 days to go still in October, and I'm pretty shocked with the drop in sales at SS this month: -45%.



The lowest results in 14 months, the largest drop in almost 2 years, without any logic behind the drop. And that's during supposedly the busiest month of the year?! Following this trend, November and December will be even more dreadful, taking into account the looming never-ending holidays and vacations.

Loosing faith in this model faster than I thought.

Well looking for any logic in this business is like looking for logic in the spinning of a roulette wheel. Zip!. For all we know it could be that SS inspite of all reports are losing buyers? which is actually the worst that could happen. Too many files 100 million too long time for buyers to find what they want? who knows?

everybody should quit ss honestly 

Except us. 

Quote from: beketoff on October 11, 2016, 02:32

Well, you contradict yourself, by admitting that people have raised this theory before me. If they did that, they had certain grounds for that, be it a math (graph) or just pure intuition based on anything else. So I'm not the only one on here. However, again, I'm not counting how many people are in each camp, just to be clear.

What if my titles and keywords, being indeed important, are already exceptional and of high quality? I spend similar time to keyword my assets as to develop them from RAW knowing this, and still the underlying issue of my OP remains there? Your solution to success doesn't appear to be valid. (By the way, the quality of my keywording wasn't that good during the first 6 months, and still my material enjoyed a greater success, nothing like afterwards, with better quality of assets including better and richer metadata. Just in a span of 1.5 years time. Try figure that out.).

People repeating the same thing over and over again doesn't make it true. The flat Earth theory worked wonders for centuries until someone proved it was spherical. I guess the only way to disprove the 6 month grace period theory is with a chart. This is my SS earnings chart for the last 20 months. The only dip was December, which is the slowest month of the year.

Same here: there was never a 6 months "grace period", never noticed any sales throttling nor any de-prioritization of my files. Years ago, I remember being warned, by "old-timers", about the imminent apocalypse I will be dealing with, after reaching top tier.

I'm still waiting for it.

With normal up and downs, my sales have been growing steadily for the past 4 years or so.
I don't expect a BME, but I'm on track to have an excellent October:

So the conclusion of it all is that SS is the heavenly saviour of all micro-stock contributors. The only agency in town that rather put money in the pockets of its members rather then fuelling their own. The answer to all prayers so help us God.

Older members with bigger portfolios who are experiencing a drop in earnings and skewed search algorithms are simply imagining this or they have lost their creativity to produce.

Yes its all in our heads

Nope the conclusion is supply growth  is outstripping demand growth SS like everyone one else is becoming less attractive for contributors but still making $$$ for itself. No evil criminal mastermind creating hyper complicated strategies to target certain contributors for random reasons required.

SS pays $0.25 to the newcomers and $0.38 to the old contributors. It is 52% more profitable to sell newbie's pics. Now tell me that there is no reason to show newbie's pics higher in search results.

No, they (at SS) are not "Robin Hoods", they do not pay for nothing from their pockets. (By the way, Robin Hood also did not pay from his pockets, as far as I know British folklore.) They just show newbie's pics to the customers more often so those pics have more chances to be sold.

Quote from: Pauws99 on October 29, 2016, 03:15

Nope the conclusion is supply growth  is outstripping demand growth SS like everyone one else is becoming less attractive for contributors but still making $$$ for itself. No evil criminal mastermind creating hyper complicated strategies to target certain contributors for random reasons required.

You are right. 100 million files, 100,000 new a week, most are the same subjects and concepts that are already on every site and being done better many times then old files from 2008. Plus more new every week.

What fun is that when we can have deep dark secret conspiracys and claim that stockholders make this happen, and somehow things aren't fair or we are being cheated.

New users do get a boost. New files get a boost. This is not secret. After some time, the new files drop down. Watch your own new uploads and they are most popular, after a week or two they go to their rightful place. This is for old and new users.

After some time, new users loose the search advantage. It's not because they make less, it's because SS wants to encourage new people by giving them better placement in searchs. Then it goes away and we're all even.

You can't force somebody to buy a file they don't want, just because it's first. How absurd is that for people to claim buyesrs are that foolish and led so easy.

SS doesn't have to cheat or manipulate sales to make more money. They do that every quarter. We are the ones making less every year. Supply is outstripping demand. Old timers were competing against 100 times less competition, 100 times less choice and competition. People made a living from shooting with a P&S in the kitchen window light. Times have changed. It's not going to ever be the way it was, anywhere.

Competition is up, income will go down. Especially when IS will soon be paying .03 for sub download.

I heard that!  doom and gloom is all we can look foward to.  Nice job.