Six years and over 2000 uploads later, my monthly earnings at Fotolia have dropped so significantly since May 2011 that I'm now earning the same as when I started in Jan. 2006.  Take a look at my earnings chart!  It's shocking! 

That chart looks familiar 

How many images have you upload in the last 6 month?

I haven't uploaded since a house fire upended my life in late August 2010.  The earnings drop started 8 months later.

sorry to hear about the house fire. Lets hope fotolia is not the norm or future of the other companies. 

Over two years isn't that graph to be expected?

Sorry, Fotolia forgets old files after a few months ... bad strategy (IMHO).

Wow, that really puts things into perspective in a graph like that.  My earnings have been pretty steady lately but so have my uploads.  I have noticed however that new files are selling a lot better than old files.  It used to be that the same 10 files sold over and over again and new files hardly got looked at.  They have certainly changed things a bit in the last 12 months.

It would be very interesting to see 20 peoples earnings vs port size graphs and see if we can see an obvious trend.

I heard things have changed and active contributors get pushed. My sales have gone up since all of yours started to drop.

Quote from: Poncke on November 21, 2012, 20:29
I heard things have changed and active contributors get pushed.

This is true. If you don't contribute regularly, you get severely punished in the search results. In my experience, not contributing enough to clear their threshold costs you about 25-30% in earnings.

Quote from: michaeldb on November 21, 2012, 21:15

Quote from: Poncke on November 21, 2012, 20:29
I heard things have changed and active contributors get pushed.

This is true. If you don't contribute regularly, you get severely punished in the search results. In my experience, not contributing enough to clear their threshold costs you about 25-30% in earnings.

It's cost me 90% of my earnings.  I haven't contributed much to the other micros either, but they are either still growing or remaining steady (with IS being the exception). 

No biggie for me though...I've been wanting to leave Fotolia for a few years now.  They just made it very easy to do.

Quote from: Karimala on November 21, 2012, 21:58

Quote from: michaeldb on November 21, 2012, 21:15

Quote from: Poncke on November 21, 2012, 20:29
I heard things have changed and active contributors get pushed.

This is true. If you don't contribute regularly, you get severely punished in the search results. In my experience, not contributing enough to clear their threshold costs you about 25-30% in earnings.

It's cost me 90% of my earnings.  I haven't contributed much to the other micros either, but they are either still growing or remaining steady (with IS being the exception). 

No biggie for me though...I've been wanting to leave Fotolia for a few years now.  They just made it very easy to do.

On any day 70 - 90% of my sales are from images that have been uploaded in the last 6 months.   My old best sellers rarely sell now.  If I hadn't uploaded for the last 6 months then I would have very few sales.

FT, invest in newcomers and low ranks are given preferance in search. Emeralds and Golds are pushed aside. Their files dont seem to be important anymore. Since they dont need them maybe we should find a better use for them.

I've been adding files regularly to Fotolia for the past 4 years (of course they also reject a lot of my non-studio shots!) and over the past 2 years I went from 924 files online to 2101. My earnings have never been great ($84 last month), but I plotted the earnings per online file and it has stayed sort of constant over that period. Looked like things were going well at the start, but it has been down and flat ever since.



I don't really track which images are selling - I see their emails with each sale but rarely give them much thought.

So, not a great site, but not going backwards (at least over the past 15 months or so)

Steve

i've been 'playing' with stock since 2005 and only upload a few images a month... if...
i noticed that its has been getting MUCH worse at Fotolia than other places...

NO DOWNLOADS IN 2 WEEKS..  (i started getting at least 1 sale every 2-4 days)

now i suspect that its not only me...

Up to now, i have been getting a weekly rank of about 4,000  (sometimes even 2,500 !)
a while back with decent sales, i  dropped to around 5,000.
now here's the thing...
with almost NO DOWNLOADS in the past month or 2... my weekly rank HAS NOT CHANGED !

doesnt this mean that sales are generally crappier for EVERYONE ?...
if it were only me.. my rank this month would have tanked....

something is going wrong over there.. didnt they cut the forums ?  probably too many people bitching about sales.
steve

Great shame. FT used to be a great earner. Now its just pathetic. I have started to delete files already, deleted some 16, today with over 1500 dls between them. I am not supporting their self-destructive strategy anymore. Its one of the agencies I am dropping for 2013. Havent got the time to sit there uploading, this and that.
Plus the fact it does HELP a lot to have some insight behind the scenes so to speak in the entire stock business.

Quote from: Karimala on November 21, 2012, 18:16
Six years and over 2000 uploads later, my monthly earnings at Fotolia have dropped so significantly since May 2011 that I'm now earning the same as when I started in Jan. 2006.  Take a look at my earnings chart!  It's shocking!

At least your misery is shared!  My case is almost identical - 4,000 images later, my earnings have fallen back to the same levels as 2007.  My chart is almost a perfect bell curve, just like yours...     It has made no difference whether I upload furiously or don't upload at all.  Someone at Fotolia flicked a switch back in early 2011, and it's been downhill every since. 

After my earnings almost fell off the chart, I was seeing a very slight recovery for a few months but now it's gone back to being abysmal again.

only agency going up these days is shutter, fot is on the lever. is and dt are going down.
Both massively.

My guess is that we have a huge customers migration going on.

Quote from: robynmac on December 14, 2012, 00:22
...  Someone at Fotolia flicked a switch back in early 2011, and it's been downhill every since.

But you're emerald, aren't you? Isn't that what many other emeralds noticed and assumed that FT did exactly that to avoid paying out so much on sales - they'd rigged the search results? In their case, their reputation's in the toilet, so they haven't much to lose.

It's a bummer - they had seemed like such a bright light when they started. The first agency since the "originals" to make it to top tier status...

FL has really been taking off for me the last couple of months.
I am just about to reach Emerald, missed it by a hair when they moved the goal posts last time.
I hope I don't see a drop when I pass the line!!

I'm Emerald, and I've been really going down the past week or so.  Not just the usual pre-holiday slide that we would normally expect... No, it feels like I'm being targeted (or rather ignored), and perhaps it's all Emeralds.  My 7 day rank (which had been steady) started tumbling, so others must be doing better than me all of a sudden.

Any other Emeralds seeing a crash this week?

Quote from: Microbius on December 14, 2012, 16:17
FL has really been taking off for me the last couple of months.
I am just about to reach Emerald, missed it by a hair when they moved the goal posts last time.
I hope I don't see a drop when I pass the line!!

I hit Emerald not too long ago.  Right away I boosted my prices as we're allowed, and my sales doubled.  Things were fantastic for a few months.  I made it into the top 20 (7 day rank) for a while. 

But soon after this, FT seemed to change how it treats its Emeralds in search results.  And it started lowering prices on images that haven't sold at least 4 times in some recent period.  My sales started gradually sliding. 

This week I feel like I'm falling off a cliff.  My 7 day rank is quickly sinking, after many months of being at the same number, give or take a few.   I'm wondering if this is happening to all Emeralds.

Note:  I have been steady with uploading, sending new stuff just about every day.

I was really looking forward to the bump, now I'm terrified!

I wonder if they are targeting Emeralds who have boosted their prices?