Why did sales drop off?

december sucked biiig time, for me...

How many sales?

my sales are low one the worst months i have ever had since i started a year and half ago, bit worrying as well, i would imagine it could be because of the xmas and new year though?

on the new year and xmas, also in december, people busy by many other cares

i hope that all it is still very low for this month, hopeing next month will pick up :( lowest i had in over a year

You have to remember there are ups and downs to this market. You joined in 2014, so you have about 1.5 years of historical data to review... Which isn't much, and in the overall scheme of things your clip count is like tiny drops in a bucket. It would be great to get an overall snapshot of how p5 is performing, but I don't think those numbers would be released.

I just received my lowest payout since I began in 2011...income is down nearly 70% below average. Never saw anything like it. Also, going on 3rd month (not 3rd weeks as their notice says) for review of latest uploads...and the uploads before that were rejected when I'd only had a couple rejections in the whole last 5 years. You'd think that Pond5 has totally changed hands and is not the same great company we used to have. What is going on... everything seems to be affected...??

I stand corrected...just noticed that they changed their review time notice to over two months rather then three weeks. That's something then.. Since I'm close to three months out, that means I should be coming up soon, huh? Now if they could just increase sales...

in february everything should be settled. with the arrival of the site improvements (or new site).
we will see how that works. maybe for the better

Things always seem to slow down around this time of year. Relative to last though I am still doing much better. I've been here since April 2013 and overall sales have gone up, but of course there have been ups and downs as dapoopta said.
There are some people saying Royalty Free sites are getting so bad, though I'm not sure in what way they mean it. If they mean sales, that is simply not true. If anything, overall sales for Royalty Free sites is increasing. The number of tracks on sites are increasing, so the relative pool of money getting spread around is getting smaller, but the number of film/video makers also increase, as well as (presumably) the number of people who discover RF sites (instead of stealing music, for instance).
I think Pond5's trend of more rejections is partly an attempt to curb the issue of over-saturation (which many have argued is already out of control). These kinds of markets are definitely kinder to those who can either do some pretty incredible tracks, or who can do lots and lots of pretty good tracks --so either those who can make hits and become top sellers, or those who are decent and are also prolific.