Slow start to the year? Or signs of a downward trend? Published on February 25, 2020 by

luis

in Insights, Stock Performer

It is with a certain frequency that one can read gloomy stories about microstock’s demise and how the industry is running out of energy. Individual contributors complain about falling revenue and the difficulties of earning a sustainable revenue.

One of the best indicators of contributors’ health is how much they upload. If they are optimistic, they will put the time and money into producing new content. If they are pessimistic they will wind down their production and upload less.

At Stock Performer we have a small sample of the industry’s contributors. But we could argue this sample is a good representation of the top contributors. How else could they afford our subscriptions plans!? 😉

So we decided to look at whether our customers (only those opted-in to our ranking program) are uploading more now than they did a year ago. We aggregated all uploads in January 2020 and compared the sum with all uploads from the same contributors in January 2019.

The following chart visualizes the results:

Change between all January 2020 vs January 2019 uploads per agency

One immediately sees that this set of contributors has heavily reduced the amount of files they uploaded in January 2020 vs. the amount of files they uploaded in January 2019.

123RF seems to fair best, with upload counts increasing by 1%. All the other agencies are in negative territory, with Adobe receiving 27% less files this January than last January. Most affected of all seems to be BigStock with a 75% decrease.

Are we seeing a lazy start to the year? Are contributors catching up from Christmas festivities and getting up to speed to start an incredible 2020? Or is this an indicator that the energy is subsiding and some contributors are slowing down production to better face the reduction in revenue? Can we argue contributors are pessimistic about the near future?

How much did you upload in January 2020 compared to January 2019? Did you upload more? Or have you decided to reduce your output waiting for better times? Please leave a comment and share your experience!

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