07 Jun 2007 Watch your Dreamstime Approval Rate

Dreamstime‘s search engine is called Dreamfinderâ„¢. They released version 2 on this day last month touting it as the best in the industry. It features a Google-like algorithm, setting the order of search results in real-time, and factoring in a large number of variables.

Search result order is an important factor in the quantity of sales a photo produces. Photos that appear at the top of the list for a particular search term will obviously sell more than photos that appear at the end of the list.

Different microstock agencies have different search technologies. iStockphoto allow the buyer to sort their search results by photographer alphabetically, title alphabetically, size of photo, age of photo, by community rating, by number of downloads, and by best search match. Shutterstock allows buyers to sort by age and popularity, but heavily favors newer images. Dreamstime also offers buyers similar search sorting options, but the default search is ‘relevance’ to the search term, and this is where their algorithm comes into play.

The algorithm takes into account many factors including details about the image itself, the preferences of the searching buyer, and factors of the contributor. So what factors about the contributor influence the search result order?

Approval rate! Go into the statistics page via the Dreamstime Management Area to find your approval rating. If it’s low, your rejected contributions are likely hurting your sales figures and it’s time to consider what you’re uploading.

Our average is 65.1% which may explain why we’re not currently receiving great earnings from Dreamstime. What’s your average approval rate?

See the Dreamstime thread on Dreamfinder v2.