Agency Based Discussion > Shutterstock.com

The shutterstock trap!

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joingated:
Ive been doing this for 15 months now and only last month did it dawn on me... I was in the shutterstock trap!

By that I mean I was feeling pressurised to keep producing a large amount of images weekly (large for me is about 30 i know its all relative!). I then knew i could expect to earn what was for me a significant amount. The problem is though that quality would sometimes suffer, I would find myself shooting anything on white or creating simple vectors just to keep feeding the beast as at the time shutterstock was way above the other libraries in terms of income. And I wasn't enjoying it.

Now I'm a bit further down the microstock road I have come to believe like some others here that quality does matter, so I've reduced my uploading to about 10/15 files a week, this has meant an immediate hit on shutterstock of down 30% this month (whether that is a time of year thing too i dont know) However my acceptance on istock has shot up and my sales there have doubled this month.... sales across all other sites are on course for a normal month, anyone else find this?

microstockphoto.co.uk:
yes, I understand what you mean

both quality and quantity count, but SS is mainly based on subscriptions, so a strong accent on quantity - at times over quality - is unavoidable

my response is to give them what they want:

acceptable quality AND quantity to SS;
great quality to IS;
variety to DT;
subjects they like to FT;
everything to all minor sites which accept everything just to increase content;

and of course LCV shots for ourself, just to stay interested in photography.

PS: seeing that people are buying pictures I myself think are crap - but I know HAVE commercial value - makes me feel some sort of 'punk' intellectual pleasure

Kngkyle:
I was the same way for the first 6-12 months. Now I make 4-5x as much on IS with 1/5th the images.

Fran:

--- Quote from: joingated on May 25, 2010, 06:38 ---Ive been doing this for 15 months now and only last month did it dawn on me... I was in the shutterstock trap!

By that I mean I was feeling pressurised to keep producing a large amount of images weekly (large for me is about 30 i know its all relative!). I then knew i could expect to earn what was for me a significant amount. The problem is though that quality would sometimes suffer, I would find myself shooting anything on white or creating simple vectors just to keep feeding the beast as at the time shutterstock was way above the other libraries in terms of income. And I wasn't enjoying it.

Now I'm a bit further down the microstock road I have come to believe like some others here that quality does matter, so I've reduced my uploading to about 10/15 files a week, this has meant an immediate hit on shutterstock of down 30% this month (whether that is a time of year thing too i dont know) However my acceptance on istock has shot up and my sales there have doubled this month.... sales across all other sites are on course for a normal month, anyone else find this?

--- End quote ---

I felt the same, but as you I'm now trying to focus on quality, which for me means trying to improve my skills and work more and more on each photo after tighter editing. The way I use to keep feeding the beast is to extract and submit more crops (square for example) to SS out of single images that I see are doing well. I don't find this "different edition" strategy morally questionable at all since I resize everything at 4mpx before submitting to a sub size.

cthoman:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dddAi8FF3F4[/youtube]

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