Best Match Discussion - Feb 15, 2013

Just to know, is BM still "geolocalized", meaning that people don't see the same images with the same keywords depending on where there are in the world? As a north american, I used to sell a lot of files to european clients before september (they were bought during my night time) and those sells are very rare now. Might be one of the factor that affect some people so much...

Nice update. I apprecte being talked to like an adult and a business partner by Lobo and Mary. It's a nice change from how Best Match discussions were treated in the past.


At this point, is there anything that contributors can do to help Mary and her team as they move forward? Any information or opinions you'd like from the field?

The only hard data I have to contribute is are my sales patterns.

I analysed (i.e. I counted with a pencil) my last 100 downloads by year. The spread was like this:

2005: 6

2006: 15

2007: 21

2008: 21

2009: 11

2010: 10

2011: 7

2012: 5

2013: 4

As you can see there's a notable bulge around the 2007/8 dated files.

I can only speculate why this is so, but I imagine those are the years when images that became high volume sellers were uploaded around the iStock download numbers peak for individual artists between 2008 and 2010. I'm pretty sure I uploaded more images in the years after 2008 than I did before since that's when I started doing this full time.

I have no idea whether this kind of information is useful, but there it is.

thanks for update. i wonder if data as foto voyager's can be useful to sf/team who is working on bm things/issues. - if so - i am willing to post last 100 or 200 (or how many needed). for me older images still dominate dl's (added +1600 images for last 1.3 year).

Thanks Lobo and Mary for the update. I do think BM has improved a lot recently.


There are still some oddities though for me - I have a Bathroom image where the primary keyword is "bathroom" which was uploaded in November last year and which has had 6 downloads after 17 views (which I would have thought would have given it a bit of a boost...) but it is nowhere to be seen, in 20 pages of "bathroom" images @200/page...

I have a question that I have speculated for years here. Does contributer participation in the forums help boost the pictures in your portfolio. I noticed the more I posted in the forums, the more I sold?? I thought of two reasons this could be. 1 because BM has something to do with it...or Buyers see your name in the thread and click on it.

Well, I guess we just disagree. I just think the knowledge and skill of keywording images is what separates a photographer from a stock photographer. Frankly, I wouldn't trust istock to keyword my images any more than I would trust them to do the editing.

Jodi, come on. Of course not. However, maybe... wait, yes, it totally does. The more negative you are the less likely you will have sales. Nice positive comments tend to push all your files into the best sales positions and Unicorns make their way to all your dinner parties.

(Edited on 2013-02-16 14:11:31 by Lobo)

I will see what I can get from Search_Fairy on Tuesday. The fine folks south of the border are celebrating Presidents Day on Monday whereas the Albertans are celebrating Family Day, much to the dismay of some.

I know we have a lot of plans to dig deeper into the views issue over the next few weeks so if something will help with that I will make sure to let people know.

Lobo why are you making fun of me? I'm always nice to you! I really thought it might be true. I'll go back and play with my unicorn now.

Oh, Jodi. I love it so much when you go there. Don't feed them skittles, it's a misconception that they like them. That's why they always throw-up rainbows.

Right now we know 2 things… views from logged in clients are being counted when they hit the file close up page and customers using cash and adding files directly to the cart from their search results are skipping that step. We’re not giving up but it does take a little time to pull several sets of complex data, compare them and then make any sort of assessments.


If views are not counted with the cash sales, are the sales themselves counted.  Just curious because one day 80% of my sales were from credit cards.  Of those sales, I am curious if they got a boost from the sale since they probably didn't get a boost from the view.   Could we be getting sales that are not actually counted towards whatever the BM looks at even though we get the money and the sale shows.  Probably far fetched thinking but it made me wonder outside the box when I read about the credit card sales view counts.   Credit card/cash sales have been good and I am thankful for that. 


And the tweeking seems to be going in the right direction.  Ten of my last 20 sales were uploaded in 2012 and 2013.  Thanks for the updates and information.  We appreciate being kept in the loop.

I too have noticed this in the download patterns of my images. The only time I see downloads is during the working hours of the U.S., where as before, downloads happened 24 hours. I would be curious to know if this is an effect of BM.

That's a good point.  I used to get most of my dls overnight.  Now the few remaining areduring North American working hours.

I'm sure it's localised to the buyers not the artists. It makes no difference where you live, just where the buyer does.

I think this might be well representative. Nobody can reach the volumes reached earlier on, so really, BM should not favour those, with whom the late-comers have not chance to compete with. In September BM seemed to work ok - and IS decided to fix it. When it does not seem to work - IS's been fixing ever since. We only fix something that does not work. Improvement of sth that does not work is not improvement, is it?

I hope that BM really gets more fair-trade, balanced and proper [you may say it is not proof, but I would certainly not think that lower number of dls - and I never had many - now that I am an exclusive, when compared to a year ago, when non exclusive, plus doubling my portfolio, that all that is just a coincidence]

Well, if european buyers mostly see photos from european photographers first, it does make a difference...

Do you see regular sales overnight, in your part of the world, and also during your working hours of Europe?


Thanks for your stats of your last 100 sales, it seemed to help confirm to me that BM is favoring the so called middle aged files.

Dear Fairy, I have been trying to be a good girl, are you going to give me a chance??

New files only get very brief exposure. I get one DL if I am lucky, then it dies. Most of us, including myself, have improved our photographic and PS skills a lot over the years. The old images often are not good representations of my portfolio and the current quality of iStock datebase.

I know some people are luckier than I am, but the current BM is devastating to me.

(Edited on 2013-02-16 17:50:40 by Orchidpoet)

I am in Asia, with an Asian based portfolio, I don't get anymore sales from the US or Europe - The 2 biggest sales markets. 

ETA 2012: YES  - 1000 uploaded
ETA 2013: NO - and no plan to add anymore RF files on istock until there is a change in the localisation search  






(Edited on 2013-02-16 22:52:00 by fototrav)

(Edited on 2013-02-17 07:22:30 by fototrav)