Perhaps my situation can add some different perspective to current discussion. I have joined this industry last September, so I am quite a fresh contributor. However, since I've been doing photographs for many years now, I was able to get thousands of images accepted within short time. I focused on Adobe and SS, following advices from this forum. Currently I have almost the same number of files on both sites, equal to ~8000 (should be more than 10000 on Adobe, but I am not able to add anything for months, at this point I am not even trying, as waiting for a month just to get it rejected is ridicuolous).

Anyway, regarding competition between SS and Adobe, in opposition to what most of you say, I can see that SS is getting better and better each month, while Adobe is rather dissappointing me, with pretty much constant number of monthly sales since march (I expected significant growth, considering growth of my portfolio and widely reported here increase in their performance).

The number of sales on both sites is similar, with SS leading slightly this month. However, almost each month I am getting at least one good sale (~50$ for one photo downloaded) which significantly increases rpd and makes SS better than Adobe in terms of revenue.

Stop the Press. This just in.

Shutterstock and Adobe Stock are now neck-and-neck in the final run of the race with Shutterstock just 1.7% ahead in earnings. It's a tight race, that is changing on an hourly, even minutely basis.   

Funny! Exactly the same image - sold today at shutterstock and the day before yesterday at AS.

Still this is a lousy month!

Wow, I thought Adobe is done with commissions higher than ~$1, haven't seen them in the last couple of hundreds downloads. Congratulations.

For me is the best November since i started microstock like 8 years ago, just a little better than last year but I can see a different trend in SS sales than usual, OD are selling very low in the last 2-3 months but I have a lot of S&O, like 20-30 sales daily with prices up to 5$ but the average is like 1$ per picture, probably they are sold on partner sites and not directly on SS.

My SS income is always double or more compared with Adobe, same portofolio on both.

Me too, best SS November month ever, just sold a SO image this morning for $108, for example, a rare event. Strangely, even though I have images from many remote countries such as Namibia, Nepal, Burma, etc., my best-sellers are all from my hometown, Quebec City, or Montreal or the Quebec province.

Nice sale, I wonder if the majority of your sales are of localish things because SS search prioritizes local artists in the search. - good if you live near a large buying population and have local content. Not so good if most of your content is from somewhere else or you live in a fairly remote area. I did notice a drop when I changed my address from an urban area to a rural area.

Quote from: AnneVictoire on November 30, 2023, 10:31

Me too, best SS November month ever, just sold a SO image this morning for $108, for example, a rare event. Strangely, even though I have images from many remote countries such as Namibia, Nepal, Burma, etc., my best-sellers are all from my hometown, Quebec City, or Montreal or the Quebec province.

Nice sale, I wonder if the majority of your sales are of localish things because SS search prioritizes local artists in the search. - good if you live near a large buying population and have local content. Not so good if most of your content is from somewhere else or you live in a fairly remote area. I did notice a drop when I changed my address from an urban area to a rural area.

Maybe I should shoot more local images. Thanks for the idea. And if I take a photo of a scenic view, without a distinct location, I should be adding my location to the keywords? I mean forest with Fall colors, who can tell if I took it here or 600 miles away. Trees in a woods are what they are?

just curious- do you use french keywords or titles?  i've been wondering what that may do to results and if it makes sense to include other languages in certain situations.

I have been installing SS for 10 months. So far, I have made high-priced sales worth $60 twice and $25 twice. Other than that, all sales were low-priced.

Nice sales for one day, Wilm. However, I see on average once a month a total solar eclipse 

Finally a big sale after many below-average weeks! 

Nice one, grats! 

Surprisingly, my December is already better than the whole November, helped by big sales like this.

Oh, great!!!

Nice surprise this morning.

Nice!