Recently there was a livestream with Mat Hayward and Terry White (https://www.behance.net/videos/eb2dab18-ad9b-4535-a64e-127037055b8e/New-Creative-Cloud-features-for-Adobe-Stock-Contributors-with-Mat-Hayward-and-Terry-White) where it was revealed that customers have a certain number of "credits" they can spend on generative fill features. Namely, they called this "fast lane", which puts your request in a separate queue and you get your output in 10-15 seconds. Otherwise, you go into the other lane, which is slower, and which could take a lot longer to do the generative fill.

When customers used up their credits, they can buy new ones, and use it to put their requests in the "fast lane". Now - I might be biased, but it seems pretty obvious with me that a part of this revenue should be shared with us - the contributors who helped train the underlying model. Yes - we got that one-time payment to use our assets to create the model, but that is separate from continuously reaping the rewards of our work, and not sharing any revenue with us. So, I think a percfentage of the revenue should be shared with us.

I asked Mat about that in the topic about the livestream (https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-livestream-today-with-mat-hayward-and-terry-white/msg594091/#msg594091), but although the questions posed after mine were anwered, mine was ignored. I'm no mind reader, but it's probably because there isn't any revenue to share with us.

Do you think that we, the contributors whose content trained their model, should be fairly compensated for the continuous revenue that Adobe will get from selling these (but not limited to!) fast lane credits? Is a one-time payment enough to keep you quiet? Or will you raise your voices only when AI completely takes over and you lose the entierty of your revenue? Let me know in the comments <3

Not asking for tax advice, just to share experiences.

For example, since J-1 is a non-immigrant visa, I still believe we are legally treated as US residents for tax purposes (resident alien), but I'm not sure if stock agencies will continue to keep withholding 30% of our sales, and if we need to fill the W-9 or the W-8BEN?

Has anyone been in such a situation?

(of course I'll talk to a tax professional when I finally move)

I tried to make this as short a possible, but game theory needs some simple explanations. Just stick until the end, it will make sense.

There's a game in game theory called prisoner's dilemma. In short, two members of a criminal gang (Alice and Bob) are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The possible outcomes are:

If Alice and Bob each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison
If Alice betrays Bob but Bob remains silent, Alice will be set free and Bob will serve three years in prison
If Alice remains silent but Bob betrays Alice, Alice will serve three years in prison and Bob will be set free
If Alice and Bob both remain silent, both of them will serve only one year in prison (on the lesser charge).



It is assumed that both prisoners understand the nature of the game, have no loyalty to each other, and will have no opportunity for retribution or reward outside the game. Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other ("defecting"). The reasoning involves an argument by dilemma: Bob will either cooperate or defect. If Bob cooperates, Alice should defect, because going free is better than serving 1 year. If Bob defects, Alice should also defect, because serving 2 years is better than serving 3. So either way, Alice should defect. Parallel reasoning will show that Bob should defect.

We, the contributors, are Alice and Bob.

We can choose to either "cooperate" (deactivate portfolios) or "defect" (do nothing). If we cooperate - yes, we will lose some income, but if we defect - it's us who will get off scot-free and reap the benefits. While all the other contributors (Bob) deactivate their portfolios, we can actually profit by leaving ours on. Hence, the rational way to play this game is to actually do nothing. People at Shutterstock know this. This is what leads to the tragedy of the commons. This is why it's so easy to lose.

However, this is not just one instance of the prisoner's dilemma. There are other stock agencies that will see what Shutterstock has done and how we reacted. This can become the new norm. Hence, this is the iterated prisoner's dilemma, where cooperation plays a much more important role.

Without getting into all the details about game theory, stable equilibria and all that academic stuff, the important part is here - by not deactivating your portfolio for a week you are boosting your own sales for a week. That's true. At the very least - you're not incurring any penalty to yourself. BUT - this action has a chance of succeeding if and only if we are able to cooperate, "not snitch of each other" and collectively suffer the consequences of a one-week-long deactivation. By not deactivating, you are also increasing the chance that, in 6-12 months, you income starts to drop considerably, not just because of shutterstock - but because other agencies WILL follow. While it might be in your short-term interest to do nothing, it is actually in your long-term interest to cooperate.

So, please, if you are able to, deactivate.

If I can do it, after $150,000+ earned in more than 10 years, you probably can as well.



We have only one chance at this. Don't let it go to waste. Cooperate. We can all be "one year in the prison" for the collective good.

I live in a non-treaty country and EVERY video sale has an $14.15 amount withheld. I thought that's just the way it works, despite the fact that all other agencies apply the withholding tax only if the buyer is from the US.

Then I go and check my images sales earnings on the same agency (storyblocks) and some images have tax withheld from them ($1.15), but some have $0.00 (aka no withholding tax applied)!

What is up with that? I would have understood if they applied the withholding tax to all sales (which they don't because they haven't applied to some of my image sales) or if they just applied to US sales (which they don't, as otherwise some video sales wouldn't have $14.15 withholding tax associated with them).

I don't want to throw accusations which are unsubstantiated, but this seems like they might be tricking contributors and keeping the withholding tax amount even though they shouldn't, as they should just keep if for the US-based sales.

Anyone know what's up?

I'm trying to decide if it'd be worth it to step up my video game and the most important thing is ROI.

I currently don't have good gear to do video and I'm thinking of buying the GH5 with the metabones adapter and maybe some video lights (if I need anything else, let me know). Let's say all the equipment will be 3500-4000 USD and that I need to pay the person shooting, color correcting and grading the videos (let's say 600 USD per month), what do you think how much we need to produce in order to make this a profitable venture?

We'll be able to shoot/edit 8hrs each day, so that should give us a lot of time to create a lot of clips, but there's only so much you can do indoors and without models, so there'll be additional costs.

What I'm looking for are the opinions of people who have attempted something similar or have more experience with selling video. Is this a dumb idea that will never pay off, or it could?

Thanks!

Did anyone try to create an offshore company in one of the tax havens (such as Belize or Isle of Man, or maybe even Panama) for the purposes of microstock? Would that even work?

I mean, we get paid as individuals on stock agencies, right? So all the money the company makes has to first "land" on a personal account, correct? Most of the agencies ask for your ID etc. I'm not sure how microstock factories do it. But my understanding is that if it's a personal account, then it has to be taxed, and even if you transfer it later to an account of a company in Belize, you're still taxed because you received the money. The question is - can the money go directly to the account of the company? Then it would work?

I don't think that giving away 50% of my earnings is really "fair" (I already give more than that to the agency), so I'm looking into other options.

I'm wondering what kind of financial workflow do you use to keep on top of everything stock-related? Do you have an accountant or do you do everything by yourself? Do you even report (poll above)?

I need to revise my workflow, as it's becoming harder and harder to keep track when an agency has sent me a payment. Up until now, I just had a huge excel sheet with monthly earnings per agency (with portfolio size, RPI, RPD, STR, etc.), but that's not really a good solution for reporting income, as you only need to report what the agency has paid out to you, if I understood correctly. So, for example, if you have xxxx credits on FT, but don't transfer it to your PP/Skrill/..., that "income" is not "taxable", as you haven't received anything. Right?

So, how do you manage your stock income, do you use any specialized software, or have a separate excel sheet with agency payouts only? Do you even bother with that (I personally know quite a few contributors who don't report it as income at all)?

I've been out of the loop for some time now, so I'm looking to find out if it's not ok to upload to depositphotos?

I stopped uploading there when the 3% royalty per image was discovered, was "kindly invited to upload my stuff back" and refused, so I'm wondering if they changed their ways or not?

The last that I've read is that they reduced the royalties by 10% for all and increased prices, but what about the partner program, opt-outs, and so on? Are they now considered to be a more or less fair agency (like fotolia after the launch of adobe stock), or it's still the same? Do you upload there?

Thanks.

I've found this here (http://www.dreamstime.com/credits), where it seems buyer can buy an "All-at-once subscription" for 31� and get 5 images per week.

I'm wondering what's the amount that we get per image - 0.35$ or something higher?

Because if it's the former, then what's exactly the difference between this and DP(C)?

I miss the old days when there were more graphs and discussions, also a lot of blogs which reported income closed (and they were very helpful to me as a beginner), so this is my thanks to them and I hope you find this useful.

I started microstock in Oct 2009, and I did quite a lot of work, but not with spectacular results. I was a student, so it was lunch money. I was fine with it. However, as I started working, I've noticed that I'd like to improve my income, so I waited until my contract expires and during the summer of 2013, decided to populate my portfolio with quick-to-make, totally generic images. However, something peculiar happened. Now, enough talk, let's see a picture. Blue bars are income, red line is portfolio size.



When I write "spam started", I really mean totally generic images. This is why I was able to increase my portfolio size so quick, and my earnings. However, these totally generic images were not alone, I also tried some more creative stuff or things that I thought would sell. So it was a mixed bag. Upon analyzing my portfolio in 2014, I've found a couple of images which stood out and amounted to most of the income. To put it in perspective: less than 1% of the images were responsible for more than 50% of my income.

In Feb 2014, I updated the niche and, no surprise here, income increased once again - you can see almost a negligible increase in my portfolio size between Feb and March, but the earnings almost doubled. It's all due to this small number of images. In May, I updated the niche again. Income rose. To compare, I started "spamming" again.  But although I increased my portfolio size by a significant amount, the earnings did not follow, or at least not as dramatically as after uploading niche content.

What's the take-away message? Shoot in a niche, don't overpopulate stock agencies with generic stuff? I don't know. It'd be easy if niches were easy to find, or if you could predict them. So that's obviously not the advice I'd be willing to take. My advice would be to check your statistics more thoroughly, even with paid solutions if necessary (there are brilliant options available), and base your shooting strategy on numbers. It worked for me.

Hope this helps!

Hi all,

I want to outsource my iS keywording and the issue is that, to use deepmeta, one needs to have an istock account, which my collaborator does not.

On this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlygeZ6_TY&list=UULagW8xVqJqGYA2Ei5EVH4w) the guy is saying that he outsourced his keywording and encrypted the password, but I'm don't really understand how it's done.

Did anyone attempt this and what's the procedure?

Thanks!

I found this a few moments ago on reddit: http://imgur.com/CqTGaDb

So I propose we do something similar for each agency and let the buyers know about the conditions contributors are in.

However, I would make the title "smarter" and write it from a buyers perspective - Where MY money goes whenever I buy a $x image. This way it's a more direct message that they are indeed doing this. Because the agency can propose any rate they want - it's a free economy. It's up to contributors to determine if we want to contribute there or not. But it's also up to the buyers - do they want to buy from an agency that has low royalty rates?

And then we put out a pie chart: 5$ agency - server upkeep and marketing, 1$ artist - researching, planning, shooting, editing, keywording, submitting.
And maybe another pie chart showing how much time it takes for the agency to do all this (10%) and the artist (90%).

It might be completely useless and it might change the mind of some buyers. Who knows. Thoughts?

Hey everyone, how was your last month?

For me, a BME (and by a wide margin) of around +70% with a portfolio increase of only 5% in the last month (and around 20% compared to the previous BME).

Shutterstock killed it. No, really. 78.1% of earnings with the RPD of 0.84$.

I'm waiting for PP results, but I don't hope that they will amount to anything. But, who knows.

Also, since I've dropped BigStock and DP, I have replaced them with CanStockPhoto and PD. They are both very good substitutes - not even comparable to BigStock (manyfold increase) and better for my portfolio than DP.