P5 ... WE NEED an answer on File and title name!!!!

A close friend just called me. He has been told by curators a couple times not to include names or workds or numbers such as "HD", "4K", or number "3456" in the file name or title of FOOTAGE. He was told that doing so will hurt search and sales. Without these he has a better chance of sales.

I understand that P5 has said this on photos but we were told that existing footage or even all footage we would have no problems or reduction of sales to continue like we have for my 15,000 submissions.

Now with a sudden and drastic drop in sales and just as sudden increase in sales by other artists is this a factor? Something happened? It is not a so called summer slump.

I hope not, the long time artists that have been using HD, 4K, 3456 should not be hurt because of a change in the "better" search algorithm at P5 as he was told. This is disturbing but maybe now answers why sudden changes happened.

So P5 give us a straight answer. Does HD, 4K, 3456 hurt the search and sales in any way for footage? If so what are you doing with the possible millions that already have these words or numbers? The old long standing way here at P5 should not result in long term P5 artists being hurt because we did what was acceptable for many years, in fact from the beginning of P5.

It's time for some communication on whats going on and how our normal way of naming is hurting us significantly and what is being done to not allow any reduction of search or selling because we did what was acceptable..

Indeed. And here I am labeling clips " ... HD" and " ... 4K" etc for each clip because the need for it is that the name of the clip is the name, but how else would I keep track of which is which? Since we have to do both resolutions for each clip, being that P5 does not have the ability to downsize for our clients. Until the actual setup matches the words, I'm rendering and uploading both.

Have sold plenty of clips with numbers at the end....

Kinda makes ya wonder why the curators told your friend even though they had 15000 chances to tell you.

Oof that would be useful to know. I like to put 4K and HD in the title for combined clips so it's clear to buyers that both options are available for sale.

You are right Slimm, he only has a few hundred clips and he's been told twice to drop the HD and numbers because it will help with his sales. Makes me feel very uncomfortable with over 12,000 clips that all have HD, 4K and a number. Far too late to go back and try to change titles on all of them and move it to the description.

Since uploading 4K, I did add "4K and UHD" in name and description. Curator did not say a word about that. Strange.

Very interesting! I’m in the same boat and we really have to know!

This is something I was trying very hard to have clarified in this thread. Even with a few posts by Jonathan and Curator2, the answer still wasn't clear and their explanations, while greatly appreciated, contradicted each other. I eventually relented and decided to no longer include numbers at the end of my clip titles, however, my older clips remain with them (and sell more consistently than new ones with no numbers) and I still use "4K" in the title of a 4K clip to differentiate it from it's 1080p companion, although I've had practically zero sales on (just under 100) 4K clips.

The specific contradiction that bothered me the most was that they seemed to conclusively state that adding numbers to a clip will decrease it's search ranking, however they also said there's no reason to change our thousands of previously approved clips which already contain numbers. To me, it either hurts or it doesn't, so which is it?

Doing a few simple test searches, I find numerous examples of clips with titles such as, "78684 man swings hammer" appearing very high in the results, again, an apparent direct contradiction to the statement that numbers in titles somehow hurt rankings.

I'm not trying to be overly critical of a detail of an otherwise almost flawless system here (given that sales here beat out anyone else), but this really is something I think warrants a truly conclusive answer.

Just to further clarify my point, here's excerpts of explanations given in that thread which I linked in my previous post. Sorry it's long winded, and please understand I'm not trying to be a wannabe jerk lawyer or anything, I'm just truly confused by these points:

Jonathan - "I have been corrected by my supervisor, in that numbers should not be in our titles...The reason we don't want numbers in titles has to do with our our search algorithm is set up, and how our keyword tags work...having numbers in it (Steamboat 1, Steamboat 2, etc) actually only serves to confuse our system and can cause the item to either never show up in results, or to show up in all the wrong places...we simply can't take items with numbered titles like that."

Sounds like we should take numbers out of our titles, pronto.

His next post - "I've been told by several our curation staff that numbers in the title is something you really should try to avoid. We do understand that some artists have been using their own numbering system for a long time, and changing everything would just be a mess ...In those cases, so long as the rest of the title is accurate, we tend to let them slide."

Now it just sounds like an issue of getting a title approved in curation, but not a search placement issue.

He continues - "This is why using 4K in the title isn't a big deal, because buyers looking for 4K footage will tend to append their search with 4K. But buyers searching for X, Y, or Z won't tend to append their searches with random numbers."

So 4K seems to be OK.

Curator2 - "This is an acceptable title with numbers: Statue of Liberty at Night 0128...This is not an acceptable title: Statue 1...
This is not an acceptable title: MVI_7855 or IMG_5642"..."3D, 4K, etc. do NOT negatively affect search results... No one here has to go back and remove numbers from their portfolios."

Now again we're just talking about getting the clip through the approval process, stating that no one has to go back and remove numbers implies that they aren't suffering from any ill effects, otherwise I would hope they advise up specifically to do so. And, the example of "Statue of Liberty at Night 0128" being the acceptable one of the group furthered confused me since that was the exact method of titling I was using that was being rejected by the curators and started that entire thread/discussion to begin with.

If you check at the trending terms at the starting page you willl see at least 3-4 popular keyword searches with the word "4K" in it, as well as the term 4K alone.Artists stats page (http://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=artist_resources) shows an increase in 4K sales overall.Would be a bit peculiar to drop clients looking for 4K footage by not letting you title and/or keyword your footage using attributes essential to its success.