Microstock Group - A meeting place for microstock photographers

I just got this email from Keith at zymmetrical.com

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Hi Richard,

You have an abnormally high rejection rate, and you seem to just have us on auto-FTP, sending more of the same each month -  our reviewers pay careful attention to each review, and we expect the participating artists to heed those comments.

I am sorry if this may come off harsh but it costs large sums of money to be rejecting your files when that money could be put into growing the business. We have no upload limits, very high commissions, and generally relaxed terms - we rely on the artists to play fair and participate in good faith: just uploading whatever thousands of shots you've made each month is unsustainable. The 150 or so you have approved are marketable, but since rejection rates affect search positioning to a degree, you are shooting yourself in the foot by just carpet-bombing the uploads. We are completely open to help you not have to spend too much time on deciding what to upload, you just have to ask - in the meantime, it cannot continue with this rejection ratio.

Best Regards,
Keith Tuomi

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It is true, it must cost a lot of money to reject my pics.  So far I have 1593 pictures rejected there and only 154 approved. 

I have a 78.5% acceptance rate at dreamstime which is climbing as it was the first months that brought the average down.  The last 5 months there I have maintained more than 90% acceptance average with about 200 pictures added every month.

Istock, Shutterstock, Fotolia are all very similar.  I haven't seen a rejection from Stockxpert in ages.

Heck, even Crestock accepts more of my images.

All is not lost though,  the most popular rejection reason given is composition and lighting.  Although I'm not too sure how an isolated object on white gets a composition rejection.  Anyways, if all the sites had similar complaints about me, then perhaps I would pay more heed to this email. 

I know I am not a top seller, but I do try and learn.  But with rejections like this and from only the one website, it makes it difficult. 

Thanks for listening, and any comments or criticism about my post or portfolio not a problem.

p.s.  Keith will not have to worry about paying people to reject my pictures for a while.  I won't say that I am done with them, but surely I will take a break and ask him to delete all my photos in the pending queue, to be sure he gets only my best and newest.

That's all they are asking for, I believe.  Not all sites agree on what a marketable image is.  They mass rejected almost our entire first batch, so I figured they didn't appreciate our style of shooting, and that's fair.  It's their company, it's up to them to decide what "marketable" is.  

By the way, I left our 20-ish images online there, no reason to pull them, if they feel they are marketable, then I should be able to use those as my little sample.  So far, (surprise) no sales.  Will I start uploading there again? It's possible, Zym seems to be quite willing to get involved in the community, and that's always a positive thing.  But they won't get our first runs.  I need to put those on the sites that appreciate the way we shoot first, because that's where we sell.

Gebbie

I wouldn't bother uploading more if they rejected that many of mine.  They sometimes spot problems with photos that istock don't notice, so their reviews are strict.  As they sell for higher prices than most of the micros, I don't mind them being strict.

Wow my email outbox is routed to MSG automatically now.            

The (single, private) message to Richard stands as it is, our reviewers are not there for entertainment purposes, the comments they give about rejections, particularly in the technical area which is pretty straightforward, can not just be skipped on a consistent basis. We are open to anyone uploading, and as such can have either pre-imposed limitations to avoid one person using up more than their fair share of business resources, or human intervention. We prefer the human touch - if someone is literally uploading thousands each month and getting rejects constantly for the same reasons we owe it to the other members to at the very least send a friendly note to that person, as I have.  Is this so dramatic?

Rgebbie - I had a look and your approval rate is 64%, pretty good actually - i'd be interested if you could tell me some more about the ones you know we may have rejected but sell elsewhere (via PM or email if you like). We are not ones to sit with our hands on our ears saying 'nanana midstock can't hear you'     Every piece of info people share with us about their experience marketing images is valued and noted duly, but for basic policies, sure, we don't do subscriptions etc. so have a different set of standards then some other agencies that do.

It's no problem, really, just already someone got the impression it was a mass email or something, which would be really confusing since it's clearly personalized.   Plus I don't like you being singled out in particular, we make life difficult for lots of people.   (humor)         

I did try to head this type of issue off a bit a few weeks ago at http://www.zymmetrical.com/info/forum/afv/topic/aff/15/aft/3186/, but it's just a little post on our forum, no guarantees people see it. It's tough to turn down content, especially when you have people pointing out exactly how much some of it's been sold for elsewhere-  but if we don't stand for something we will fall for anything as the saying goes - and I trust our editorial team's choices and our policies very much.