That sounds like something photodune and other platforms already used to do, so why did they stop in the first place if it was successful? [quote=“SpaceStockFootage, post:8, topic:74125”]
the whole point of the test was that it proved that a lower amount of high quality items does a lot better than a massive amount of varying quality
[/quote]
When you already have proportionately well rounded growth in standard photos. If you simply only make niche quality pictures, there simply won’t be any of the common stuff that people are most likely to search for and buy. Like I said, the results could simply be explained by the sheer concentration of niche and unique photos since photodune already provided what the bulk of people needed, and of course on unstock there are fewer pictures so the overall revenue of the platform gets divided by a smaller number. Other authors have demonstrated that one way to succeed isn’t even necessarily anything that been demonstrated by unstock, it’s providing the most economically feasible quality at the lowest price for the most common products. If Envato makes products that people search for all the time but makes them better than anyone else, that’s going to attract more buyers than a small volume of niche high quality photos. That means that in fact, that the answer is somewhere in between the extreme of unstock and the extreme of people who only make average items. There is clearly some optimal configuration for search results that mixes between satisfying what the bulk of customers need and allocating resources to only the most unique and high quality (relatively) items.
If that’s the case and they aren’t making any money, then that’s already their own motivation to step up their quality if they can. If they make that little and they still don’t step up their quality, then it’s the same as if they were never approved in the first place, so they would just keep submitting a portfolio to be approved instead of submitting images that may make a sale.
I’ve noticed several demographics of customers that these platforms have failed to reach out to. There is definitely a possible issue with marketing if something doesn’t make sales either. What do competing platforms do better than Envato? Why do people go to shutterstock pond5 or soundsnap or iStock when it’s harder to search for stuff on there and they’re like twice as expensive? That’s a big problem for AJ’s marketing team, Envato’s undercut all of the major media industries and yet they still aren’t the biggest vendors for any particular category.