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Messages - hatman12

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51
Worst month ever.  I don't even bother to look anymore.

52
Same here.  Didn't receive payment and no apparent notification that tax form had expired.

Tax update on web site currently not working.

53
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: May 17, 2020, 22:10 »
May 18 here in the Far East.  Still no payment received.  It just gets later and later each month.

54
They give customers maximum quality at an affordable price. In addition, they give the option that if it is not in their agency you can acquire it in another agency, after the appropriate commission, also, while you browse their website you generate views of their Google advertising. Quite simply, to say that this agency is temporary is to say a lot. Actually, they can't go unless. They can only grow month by month. If collaborators turn their backs on mass, they will last a year on the market. The situation has to occur that all its collaborators close the accounts. They have more open websites, they work more things besides photographs and vectors. To deny them affiliation by large agencies is to blind them to the market. Not only do they benefit from users who do not buy from them through third-party commission but from advertising, but they guide them where the sale that escapes their portfolio is. Presumably and it is simply a conjecture, mere speculation, theory. All this, with modern, close marketing, extreme quality and a new international record, have hired a theoretically eminence, a recognized winner in other companies, a star in the sector for its new international expansion. In addition, with external collaborations, which facilitate the vision of the portfolio if you collaborate as an ambassador for your agency, promoting your agency on social networks or websites. They succeed a lot, month by month. Your collaborators earn money. And apparently a lot of money. Of course, not everyone enters the agency, they are very demanding.

True exercise of faith in what they pay you, I suppose. But, that it is temporary, I don't think so. They are monopolizing the market and it seems that their progressive rise has no ceiling.

Excellent analysis.

55
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: May 14, 2020, 23:24 »
Perhaps they are showing the actual sales, and the adjustment will come as the PayPal payment.

56
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: May 14, 2020, 00:10 »
Gets later and later every month.

57
iStockPhoto.com / Re: March stats are in (istock)
« on: April 22, 2020, 05:57 »
Terrible, unfortunately.  Lowest month since I went non-exclusive six years ago.

58
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: April 16, 2020, 19:46 »
Does the 'double earnings' apply to March or from April (ie paid in May)?

59
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: April 16, 2020, 19:16 »
Okay payment just received into PayPal.  No email from Canva, and no 'extra' payment.

60
Canva / Re: Canva announcement
« on: April 16, 2020, 19:14 »
April 17 here in the Far East.  No payment for March yet.

61
Bigstock.com / BigStock ... stopped uploading there
« on: January 04, 2020, 05:26 »
When I first went non-exclusive a few years ago I could reliably make about $100 a month at BigStock.  However over the past couple of years sales have declined, declined, declined and I'll be lucky if I now reach $10 in a month instead of $100.

Clearly this isn't worth the time and effort, so I've decided to stop uploading.

Perhaps others here have a different experience, but for my portfolio I clearly have to take decisions.

Good luck to anyone still active there.

62
Canva / Re: Canva Subscriptions
« on: January 02, 2020, 22:33 »
I see that the subs numbers have been added today.  An improvement, but unfortunately credit sales seem to be falling faster.  I imagine this trend will continue if they have a plan to covert credit customers to subs.  My subs numbers are disappointing and looks like this:

July   30   $5.84
Aug   53   $10.11
Sept  41   $9.10
Oct   64    $17.44

November $30.26

Edging upwards but nowhere near sufficient to offset the drop in credit sales.

December just published at $41.85

63
Could 50 keywords be to many? Or if they are relevant its ok?  I know that is the limit on the sites I use, like shutter stock, p5.   But is that the best thing to have?  All 50?  Or could search results be better by some chance if you just had 10-15?  Thanks

I remember years ago reading a report that too many keywords results in poor positioning in search, the theory being that the more keywords you have the less importance is assigned to each word.  So if you have fifty, each word is only considered 'one-fiftieth importance' but if you have say fifteen each word is given 'one fifteenth'.  Obviously this theory varies depending on each agency.  But to me it made sense.  These days I use the smallest number of keywords possible, sticking strictly to the most important aspects of the image.

64
Canva / Re: Canva Subscriptions
« on: December 03, 2019, 23:02 »
I see that the subs numbers have been added today.  An improvement, but unfortunately credit sales seem to be falling faster.  I imagine this trend will continue if they have a plan to covert credit customers to subs.  My subs numbers are disappointing and looks like this:

July   30   $5.84
Aug   53   $10.11
Sept  41   $9.10
Oct   64    $17.44

November $30.26

Edging upwards but nowhere near sufficient to offset the drop in credit sales.

65
Cameras / Lenses / Re: iPhone 11
« on: November 26, 2019, 21:34 »
Ken Rockwell recently did a Yosemite trip where he took several cameras and an iPhone 11 Pro.  Naturally there are quality differences when viewed 100%, but at full screen size (24 inch monitor) I find it difficult to see any difference between the mega-pixel cameras and the iPhone.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/trips/2019-10-yosemite/index.htm

66
Canva / Canva Subscriptions
« on: November 03, 2019, 20:43 »
I see that the subs numbers have been added today.  An improvement, but unfortunately credit sales seem to be falling faster.  I imagine this trend will continue if they have a plan to covert credit customers to subs.  My subs numbers are disappointing and looks like this:

July   30   $5.84
Aug   53   $10.11
Sept  41   $9.10
Oct   64    $17.44

67
Canva / Re: More ''Good news'' from Canva :-/
« on: October 24, 2019, 19:52 »
My peak month at Canva was about $900 and I was delighted with the effort I had made.  That was a year ago.  This month will be less than $200.

They said when they announced the istock deal that our work would 'continue to have priority in searches'.  That was clearly not their intention or they changed their minds.

Now they are trying to convert customers to the subscription model, further eroding credit sales.  My subs sales paid me $9 last month.  Perhaps good for them, rubbish for me.

As others have said, they used us to help get the business going and now they are successful it appears they don't care about us any more.

68
Adobe Stock / Re: something's wrong (sales)
« on: October 24, 2019, 19:45 »
My sales have been declining ever since I became Emerald two years ago.  Back then I could make $500 - $700 a month.  This month will be about $200.  Very disappointing.

As many people have said, the stock photo business isn't a big priority for Adobe - they see it as a convenient 'add-on' service that they can incorporate into their mainstream products.

69
iStockPhoto.com / Re: September numbers...
« on: October 17, 2019, 16:54 »
Worst month for earnings in several years.  Hundreds of downloads at very small royalty rates of $0.10 or less.  They are giving away our stuff for pennies.  Insulting.

70
Canva / Re: More ''Good news'' from Canva :-/
« on: October 13, 2019, 03:15 »
Nice new sales page with thumbnails etc.  Now I can see more clearly how they have totally scr*wed me on sales.....

71
Software / Re: Any way to search your own drive by metadata?
« on: October 03, 2019, 23:37 »
Quote
But if Windows does this and yes I have indexing on and I don't want to go through some project? How do I search metadata based on my already indexed hard drives?

open a folder  eg /this pc/pictures   and enter search term in upper right

This is the correct and excellent answer.

72
iStockPhoto.com / Re: August stats
« on: September 26, 2019, 22:41 »
Jo Ann Snover was correct two or three years ago when istock changed the subscription payments to 'percentage of whatever the client pays'.  She correctly predicted that this would allow istock to offer massive discounts to customers and then pass on those discounts to contributors.  That's exactly what has happened.  And this is why RPD is declining (and will continue to decline).

In my case my monthly sales have remained fairly stable, but income has declined by about 40% over the past year.  This is a direct reflection of the discounts being given to customers then passed on to contributors through reduced subscription payments.

Several years ago Getty support published a video reassuring contributors that 'this is not a race to the bottom'.  In reality that is exactly what they have done.  Their business model appears to be to give bigger and bigger discounts in order to retain customers - and that means lower and lower payments to contributors.

At the peak istock was the most successful microstock agency with gross revenues of about $400 million.  Getty changed the model away from 'high volume' and destroyed the revenue stream which is now in the region of $200 million.  So istock's gross revenue has dropped by half and now they reduce payments to contributors in a desperate attempt to maintain the customer base.  Is it any wonder that for most contributors sales and income have dropped by a significant amount?

73
General Stock Discussion / Re: Alamy - is it worth it?
« on: September 01, 2019, 22:14 »
When I went non-exclusive four years ago I decided I'd upload my entire microstock portfolio to Alamy (including some editorial work) as a potential source of extra income.  I did this 'knowing' that for the best success on Alamy one really needs to be a UK editorial photographer (which I am not).  Frankly Alamy has been a disappointment (although not entirely unexpected).  I make about $1,000 a year from my portfolio of about 5,000 images.  Hardly worth the effort, but I suppose in these times of much more difficult trading conditions for stock photographers every extra dollar helps.

74
Canva / Re: Canva - did I miss something?
« on: August 30, 2019, 22:08 »
My sales dropped very dramatically as well. Canva went from hero to zero very quickly, it had became my top site by earning, but I knew it was not solid because the majority of my sales came from just a handful of pictures.
At the beginning of the year and until beginning of May, I was averaging at least 50 downloads per day, in June it was less than 5 per day.
From my stats, I noticed the drop started on May 3.

So I decided to contact Canva support and I got this reply:

"Thank you for reaching out to us.

Yes, we're aware of the decline in contributor sales and it's something we're looking to improve.

The decline will be as a result of the Getty partnership as well as a free images experiment that we ran (now finished). Both of these are efforts to keep users happy (content to fulfill all search queries and free images, respectively) however we've become aware that there is a major downside which is a decline in contributor sales.

We value the ongoing contribution our generous contributors make to Canva, and so as I said we really want to remedy this asap."

Two months have gone by and no sign of any improvement.  "We want to remedy this ASAP" appears to be yet another pack of lies to what they consider to be gullible stock photographers...

75
Shutterstock.com / Re: Worst month on shutterstock
« on: July 31, 2019, 23:37 »
This idea that the NHS is 'free' is complete and utter rubbish.  It is paid for from National Insurance Contributions.  Every worker has 11% deducted from salary in addition to income taxes.  Employers pay extra.  Yes, part of this money goes towards other benefits such as unemployment, national pensions etc.  But a large part is to pay for the NHS.

Imagine someone earning a reasonable 50,000 per annum.  They pay 5500 a year in National Insurance.  A typical person works 40 years, so that's 220000 over a working life not adjusting for inflation etc.

Now imagine if that money was instead invested in an annual investment plan.  Even at a modest 5% a year that money would grow to somewhere near to 1,000,000 - easily enough money for retirement and health.

What would you rather have - free NHS and a small Government pension, or one million pounds in the bank?

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