I have stopped uploading to Wirestock. I will starve to death waiting for them to pay me for quite a few images of mine that have been sold by them.


So what's the deal with them?  Are they holding all our money to draw interest for themselves?  I hate to believe they are a bunch of crooks.


Am I the only one among the photographers who upload to them on this site have this problem too or is it just me?  Thanks.

Except for a couple of small exceptions, the prints and the direct sales, Wirestock sells nothing. The agencies they distribute to sell the licenses, so it has nothing to do with Wirestock "selling" anything. Another way to put that, is if you had uploaded the same images yourself, they would probably have the same number of downloads.

You will be able to withdraw your earnings once the total balance exceeds $30. Have you sold enough licenses total $30 combined yet? Then they should send you money to your Paypal account.

Keep in mind, DT is the worst example, you need to make $100 before you can get your money. But others have lower levels, before they pay you. 123RF - Once your account exceeds $50, you are eligible to get paid. Adobe is $25. But back to your question, you need to have accumulated $30 from all the site combined, any sites, instant sales or anything, before you get paid. That's pretty low and gets you the money faster than waiting to make much more on some places?

I upload to AS, SS myself because why give away 15%? I can make a payout almost every month. Which used to be, every month.

DT or Alamy it depends on the image. But the rest all go through Wirestock. I'd have to upload for years to get anything back from DT, P5 or 123RF, and I don't have accounts at those, I don't have enough new images and I don't want to spend all that time, starting now, for $5 a month?

So it depends. But if you earned $30, they should be paying you. Did you do that?

Wirestock makes payments in the first week of every month for all accounts exceeding the minimum payout date as of the last day of previous month. My payments have arrived on the 1st or 2nd when I was due money.

Their support is less than fast, people have told me 5 days or more to answer. Since they had the site upgrade, I get strange half-assed page views, uploads don't go through right on their site and sftp I can't even connect. When they were starting, it seemed like everything worked and support was pretty quick. Here we go again? Sites start friendly and as they grow, become more tangled and less responsive.

For a place that charges 15% for some pretty vague keywords, for people who don't include them like I do, I'd think they would pay attention to contributors a little better?

Wirestock = 653,409 stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free... on Shutterstock. Since these images are reviewed before WS sends them to SS, there's less likely to be junk, similar and spammed images. 15% of 653,409 vetted images? That should pay for some better contributor support.

If you earned $30 and didn't get paid on the 1st, you should write them.  [email protected]

Good Luck

Got my first payment last week... processed on the 2nd, received in my Paypal on the 2nd.

So far, I have been pretty happy with them , especially when it concerns SS. Being active in nature photography I do not expect high returns as my (macro/closeup) images are quite specific targetting a specific audience... but still they sell as much images as I do , however - and certainly now with the resetting of the levels - the return price per image is much higher then the usual 10c I tend to get for my shots. I did however choose to add my own keywords to the images (so not using easy submission anymore).
Payments have been happening correctly up til now and response times by support desk are good . Have to say that when submitting images through easy submission that took some time before the images were processed , but now with the own keywords it is quite fast.

Quote from: Roscoe on February 06, 2022, 07:42

I don't go full in on Wirestock, and try to use them as wise as possible: earning aggregator for agencies and content which doesn't deserve much of my time. My better content still goes to my personal accounts,

That's what I do too. Works out best as a pick and choose sites for distribution. My own account or easy upload using Wirestock.

Here's who is behind it.

Interview with the founder  https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2021/03/22/interview-with-mikayel-khachatryan-co-founder-and-cto-at-wirestock/

The bugs and the recent issues are disappointing, and I can understand how some people might lose confidence. But these people do seem dedicated and honest.

Yeah, read that too.

The bugs and issues are indeed disappointing, and they should fix that fast now. I have little doubt that their intentions are dedicated and honest, but a solid front-end and reliable sales reporting are key for running a successful business as theirs. They probably lost potential sales and new contributors due to upload issues, people giving up on uploading, and already uploaded content being in backlog for weeks.

Wirestock is around for how long now? Roughly two years? It still looks and feels very much as a start-up in beta-mode to me. If they want to be taken more seriously they have to up their game in terms of communication and reliability. Sure, technical issues as hosting problems can occur. Temporarily being short on staff due to whatever reason is also possible, definitely during a pandemic. But if that happens, you communicate very clear to your stakeholders what's going on, and what the outlook is.

What I find less acceptable is their so-called "major upgrade". Also going on for quite some time now, but I don't see much of an upgrade happening there, and more important: you don't experiment and implement untested changes with your customer/contributor front-end production system!

On the other hand, investors still believe in them, and they've set quite some goals too:

The company has helped creators generate over $1 million in sales in 2021 alone and is projected to grow tenfold in 2022. 

 
Tenfold!

Read more: https://en.armradio.am/2022/02/05/wirestock-raises-2-3m-to-help-visual-content-creators-earn-passive-income/ and here: https://www.2048.vc/blog/our-investment-in-wirestock

But at a certain point those investors also gonna want to see returns and drink cocktails on the Bahama's with it.
My prediction? Their investors will push them to up their game, act more professionally, increase turnover and profits. 
That's probably the point where Wirestock will have some "exciting news" for their contributors.
You and I both know what that means ;-)

I opened an account and closed it when I realized I couldn't delete any of my images by myself. 
The keywording job is poor, I don't know which kind of visibility they can achieve on Alamy

Since 6 month or on I concentrate on POD sites. Then I came back to wirestock and uploaded 180 images at once as easy submission. Only 20 got accepted! I never had that bad result! Well, then I found out about all these issues mentioned above. Now I am waiting until everything goes again like before.
I am not sure, if I would upload any easy submission again or not. Because in the past already it was like this: With keywords 90%+ accepted, easy submission mabe 60%, So the 40% I even have to keywording myself, upload again and 90%+ of them got accepted.
I can understand that the are lazy to keyword stuff they might think does not sell well, but that is and cannot be their mission! There should be not that big difference between keyworded stuff and easy submitted stuff.

I can understand that the are lazy to keyword stuff they might think does not sell well, but that is and cannot be their mission! There should be not that big difference between keyworded stuff and easy submitted stuff.

There is a difference between keyworded images and easy submissions, and it's also justified. Wirestock is a private company who's mission is not to keyword crapstock with very little sales potential and upload that to agencies. Their mission is to make money for themselves. Period. So they have the right to reject images with no commercial value and avoid wasting time on them. It's a different story for pre-keyworded content that gets uploaded. They still have the right to reject it (and actually, every now and then they do!) but as it is just a matter of forwarding it to agencies, they can be less strict on that content. So there is a difference, and it's fully justified if you ask me.

Quote from: cascoly on March 13, 2022, 12:40

 
-------------------
However, since around Dec 2021, I now get rejects for images than are <1MB - even though they are >6mp

They claim this is because it's an agency requirement, even tho i've sent them the SS, AS & other details which have no such requirement

I've had those rejections also and they make no sense, because the images meet the "image size" requirements. Do I really care? Fixed one all I did to change that for one, as a simple test, was opened and saved at 100% or 12, which made the file larger. Nothing change for the image.

  unfortunately, mine are already at max 12 - eg glaciers & blue skies
 

Actually I've seen a change and more rejections, which look more and more like SS rejections for stupid AI reasons. Focus? Downsize and they pass.

Two like this and I don't really feel hurt: Limited Commercial Value: Low likelihood of generating sales based on our downloads and profitability data. They can take or leave what they want.
...

the ones that annoy me are LCV - they claim that their REVIEWERS are experts - instead they should let the agencies decide (where LCV varies - havent had an LCV on SS for a long time)

the other new reject is "Over Stylized Image: Image is overly stylized, altered, or tinted. Refrain from over-editing " - some justified, but many 'standard' HDR; again accepted by the major agencies. one of their excuses is they're selecting for lowest common denominator agency, rather the majors

Quote from: Uncle Pete on March 14, 2022, 10:18

Quote from: cascoly on March 13, 2022, 12:40

 
-------------------
However, since around Dec 2021, I now get rejects for images than are <1MB - even though they are >6mp

They claim this is because it's an agency requirement, even tho i've sent them the SS, AS & other details which have no such requirement

I've had those rejections also and they make no sense, because the images meet the "image size" requirements. Do I really care? Fixed one all I did to change that for one, as a simple test, was opened and saved at 100% or 12, which made the file larger. Nothing change for the image.

  unfortunately, mine are already at max 12 - eg glaciers & blue skies
 

Quote from: Roscoe on March 14, 2022, 02:56

Actually I've seen a change and more rejections, which look more and more like SS rejections for stupid AI reasons. Focus? Downsize and they pass.

Two like this and I don't really feel hurt: Limited Commercial Value: Low likelihood of generating sales based on our downloads and profitability data. They can take or leave what they want.
...

the ones that annoy me are LCV - they claim that their REVIEWERS are experts - instead they should let the agencies decide (where LCV varies - havent had an LCV on SS for a long time)

the other new reject is "Over Stylized Image: Image is overly stylized, altered, or tinted. Refrain from over-editing " - some justified, but many 'standard' HDR; again accepted by the major agencies. one of their excuses is they're selecting for lowest common denominator agency, rather the majors

Just to continue with the under 1K size for client demands, but no one knows who that might be. I got this one today for three images, where all three have been accepted everywhere that I submitted. (that everywhere is small, AS, SS, DT and IS) But I know we've seen this over the years, Agency X rejects my images but Agency Y takes them all. 

However, since Wirestock is supposed to be distributing our images to the same agencies, the situation is somewhat different? LCV? Over Stylized?  And,

Poor aesthetic quality: Image aesthetics don't meet our requirements and the image cannot be accepted.

Well they sounded good to start with, and slowly broke everything including uploads and reviews, and now have repaired most of that and decided that they are just too "special" to accept common images like a plate of food, isolated on white? And I waste time so they can feed, P5, 123 and DP? I'm not hurt or offended, I just think the mind of Wirestock has been lost.

AI reviews for tilted horizon was the start, then they somehow got the SS detection for grain and focus and now we get subjective LCV and Poor Aesthetic Quality. I've never had a PAQ rejection anywhere before.

worse th an the tilted horizon were rejections because there were normal non-verticals (eg many buildings, lines of columns, etc)

but a glimmer of hope(?) they finally admitted that the majors dont require a 1 MB+ image and that they may re-consider

That's good news. They started out with a good viewpoint and then got tighter and odd. I hope that the guy in charge sees that they don't need to be so picky. I know there's always the two sides, let the buyer decide or that's terrible crap, why do they accept it? But still, somewhere in the middle is a good position.

I'm not terribly concerned because I don't really push much through them and what I do, is to the minor agencies. I really hate it, when I read for other places, "these are accepted everywhere else... But?" In the case of Wirestock that has started to be true. Why should WS have higher, and stranger, standards than SS, AS, IS, DT and Alamy. Why did they decide to do that?

But give me a break? Poor aesthetic quality: Image aesthetics don't meet our requirements and the image cannot be accepted.

I think that's the new version of LCV?