Pants

I had another BME due to two ELs at Stocksy. SS was alright (one EL), the others flat or below average

Stocksy  80%
SS 12%
DT 3.1%
123rf 2.4% (my last month with them, deleted my port after being paid less than 10USD for an EL and discovering that images i deleted last year are still being sold)
FT
2.4% - slightly above my WME... 

Small pair of socks

Video sales helped push up my income but so did a big last minute sales on SS. Dreamstime hit over $200 two months in a row, but based on history I expect it to go back to the $15O to $175 level.

Istock came in a little above but that was due to one el and two video sales. Next months PP reporting will determine the month, could be a good month on IS or normal if PP is low again.

FT managed to make me $100 but again had a rare el.

Dt blew
Pd blew
Sf blew
CanStockPhoto blew

Worst month for seven years, or so. 

It seems there was a negative Nancy svcking on a lemon who couldnt appreciate some lighthearted feedback on the subject and voted everyone down.

In case you didnt understand, May was pants, in other words, it sucked, hope you feel better now.

Surprisingly BMY on DT, iS and Alamy, $3 under BMY on SS but WMY overall because I had no direct stock photo sales from my own site, which had been on the rise for me all year. Four sales on Alamy in May - nice to see it moving up. Big improvement on all the sites since April.

Looking forward to starting to work with other agencies such as Spaces and looking into other traditional outlets for my work.

I think that finding a niche on specialized agencies and finding good traditional outlets for your work is the only way to go these days. It's a lot more work and uncertainty in some ways than just uploading as much as possible to the same old agencies, but overall I think it's the only way to deal with the fact that even if you can add a few thousand images a year to the micros, it's not going to give you the kind of results you saw a few years ago. I think that diversifying is really the way to go.

Hoping that the FB deal on SS and whatever deal DT is working on actually work out for the best and show us all better returns. But I'm hedging my bets.

Above average, but not great.

What kind of pants? I'd say Khakis from Costco

My thought was jeans with holes in the pockets

SS:
53% Vs 2013
-6% Vs April 2014

I'm starting to think it's GAME OVER. 

Pretty much my thoughts this year. I've been with SS, my biggest earner, since 2006 and I was able to increase my earnings up until this year. So far it looks like it will be the first year with a drop in earnings for me. As you, I'm unable to keep growing my port at the same pace the whole market grows. Currently Shutterstock adds ~200-250 thousand images every week. I used to have very few images with no sales. Now, at least half of my new images get no downloads whatsoever (and mind you this is with almost 300 'followers' ). I can't even imagine how hard this must be for someone starting right now.

I'm a bit concerned in case Dollar Photo Club is behind some of the earnings decline in the last few months. It's impossible to know, of course, but if it is starting to undermine earnings it is potentially disastrous.

I'm virtually certain that the DPC is still very much in it's infancy and is having a negligible effect on sales elsewhere thus far.

When I opted my port out of the DPC I compared my sales on FT before and after having done so. There was no noticeable difference in volume. If sales on DPC been significant then the effect of opting out should have been obvious.

That's actually a positive for us.  It must be eight or nine years since I first pointed out that as the return per image falls the incentive for the creation of new images also falls, making it less attractive for competitors to enter the field.  At some point, the market should stabilise as the flow of new images starts to dry up. Maybe we are approaching that. I'm certainly feeling less of an incentive to upload than I used to.

It would be a positive thing if the huge increases in content were coming from people starting out in this business. There was this Russian site that gathered data on port sizes and number of new contributors and I remember that the number of new people joining Shutterstock was falling already in 2011 and 2012. I'm afraid that a large part of the new content is coming from teams and companies that were able to make use of the economy of scale and will be able to take larger and larger chunks of the market.

I read something about GAME OVER earlier in this thread, and there's something I want to say to all those people who are painting doom n' gloom scenarios about micro stock.

You're right !

The whole business is becoming an exercise in futility.  Revenue keeps edging down doesn't matter how regularly one uploads, RPD is in something of a free fall, and the one thing that's certain is one or another piece of 'bad news' from one or another agency relating to sale (or giveaway) of contributor content or some other business (mal-) practice.  The only thing that seems to be seeing phenomenal growth is the number of new contributors coming on to add to the chase for pennies and nickels.  There's very little incentive to upload new content because most of it disappears among the gazillions of images that search words now produce.

 Tis soon time to shake out the mood and seek a new place in the sun.  Microstock has had its day - and it will soon be time to foray into some other business model and another brave new world

I agree with her Majesty that image factories are doing way more damage to micro stock than newbies.  You hear buyers complain about all micro pictures looking the same.  Many of us upload pictures that don't have same boring look but they don't get viewed in the mass of factory uploads.

I guess I feel the opposite. I don't have a problem with the image factories. They are in it to make a bunch of money. They are easy to understand and they usually have expectations for how they perform. It's the other side with no expectations and tons of files collectively that scare me.

There are probably less then 5000 serious contributors in microstock.
Using the Fotolia week rank, I got it to 4000 once with less than 200 pictures there.

A few industries are probably responsible for more than 80% of the uploads. There will always be people from undeveloped countries where 0.25/d is not that low, but they are not the big threat here.

I've got less than 500 images there and my seven day rank is regularly under 3,000 depending on how many sales I make. My regular rank is 5,000 and it is rare that my 7-day ranking goes above the 5,000 but sometimes it does for a day or two.

I would agree with gostwyck that opting out of DPC has made little difference to sales volume on FT main site and it is 'encouraging' to note that DPC-optersout do not appear to be being punished as optersout of subs were punished at FT in the old days. (If you opted out of subs as an exclusive, within days, your images were never seen and sales dropped off a cliff. FT actually explained how the algo worked and why you would get few sales when opted out of subs).

As to serious contributor numbers, I don't know how many there would be. I'm a serious contributor with relatively few images. I make most of my money with the occasional commission from long-standing clients. Nevertheless, I wouldn't like to go without my stock income even if it is less than �300/month. It is not to be sneezed at. And I do keep adding to my portfolio at a steady but minimal rate.

What does surprise me about DPC is that at least one image factory with 500,000 images is still opted in despite having the same port at Shutterstock. If I were to lose my ODD's income at SS because I opted in to DPC, then my income from SS would easily be halved. If an image factory with income from SS and DPC saw that SS income halve as a result of buyers downloading from DPC instead of buying ODD packs at SS, I would think they would notice that drop in income and withdraw from DPC to protect their SS ODD sales. But maybe things work differently when you have 500K pics at every agency on the planet! Maybe they just don't care or have some sort of links with DPC/FT that they're not going to reveal.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 10, 2014, 05:27

That's actually a positive for us.  It must be eight or nine years since I first pointed out that as the return per image falls the incentive for the creation of new images also falls, making it less attractive for competitors to enter the field.  At some point, the market should stabilise as the flow of new images starts to dry up. Maybe we are approaching that. I'm certainly feeling less of an incentive to upload than I used to.
.....

I don't think it is going to happen. It is too easy to grow earnings as a beginner. It's difficult to explain without a diagram but the problem comes a few years later when the decline in sales of older files out paces the new files you are adding. It's a product of the shelf life of an image. New people will keep joining the market thinking that the increasing income will last forever and be caught in the same trap. I don't know if there is a solution.

That's an interesting point, but it does depend on newbies seeing a return for their uploads. I just had a look at iStock and I had more than 100 approvals in April from which I've had three downloads. That's $3 or thereabouts in a couple of months from a week's work. It's no wonder I don't feel motivated. Shutterstock is considerably better, of course, but I think it is the only one that is.

Oboy your charts are great, can I just ask you something? How it's possible for DP be your #3?

My May results are these:

there is no way i could pay model in my country and earn some money, no way!

I see your comment and raise you: australia!

it's going to be increasingly more difficult for those us from the so-called "successful" countries, where coffee is $4 and hourly rates are $22+ (lol, unless you're a plumber, then it's $80/hr) and a house costs x10 your annual salary. Luckily I don't do this as a full-time income source, but I can report:
Stocksy BME
SS BMY and nearly BME
others were very ordinary.
Not quite enough to pay the plumber and electrician's bill... if only they were better looking I could try using them as models.

From above....."All to end up exactly where I was last year, nearly to the dollar"

Me too! All sites Jan - May this year within 10 dollars of the same period last year, despite uploading etc.

Not the total...each site is virtually the same....

VERY strange!

i think the best thing for stock world that the agency will look 2+ years unsold pictures and start deleting pictures that dose not meet this days standards

with 20-30 millions pics in each site and 10-50 pages for each search you make really it's going to down hill from here

Why would they do that? Yesterday I had a first sale of a file I uploaded in 2009, and this is not unusual. (on iS, it would be far more suprising to have a 2014 upload sell, but iS is 'up to something' in this respect, and other places aren't the same.)

How much do you think it would cost an agency to pay people to manually review images one by one to see if they match 'this day's standards'? This is microstock, margins aren't to be thrown away.

Besides which, when you've  been round the block for longer, you'll find that 'not selling' can have far more to do with the default search position a file gets into early in its career than anything else.

i ment this in more of the multiply pictures for same pupose for example X building in new york, that there is 4000 pictures of the same buliding, don't u think it worth deleting the more standard pictures and leave 400 of the same and not 4000? i mean in terms of quality lighting and act

How much would it cost to get someone to go through these manually?
Firstly, they'd have to run a program to see what subjects they have lots of, yet sell relatively few of. Then, to be fair (yet which agancy is fair?) they'd have to consider whether it's a 'bad' image (however you define that) or whether it just got caught in an unfortunate algorithm when it was uploaded.

How would you like it if your file was deleted?
What is 'quality' - "you never can tell what will sell".

How can an agency decide what a buyer would want? I once saw a particular bird photo from Alamy in a publication, and thought it was pretty bad. I checked on Alamy and there were hundreds of pics of that species, as I thought there would be, and IMO, that one pic was the worst of them all, in just about any way of judging; yet it was the one that buyer chose.

Also re Alamy, but nor specific to it, I remember someone blogging about how they'd had a good value sale of a particular subject, which is common on Alamy. I can't remember the actual subject, but I do remember he said he'd found out that the buyer specifically wanted the subject with a hazel tree in the background. That was an unusual specific, as AFAIK, the two are not normally connected. So if the agency had deleted the image because there were a lot of images of that subject and that file hadn't sold, they'd have lost a good sale, as his was the only file with subject and hazel tree in the keywords.

How can an agency decide what a buyer would want?

I suppose it depends on the strategy of the agency. I think most of the majors are kind of a "one stop shop" where they try to have everything you'd ever want. I don't see any reason why they should delete anything unless it is really outdated. Other agencies might want to have a more curated collection, although they usually do that by just not accepting things in the first place.