But to be balanced�a lot of the ai content coming in is incredibly good.

The low quality work will get cleaned out by the algos.

Yes, they could be stricter, because it feels unfair to the photos, but a lot of the new stuff is fantastic and a real advantage for buyers compared to all the other agencies.

30 Million+

... their upload limit.
...
Agencies needs to take action to control these stuffs to promote more authentic work and real artists.

Sometimes I feel there is a huge requirement for a Microstock Organization and all RF and RM companies should come under them. Through this they can control pricing and authenticity both. Moreover can also organize a annual microstock meet to reward and also motivate people to work for such field.

luckily most of us don't live in a country that would be able to dictate what private companies must do.
-- who would control pricing?
-- how would you force membership?
--  how would this work when agencies are global?
-- who'd decide what is acceptable or authentic?

At the beginning of October, Adobe Stock was adding around 900k genAI images per week.

From October 16th for the next three weeks, it was just over 1 million each week.

From Nov 6-13, it was almost 2 million!! 1,930,975.
...

for comparison, what were the numbers for non-AI?   that would help to see how much AI is affecting the total

Not sure what the Adobe review waiting time is, but I have a file waiting for inspection 28 days.....frustrating.

350k a day

And here we are, still making money.

We survived unsplash...what could be worse than free images?

The majority of content uploaded is just duplicates of duplicates.

Once you dig into a genre you see all the glaring holes in the collections.

Huge amounts of content are missing, but most uploaders just sort a search by most downloaded and copy the top 20 files. Again and again.

Give the customers something even just a little bit different and they will be grateful and buy.

We have now reached over 33 million AI photos and illustrations on adobe stock.
Of these, less than 3 million have been sold, which corresponds to a share of just 7%.

The majority is therefore literally data garbage that has no buyers.

@Cobalt
I think that there will no longer be a market for generic motifs (people, life style, interior, etc.) and that this will be completely replaced by the stock providers' own AI models.

Where there is still some market potential are only niches, where AI can't produce high detailed images without errors.
Contributors like https://stock.adobe.com/de/contributor/205024019/ipopba are now melking for short future the current demanded niches.

Some successful contributors specialized on generic motifs have already switched to the video market in time.

Just for comparison, what percentage of real photos have been sold from the entire collection?

AI in so much alike and so many that more of the same helps no one. Not us or the agency. When does Adobe say, enough is enough? At 66 Million or when the new images change nothing for the volume of downloads? There has to be a wall.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on January 11, 2024, 14:50

Just for comparison, what percentage of real photos have been sold from the entire collection?

AI in so much alike and so many that more of the same helps no one. Not us or the agency. When does Adobe say, enough is enough? At 66 Million or when the new images change nothing for the volume of downloads? There has to be a wall.

According to the Adobe search engine in total around 194 million of the 242 million classic photos and illustrations were never sold.
This corresponds to a share of almost exactly 80%.
Conversely, 20% were sold at least once.
In my view, this is a plausible result and can often be observed as the Pareto principle in markets with very unequal concentration distributions.

It is possible that the AI images will sell better in the future after there has been a market shakeout of the bad skilled contributors.
But I'm also very curious to see whether Adobe will close the floodgates for AI content this year.
I can't imagine that they can manage 2 to 3 million new images every few weeks in the long term.
I also fear that the ranking and keyword order will suffer damage. There are so many images either with the wrong tags or in the wrong categories.

All in all I am surprised that nobody tries to individualize the Midjourney image look with own filters.
It's like a collective frenzy at the moment, who can generate more content.

20% of the entire collection with at least one sale is an amazing number. Although people here, have listed their stats for sales, and are higher than that. I'm lower.

Keep in mind that a number of agencies and other places, offer AI image creation, directly for consumers. Anyone can go to many of those and make their own images, get just what they want, without artists, so they don't need to buy one from a stock site.

I have to laugh that you worry about rank, tags and keywords. I think we've been writing the same thing about stock sites since I started and that was 17 years ago. Spam keywords, deceptive tags, just plain wrong locations and tags, and never in the whole time of guessing how image ranks work, has anyone come up with anything that shows a benefit to keyword spam, or incorrect information that leads to more sales or better rank. In fact, if the system works at all, bad data would harm the rank of images with spam or inconsistencies.

Use Alamy clicks and views, and zooms and sales, as a starting point how other agencies are likely to rank images. Too many negative results and the image drops in rank. I don't think any of this is as simple as views and sales, it would be illogical to think and agency is that thoughtless to have some simple rudimentary system.

And then there are the "secret" reviewers rank, when an image is uploaded. Might be AI now, but you could upload 20 of the same image, and one of them will be ranked much higher, show pages higher, and come up more often in a search. Wouldn't they all be equal? Uploads have a rank, before they are live on the site. Spam, bad work, marginal content and junk files, won't have a higher than average starting rank.

Not sure how long there have been Premium AI images - $249.99 for large, $119.99 for small.Why on earth would a buyer pay that much for AI generated stuff? None of the typical reasons for the premium collection apply to genAI images. Nothing at all wrong with this image BTW, other than the price

Not sure how long there have been Premium AI images - $249.99 for large, $119.99 for small.Why on earth would a buyer pay that much for AI generated stuff? None of the typical reasons for the premium collection apply to genAI images. Nothing at all wrong with this image BTW, other than the price

Premium AI images? There's something that just seems all wrong about that.

I do stock as I enjoy photography and fresh air, can't see any enjoyment from doing AI.