So many sites have failed with this strategy.  Shame to see Stockfresh not learning the lesson.  I have no idea why they can't make a collection of their best images?  It's so subjective, I'm sure the vast majority of buyers like to make their own minds up, hence SS is doing so well and now other sites are following their strategy.

A smaller collection of images might work in theory but in practice is there a site that has made that work?  Stocksy is different because their images aren't on all the other microstock sites.  Stockfresh don't sell enough to get exclusive images.

One of the best of the low earner sites is MostPhotos.  They accept everything.  Alamy do quite well accepting everything that passes basic technical requirements.  DT tried to be more selective with disastrous consequences.  Image Vortex have always been very selective and sell almost nothing.

I do think sites like Stockfresh need a USP but this one doesn't work.  Canva got sales going by trying something a bit different.  I'm sure there's other ways to stand out from the crowd, drastically restricting content is a short cut to failure.

Looking at StockFresh for the first time, I like the fact that they accept PayPal. I won't buy from sites which don't accept PayPal. But like most of the microstock sites they seem to have a big problem with keyword spam.

It's getting more and more difficult to find the right content to buy at any of the microstock sites. I've spent most of today looking for a handful of images of 'brunch' in a certain style. Should be easy - in my head I can picture the sort of stuff I am looking for. But far too many contributors just add all food related terms to any image of food. Brussel sprouts, a glass of wine, Christmas party, birthday outing etc. It's very annoying. When narrowing down a search, it would be great to be able to hover over an image and select to exclude all results from that contributor. When you end up looking at thousands of results there needs to be a way to quickly exclude spammy contributors. Gets quite depressing.

Hi Everyone, thanks for  on this. I'd like to address some of the concerns voiced in the comments.

First of all, there will not be less content for customers just because we plan to be stricter with certain types of images, often the very types you have also been complaining about in the MSG forums. Remember those ridiculous, spammy portfolios from one of the leading agencies with tens of thousands of almost identical, useless images? Who needs those? Nobody. I'm sure inflated numbers sound really good at shareholder meetings, but we operate at a very different scale, and what works for the big guys doesn't necessarily work for us.

As for being arrogant by curating content and being more selective, we really don't mean to be. But I'm sure you are all well aware of the fact how saturated the market has become with images, if not from the growing number of topics here about earning mere cents per download. I'm not saying there isn't an element of greediness on certain agencies' part, but the fact of the matter is that billions of photos are taken and shared every single day (some big agencies claim to add over a million files a week) and there's so much competition -- even when it comes to sites offering free content -- that some of the images submitted to these agencies have almost zero value. I understand this thought upsets many people, but it's not like what it used to be ten years ago. Certain types of images are still very valuable of course and I believe customers should and will pay good money for them, but there are some that at this point people don't even want for free.

As a small agency with limited resources, we obviously need to operate very efficiently. On one hand it costs a lot of money to review incoming content and if we know from experience that certain types of images don't sell well, we need to stop those at the gates. This does not automatically mean that the content is bad, some just don't sell well here. This also protects contributors from wasting their time on things that don't work. On the other hand we also need to help top selling artists get their content online as easily and quickly as possible, and we're always coming up with new ideas to make their lives easier. Although we try to be as contributor friendly as possible, it's not possible to make everyone happy. In the end there has to be some level of curation, there's just no other way. It doesn't make sense to let everything online just because someone decided to upload it. Of course volume is important and I understand why people think it's the only thing that matters, but at this scale it's more like a balancing game where you need to take all sorts of issues into consideration.

I don't monitor this forum often, so if you have any questions about anything, feel free to send a message through our contact form and I'll be happy to answer it. Thanks!