am I missing something where are the other lines, or is this the point of the graph???

Here are the graphs. You can get to them by going here.





The things I immediately notice are:

• big slump after Christmas, smaller spring slump
• IS has more traffic than all of its competitors combined
• SS seems paired with DT
• FT seems paired with StockXpert

I'm glad to see that the whole industry slumped in April. I was getting concerned with my sales, which didn't rise as much as they should have. Things have begun to turn the corner, though, and I'm once again seeing record DL days.

I spent a lot of time looking at the Alexa charts after Michael mentioned them a few days ago.  Fascinating charts.

It is useful to compare the progress of individual agencies against each other; the biggest trend I noticed was that StockXpert appears to be making good progress and now appears to be ahead of FT (in terms of page view trends).  Perhaps those here who contribute to both StockXpert and FT could make some observations.

Saturation is a good word.  If these were financial markets or economic cycles charts I would interpret them as follows:

Each cycle within larger cycles tends to have five distinct phases (up, down, up, down, up) and it is very likely that the big burst of activity at the end of the last year was the final UP in that five phase sequence.  If so, we have entered the DOWN phase of a larger cycle.  The first down phase in a five phase sequence often lasts a Fibonacci ratio 38.2% of the previous cycle; if that cycle was 4.7 years then the down phase should be about 1.7 years.

Very likely that the market has reached a first saturation point; perhaps the flow of images has exceeded the flow of buyers, or agency competition is changing the market, or perhaps the buyers in the first cycle now have enough images to keep them going for a while.

If this analysis is correct, we should expect sales to remain at present lower levels for another year or so (broadly speaking) before the down phase ends and we enter the next five phase upwards cycle.

Well, I'll take you half seriously hatman 

Thanks for your analysis, makes sense.  More and more photographers, thousands of pictures uploaded everyday, makes me wonder each time I add a picture in this massive tidal wave.  And with the subscription system some companies may have enough on their hard drives to last for a few years.

And at the same time most of the smaller companies are not aware of the microstock resources, so I can see some potential for growth, even this year, if the sites reinvest their resources for reaching these companies with a cleverly-managed advertizing campaign.

IS has a strong client base, the graphs surprised me quite a lot in that respect.  I wonder if any of the other 4 sites will reach or cross over IS line in the near future.

I prefer to trust my own chart base on earnings .. LOL

no point having a great number of hits if my photo will not sell there.

A lot of Fibonacci experts have been very negative about the stock market over the past five years.  Their predictions have been totally wrong.  I don't believe this type of analysis works.  Ask 10 Fibonacci experts to examine a chart and you will probably get 10 different answers.  Ask them again in a months time and they will probably all of changed their minds.  The few that get lucky and predict the future accurately will seem like geniuses.  The rest of the predictions will be quickly forgotten.

But then again....

These stats could be a complete load of coblers due to the way that istock renders it's site..

A lot of the content on istocks site is delivered vi AJAX type interfaces tricks, so that any one page view might actually be 2x or 3x the number of object hits for another site of the same content type.

Also the exiry of static content in transproxies for ISP's will have a huge effect, although without a bit of piddling around I can't check that.

It also could be that people do more 'next' clicks on IS, due to the different search structure from the other sites..

lastly is the huge variable around how Alexa collect their stats via their toolbar, and some 'partner' businesses also collect stats for them.  So this tells us that the average IS user is more likely to install a stats collecting software on their PC, or that IS advertised it at some stage as being a 'great tool for finding stock images.  (Just speculating on that last one).

ie: Take Alexa stats with a _HUGE_ grain of salt.

If you look at the graphs as a whole, without making any comparisons between them, without applying any complicated mathematical formulae, but trying to smooth out all the little bumps with your eye, they all seem to show the same thing ...

A steep rise in 2005.

Another steep rise in 2006, but with a fall at the beginning of the year.

And a downward trend in 2007 so far (or do I need a new pair of glasses?)

Will that turn into an upward trend for the rest of the year

StockXpert has been exploding for me this past month. Over a 700% increase in sales this month. They are #2 behind Shutterstock this month for me. (Not on Istock)

Kngkyle: I am strongly considering ditching FT in favor of StockXpert. I am curious about your 700% explosion - how many images does your portfolio contain, and how many DLs have you had? 700% is very impressive, but may be a bit misleading if you have, say 300 images with 2 sales last month and 14 this month.

Well I opened an account at StockXpert yesterday and I'll start uploading today.

This decision is prompted by several observations: firstly the Alexa charts, even though they might not be truly representative, do show StockXpert making good progress; secondly, StockXpert according to those charts has gained ground on FT and now seem to be ahead of them; StockXpert appears to be gaining ground against the others as well (albeit at a slower pace); you all know that I do not trust FT, but StockXpert appear to be professional and trustworthy and we have steve-O here which is a good sign; lastly the commissions at StockXpert are competitive and appear to be higher overall than FT.

StockXpert didn't accept my first lot of pics either, they asked for 'further images' after my initial submission...  They also have my highest rejection ratio at the moment, so I think they are aiming to have a higher quality collection than some of the other micros.

It also might be that my port. sucks. 

I get a few rejections for 'Thanks, but this is not what we're looking for' which to me means that the photo is OK, but they are aiming for a particular 'look' to their stock... Which is fine by me.

My sales on StockXpert are slow so far, with only 100 images approved as of yesterday I'm up to $25 in earnings since January, but I've been fairly slow to upload there...

StockXpert has one hug advantage over the other micros, which I think they could all learn from (Particularly IS if anyone is listening) and that is they will inspect an image before it is keyworded...  You can bulk FTP upload some files, and submit them without going through the pain of keywording/categorising..  Once they have been inspected you can delete the ones that didn't make it, and keyword the others.. 

Another huge plus is that after uploading (Here's something else for the other micros!!) the images retain their original uploaded filename, so you can find them in your spreadsheet/database of images to asociate with keywords etc.

I think if you've got a strong portfolo StockXpert would be a good punt...

Thanks for the info, chellyar and Kngkyle.
I hope things go the way I want them to!