Since the change at of keywording at iStock, how have your sales gone? Please fill in the poll (to the left). It's anonymous.

Please assess this according to the number of images you have sold (the bottom graph on your Stats Page which shows numbers as a monthly comparison), rather than the monetary amount.

I know that cash is more important ... the bottom line and all that ... but the reason for choosing numbers is because the sale of just one extended licence for a single image, or a big print purchase, can boost your cash earnings for a month and distort the picture.

Bataleur:

It might be helpful if you defined what a "little worse" was vs. a "lot worse".� If not, then everyone will use their own definition and the results might be skewed.

You might want to try to define the terms in a percentage of last months totals.� For example, a "little worse" might be from -1% to -25%, and a "lot worse" might be > -25%.� FYI: I have heard a lot of people complaining about being down 40% or more.

Bataleur:

It might be helpful if you defined what a "little worse" was vs. a "lot worse".  If not, then everyone will use their own definition and the results might

Good point.     Thanks. I was just taking it as a sort of visual thing, by looking at the graph. Let's say, for consistency, that:

A lot better = Over 25% increase
A little better = From 2% to 25% increase
About the same = Between -2% and +2% of last month's figures (to allow for the inevitable small fluctuations in sales ... ebb and flow)
A little worse = From 2% to 25% decrease
A lot worse = More than 25% decrease

Maybe it's silly of me to disclose this (keep my advantage for one and keep others occupied with the ratings game), but the three most important factors of the best match search are: age of the file, dl's per month and having the proper boxes ticked and no others (disambiguation).

Thanks for your post.� what you say seems sensible and reasonable .... but.... this does not explain why two similar photos with identical keywords and uploaded recently on the same day show up in this order:

photo 1: 2 sales, few views , *****
photo 2 : 4 sales, more views, no stars

Now that photo 2 is rated, it now shows up first rather than second.

The antidotal evidence suggests that ratings are important.� I hope they do make rating irrelevant (except for the rating search).

[edit: time on site seems to have an effect as well looking in more detail - are you suggesting they have a similar system to SS where it is a DL/month basis)

Kacper,

I wish you are correct in that ratings don't matter, and I'm sure for buyers they don't. But the search engine obviously does care whether an image has been rated or not. I have tried many a random search and have yet to come up with one that doesn't have the rated(even if poorly rated) images on the first handful of pages.

It is possible that Kacper is trying to throw everyone off the trail by providing disinformation...
Or maybe not...
Who knows for sure?

Yeah I'm an admin for iStock who wants all the sales to meself. Seriously now... if I wanted to throw people off the trail, I'd try a bigger forum so I'd get a bigger potential audience. I didn't say ratings DON'T matter, just that they matter so much less than everyone thinks.

[edit: time on site seems to have an effect as well looking in more detail - are you suggesting they have a similar system to SS where it is a DL/month basis)

CJ: the example you provided is correct: picture with 4 dl's with a rating will be higher than the one without a rating. But: it could be age. And YES, iStock DOES have a SS-like variable. It's called DL'S/MONTH (it's one of the columns in your list when looking up your uploads). I have two images of the same situation currently both with 25 downloads. One was uploaded in September last year, one this October. They both have 1 rating each, they both have been disambiguated. One appears on page 2 of the appropriate search, the other on page 46 of the same search. The newer file got 25 downloads in a month, the old one got... none.

What I'm pointing out is lack of logic shown by people who are in this ratings craze and the best way to illustrate my point is to show unquestionable data. Look at Andresr folio on iStock. Barely over 500 ratings, more than 42,000 downloads in two years. Now look at t-lorien: almost 5000 ratings and barely over 3,000 downloads in three years. True her portfolio is three times smaller, but that's a HUGE difference (about 7-10 fold proportionally). Do your own research, don't believe in mine. Look at Top 30 Rated pictures and see how many of those have decent downloads. And then you'll figure out that the only ones that do (and also the ones that have the most ratings) are previous IOTW (Image of the Week).

It's just that I'm surrounded by lack of logic in my daily life (just the part of the world I'm from lacks all center of logic) and this has seemed to spread to a large part of iStock users who think that their portfolios will get tons and tons and tons more downloads if they can get tons of ratings from their CN. The fact is, they're likely to get their priviledges taken away, suspended or even banned. Ultimately what sells pictures is 1) quality, 2) originality, 3) uploading what sells, 4) uploading in a timely fashion (ie: uploading summer pictures now means they will get lost in a shuffle because no one is buying summer shots now).

But... let me be the last person to dissuade you from this ratings craze. If more people get banned for block rating, the better it will be for the rest of us.

both downloads and $ were slightly higher -- modified about 30% of my photo's keywords -- 0 of these has sold since modified (some were top sellers some had never sold)

try submitting 10 images and see how you like it.  It DOES have good earning potential.

Kacper,

I wish you are correct in that ratings don't matter, and I'm sure for buyers they don't. But the search engine obviously does care whether an image has been rated or not. I have tried many a random search and have yet to come up with one that doesn't have the rated(even if poorly rated) images on the first handful of pages.

Obviously didn't read the post correctly. He was saying that ratings tend to be a result rather than a cause.

Side note: October had the most downloads and by far the most royalties (including one EL) for me. IS is my best preformer, and I haven't uploaded anywhere in 2 months.

I assume your talking about why images get rated\downloaded and which causes which. Which is not what I was talking about at all. In fact I really don't care, because I agree, just because an image is rated doesn't mean it will get downloaded. What I was referring to is how images appear in the search results. It is very obvious that rated images get a preference in the results.

He did not say that ratings don't matter. He only said that they aren't weighted as heavily as people think.

my guess is that total sales are similar to last month.

That means that if 33% of the people had better sales than last monght 33% of the people had to have worse sales than last month.

The disambiguation has me baffled though. Now I have gone and done my entire portfolio (shitload of work). And I've basically noticed three things:

1. Disambiguation didn't help at all my older very well selling files (which are no longer well selling)
2. It helped a lot my older not so well selling files (which are now well selling)
3. One file that HASN'T been disambiguated started selling like hotcakes (40 times half a month): stupid me... I disambiguated it and now it hasn't sold once since October 30th...

So I suggest doing a very careful portfolio analysis and disambiguating your files on a case to case basis.

i think kasper was meaning that if a file is selling well DON'T TOUCH IT.  if it isn't selling at all, then it can't hurt changing things around... it just might help.

on a side note.

My 14 day average sales per site now has bigstock earning more per day than istock    This may just have something to do with the fact that I disambiguated all my best selling images about 2 weeks ago ... now they don't seem like best selling images anymore