Microstock Footage Forum > General - Stock Video
For people who upload mostly video, but also some photos
Brightontl:
I have read several members saying that when starting adding photos to their catalog of video, they have noticed a decrease in income, sales in photos taking the place of part of the sales in video, but obviously at a much lower price.
Here is my experience: I have a bit less than 3,000 video clips in the main agencies and about 4 months ago I started to upload a few photos to several agencies (about 800 pics).
I dropped all the dead ones and I kept uploading photos only to SS, FT, Alamy and the new SB.
No sales so far in Alamy and SB, but that seems normal: they all say that start selling at Alamy takes forever and SB only started with photos last week.
In SS I have noticed that my cap remained the same in spite of adding photos. As an example, if I was making $1,000 before, selling just video, I am still getting $1,000 now, but $70 comes from photos and $930 from video. In reality it is slightly different, because the cap is dynamic and in my case it goes slightly up every month. But the bottom line is the same: I get the same total revenue as before adding the photos, as if my previous video cap includes now video and photos. More or less the same is true for Fotolia, although with lower sales.
In other words, adding photo to my catalog is not useful and is not harmful, it is just a waste of time. I do get sales, and they tend to increase every month, but they are balanced by an equal loss of revenue in video.
My idea is to continue uploading until the end of the year and see if Alamy and SB wake up to life, than decide what to do; but almost certainly I will stop uploading photos to SS and FT.
Basically I have the feeling that if you do mainly video, adding photos to the same agencies is not useful at all.
I would be interested in other people experiences about it. After all understanding how the algorithm works is the single most important thing for this work and the only way to understand is to compare our experiences.
People who believe there is no cap, no manipulation and that sales happen just by accident, please note that I do not complain at all about conspiracy. I find that the main agencies (especially SS) obviously have an extremely complex algorithm that control our sales and I am think it is a very good thing
increasingdifficulty:
$930 from $1,000 is not a significant enough change to draw any conclusions at all.
A "dynamic" cap is not a cap.
SpaceStockFootage:
A dynamic cap that gradually increases every month? I had to chuckle at that one!
Try deleting all your photos.... I'm pretty sure your earnings won't miraculously increase! They might, for a bit, but thats just general variance from month to month. September to November is usually better than June, July and August.
alexzappa:
...and 70$/month from 800 pics is not that bad, these days... especially for new photos that seem to be penalized in SS in the latest months
Brightontl:
For people of the English language academy, I am not native speaker. I could have used monthly allotted income, but in this forum people generally uses the word cap.
The amount of sales I stated is not what I actually get, it is a round figure used as example.
I am not complaining about poor photo sales (I do not like to post in a forum to complain), I am just saying that photo sales are matched by an equal loss in video sales.
Also I said that these are my first impressions and I will keep going with the experiment for another few months.
BTW I was trying to share some experiences about the algorithm with other users, but as usual this forum has become a place just for whining about poor sales or to pick endless fights about the length of a timelapse, or the right to photoshop models...
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