One keeps hearing that contributors are only uploading more and more and that it is impossible to keep up.

We wanted to find out how much more people are uploading and what the growth rate is. We wrote about our results right here:
https://www.stockperformer.com/blog/are-you-uploading-enough-files-to-make-money-from-microstock/

Let us know what you think!

Just skimmed it, I'll give a proper once over later. Initial thoughts, SS growth ties in with what I found with the graphs I uploaded of collection size vs payout size a few weeks ago (deleted now on advice of fellow forum members). Percentage increase of total collection size for each site would also be very interesting.

Good to see that as predicted IStock's collection is falling well behind the other big sites thanks to their treatment of contributors/ terrible commission rates.

Good stuff. Do you have a chart for average number of files uploaded per contributor, per year? That would be interesting.

I second that.

It would be interesting to know if each contributor uploads more, or if there are just more contributors. I think everyone knows there are more uploads in total, but per contributor?

Do you have data for footage vs photos?

Anyway, interesting data! Thanks!

Both Spring and Autumn represent the months when most files are uploaded. During Summer and Winter contributors are probably resting and don�t upload as much.

Microstock is a global business. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is Winter in the Southern Hemisphere. And in the tropics, there is no Winter.

Sure. But 88% of humanity lives in the Northern Hemisphere.

Both Spring and Autumn represent the months when most files are uploaded. During Summer and Winter contributors are probably resting and don�t upload as much.

Microstock is a global business. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is Winter in the Southern Hemisphere. And in the tropics, there is no Winter.

Good point! Edited! Thanks

It kind of looks like the uploads are leveling off at Fotolia and iStock.

It kind of looks like the uploads are leveling off at Fotolia and iStock.

I suspect a lot of new contributors sign up to SS and are dissapointed by the returns so don't go to additional sites.

No surprise here. More contributors everywhere....high speed Internet connection have for sure helped. In any corner of the world broadband is available now. I doubt the big explosion of contributor came from the US or Western Europe. The rest of the world is just joining the game.

On the other hand, specially when I browse Shutterstock, I see thousands variations of fractals, dozens nearly exact similars and buckets of very basic vectors. There are many stockers that upload thousands/hundreds on a weekly basis . 99% garbage but they believe in the quantity strategy. I would never go this route but again my revenue has declined from the boom years and that might be the opposite for them so if only for revenue reasons their strategy to overload the system might be working. .....

Some more targetted analysis would reveal a bigger picture in shutterstock uploads.

Recent info from http://www.microstock.top/indeximg.phtml?p=01 shows that 1/3rd of the uploads come from the top 200 contributors.

The bulk of which are vectors/graphics.


The top 200 are feeding more and more images but generaly the same types happy smily business people mixed race smily families and business graphics/icons.

The report showed an interesting figure

Published: April 29, 2017

"Today 100 of authors reached 100,000 images in their's portfolios. They has 20,604,400 images in sum. It's a 15% of all Shutterstock's library 136,219,030 images"

Nice charts. Not sure about the advice to upload when everyone else is resting. Buyers are resting then too.

But.... if the algorithms favour newer uploads, you will be at an advantage.

And, if the algorithms also favour popular pix, you will then be ahead when everyone else starts uploading more.