$3,000/week to zero?  Consistently? 

You've got a great looking portfolio....there are some alternatives out there, one in particular, that you may want to give a try....

$3000 a week to $0? Are you sure there isn't some kind of reporting glitch with your account? That just doesn't seem right, even with all their stupidity.

I mean over a period of time, not instantly. Though it feels a bit like it.

Quote from: fotoVoyager on September 29, 2014, 14:39

I can't believe this day has come, but sales are so low for me that I now owe iStock money.

I've gone from $3000 dollars a week to $0 but I'm not allowed to discuss it on the iStock site.

Please excuse me whilst I tear my hair out in public here instead.

This is either the work of a genius at iStock to completely kill off all sales for Exclusives or the worst thought through plan ever. I can't decide which.

So in the heyday you made $3k a week and given a period of time (years) you make peanuts a week. Is that what you are saying? 

Yes.

I realise that was slightly unique because of the time and growth of the industry, but you'd think I'd still make enough now given I work continuously to earn enough to pay off refunds.

Downloads have gone from 150+ a day to just a handful or less.

Presumably those Exclusives still reporting good sales are people photographers where the saturation level has not quite drowned them because of the higher demand.

For f$%%ks sake what are they doing?

With your port of 10k images you should make between $6k-$7k on SS alone, you could add another 30% by adding Dreamstime, 123RF and Fotolia (ignore the rest).

All is not lost, you'll be fine.

Chuck in 1000+ into Stocksy for good measure :-)

For clarity, as it's been intimated to me that I am misrepresenting my dilemma in my current hysteria, I am now on +$7, so I have made more than 0 this week.

Curiously, I never made as much as that and I've never made as little (well, excluding April 2004, but that hardly counts).
You seem to be a victim of the "eggs in one basket" problem, highlighted long ago by those of us who sacrificed the benefits of exclusivity for the sake of not being beholden to a single managment. And if that sounds like schadenfreud, well, I guess it is.

I've had a similar experience although I'm not down to $0 but I'm heading that way fast.

Maybe the programmers accidentally put in a little bit of code (glitch) that says not to display your images upfront.

It is a difficult decision. I hope you find the peace you seek in the mountains.

I just wanted to remind you, that if you are considering stocksy as one of the agencies you are interested in, their deadline for applications ends on October1st. You don�t lose anything by applying, they anyway seem to take quite a while to get back to people.

Otherwise, the next application date is some time next year, perhaps April, like this year.

It would be great if istock could turn things around, but their track record of the last years is just against them. And this time they managed to upset many customers as well.

I don�t know how much you can earn as an indie, but to work with several agencies and not be so dependent on whatever goes on at just istock has given me great peace of mind. The other agencies are all not perfect and they all have their own dramas and issues. But it is unlikely they will all upset you on the same day.

For peace of mind going indie was the best decision for me.

And you can still send exclusive images to Getty if you want. Or any of the other agencies that offer exclusive images.

upload to ss, you will earn 5k$ with 10000 images per mounth

I doubt that most people with 10k images are making 5k/month on SS, or 6-7k, as said by stock-will-eat-itself.  Maybe there are a few, but can anyone back that up?   

I have over 5k images there and do well but hardly ever 3k/month even in better years. 

People are making life decisions.  They need realistic numbers. 

Quote from: Cesar on September 29, 2014, 17:50

upload to ss, you will earn 5k$ with 10000 images per mounth

I doubt that most people with 10k images are making 5k/month on SS, or 6-7k, as said by stock-will-eat-itself.  Maybe there are a few, but can anyone back that up?   

I have over 5k images there and do well but hardly ever 3k/month even in better years. 

People are making life decisions.  They need realistic numbers. 

I don't feel Cesar's numbers are too far off.  They also agree with yours

he said 10K images for $5K or 50 cents/image online
You said 5k images for hardly ever over $3K (or 2.5K) which is also 50 cents/image online.

Perhaps you were arguing that you can't scale up from 5K images to 10K images and expect the same $/image.. but I think you can.

Quote from: leaf on September 30, 2014, 06:25

Quote from: PixelBytes on September 29, 2014, 22:59

Quote from: Cesar on September 29, 2014, 17:50

upload to ss, you will earn 5k$ with 10000 images per mounth

I doubt that most people with 10k images are making 5k/month on SS, or 6-7k, as said by stock-will-eat-itself.  Maybe there are a few, but can anyone back that up?   

I have over 5k images there and do well but hardly ever 3k/month even in better years. 

People are making life decisions.  They need realistic numbers. 

I don't feel Cesar's numbers are too far off.  They also agree with yours

he said 10K images for $5K or 50 cents/image online
You said 5k images for hardly ever over $3K (or 2.5K) which is also 50 cents/image online.

Perhaps you were arguing that you can't scale up from 5K images to 10K images and expect the same $/image.. but I think you can.

The average image on SS sells about .28 times per month (probably slightly less the next time the numbers are updated, collection size is growing faster than sales).  So an average portfolio of 10,000 images would have 2,800 sales in a month.  I think average RPD for people at the highest level is around 75 cents.  That comes to around $2,100 per month.

I'd agree with your maths however Fotovoyager is significantly better than an 'average' contributor. Based on our relative sales at IS I'd expect his portfolio to generate about $3K per month at SS (once the highest level has been attained) and maybe another $2K per month at IS (as an independent), DT and FT together.

Your Shutterstock RPD estimate is way off. Mine (and I'm just average but paid at the highest level) is in the .90 to $1 range

That's higher than anyone else I've seen report on here.  Gostwyck didn't even argue with that RPD.  From SS the average RPD is reported at 70 cents.

Mine is $.84 this month.

If i calculated an all-time RPD it would start in 2004 with subs at 20 cents each, which wouldn't really help anyone uploading today figure out what to expect.

This month (the day's not over yet, but...) my RPD is $1.00077; last month it was 96 cents.

YMMV

i have about triple amount what you wrote.

i think i am average contributor, but i shoot only useful stuff, every photo have some sort of story

Quote from: tickstock on September 30, 2014, 08:53

u were arguing that you can't scale up from 5K images to 10K images and expect the same $/image.. but I think you can.

The average image on SS sells about .28 times per month (probably slightly less the next time the numbers are updated, collection size is growing faster than sales).  So an average portfolio of 10,000 images would have 2,800 sales in a month.  I think average RPD for people at the highest level is around 75 cents.  That comes to around $2,100 per month.

[/quote]
Congrats.  The numbers I posted are for the average based on what SS reports, if you're making 3x that per image then you are doing 3x the average.

If i calculated an all-time RPD it would start in 2004 with subs at 20 cents each, which wouldn't really help anyone uploading today figure out what to expect.

This month (the day's not over yet, but...) my RPD is $1.00077; last month it was 96 cents.

YMMV

I'm talking about average RPD as of last quarter at SS.  According to what SS has released the average RPD is about 70 cents, it will be higher for some and lower for others.  I used 75 cents because that seems to be around what most long time contributors have said, maybe that should be revised up to around 80 or 85 cents so for contributors who have reached the highest level maybe you could add 10% to my monthly average numbers or for 10,000 images $2,380 would be a better guess for the average.  Not many people here are going to give their exact earnings so using the numbers SS provides, which are real, I think people get a better idea of what is reasonable to expect.

RPI is probably more important than RPD if you think about dropping exclusivity, the RPI for a given portfolio is pretty hard to forecast!

Yep hard to forecast for an individual but the average across all files and contributors is .28 dls/image at 70 cents RPD or a little less than 20 cents per file per month.

Quote from: PixelBytes on September 29, 2014, 22:59

Quote from: Cesar on September 29, 2014, 17:50

upload to ss, you will earn 5k$ with 10000 images per mounth

I doubt that most people with 10k images are making 5k/month on SS, or 6-7k, as said by stock-will-eat-itself.  Maybe there are a few, but can anyone back that up?   

I have over 5k images there and do well but hardly ever 3k/month even in better years. 

People are making life decisions.  They need realistic numbers. 

I don't feel Cesar's numbers are too far off.  They also agree with yours

he said 10K images for $5K or 50 cents/image online
You said 5k images for hardly ever over $3K (or 2.5K) which is also 50 cents/image online.

Perhaps you were arguing that you can't scale up from 5K images to 10K images and expect the same $/image.. but I think you can.

No, I am saying I DON'T make that or anywhere near that, bur RARELY  in much better years.  Threr was a short time couple years ago when i had ELs almost every day for couple of months.  That is the only way a photog is gonna see numbers like that.  Those numbers are not reachable today even with good ports except maybe very rarely.  Gostwyck's estimate of $3k per mo. For 10k  good images sounds closer to the mark.

Of course I am speaking as a photog, not video or illustration. 

The whole RPI/RPD discussion is fine and all, but in the context of this discussion, it's kind of pointless, no? The OP is making almost nothing as an iStock exclusive. It doesn't matter what the average RPD at SS is, it's still better than nothing.

What happened to Lobo? I thought he was going to grace us with his presence in this discussion..?

If he's making nothing at iS he's bound to earn more at SS, and probably in the multiples of thousands of $, so what's there to lose by dropping the crown?

I'm also an iStock exclusive. The sales keep disappearing. I'd like to hear more about what other people's RPI is at Shutterstock. I'm about 50% down on revenue from my high a few years ago. So not quite as bad as fotoVoyager. Though it has meant that I've had to cut back on production costs quite drastically, otherwise I'd be making zero profit. It does help that some of my stuff is mirrored over to Gettyimages, so the income from there is a bit of a shock absorbent from the fall in iStock sales. 

Obviously iStock reads this forum. So dear iStock, I'd like you to either mirror more exclusive content to both Gettyimages and Thinkstock. I don't care who buys my images at this point, or what they pay for it. I just want the decline in overall income to stop.

There is no easy answer for exclusives looking for a life raft.

But as a rule of thumb I'd say if your earnings dip to 50c per image per month, you'd be better off as an indy. That's with a commercial portfolio thats had some investment poured into it.

Yep __ I'd say you're assessment is spot-on for most better-than-average contributors.

I'm around there, currently.  I had hoped for better.

I'm around there, currently.  I had hoped for better.

*results not typical. 

All these RPI comparisons are completely useless for the OP.
I assume an IS-exclusive dropping exclusivity would want to upload their portfolio in a reasonably short period of time. It would make sense. And this is the problem. Their files would compete with one another. The download numbers would be divided by all the images of one subject and as a result none of the images would take off. Most of the images would be soon burried in the endless gazillions of SS images.

The trick at SS is getting to the first page, preferably to the top of the first page. Yes, it's true for most agencies, but not to the same extent as at SS.

It's much easier to achieve good results at SS when you slowly feed them and don't compete with your own images. See if one image of a subject takes off. If yes, then don't compete with it, let it accumulate download numbers and establish itself high in the search results.

If you upload hundreds or thousands images in a short period of time that is one great way to fail at SS.

IMHO the last good moment to join SS was around 2011 or 2012.
My RPI used to be around $1, now it is lower.

It used to be fairly easy to reach the first page, now it's no longer the case with over 300.000 images added every week.
Do the OP a favor and don't compare established ports with portfolios of newcomers to SS, no matter how good they are.

The whole RPI/RPD discussion is fine and all, but in the context of this discussion, it's kind of pointless, no? The OP is making almost nothing as an iStock exclusive. It doesn't matter what the average RPD at SS is, it's still better than nothing.

actually it's the RPD being pointless if you don't make any donwloads ...

the RPI is just a generic catch-all performance indicator.

in this case i think he's getting a raw deal because there's an incredible oversupply of travel images now.
either that or IS is particularly bad for Travel.

the only way to know is to upload in other agencies and see the difference.

The answer to all of these is What are the photos? not how many, not RPD and not RPI.

exactly.

i never see discussions about specific categories of images, like lifestyle, business, travel.

travel is just not selling much compared to business or conceptual.
how much less ? we don't know ... it could be even 10 times less, especially for travel images of places and locations that are not much in demand and there's plenty of them.

1000 pics of London will probably outsell 10000 pics of Papua New Guinea and by a long shot !

Yeah, but in reality SS has 152,000 pictures of London and fewer than 2,000 (a lot fewer once all the postage stamps and computer-generated flags are discounted) of Papua New Guinea.  So if 200 pictures of London sell for every one of PNG then the return per file will be similar. Some very small and very popular places (e.g. Venice and Oia on Santorini) as so swamped with near identical images of iconic scenes that it is purely pot-luck (or search-placement luck) whether you will ever be able to sell anything from there.

and that's just for SS.
on Alamy there are 15000 photos of Papua, 1.3 millions for London, and 3.5 millions for UK (that's 5% of their whole archive).

i've no magic recipe for the oversaturation in Travel.

ultimately buyers will probably stick with new uploads or a mix of new and old, nobody is going to browse more than 10 pages with 50 thumbnails each, soon the search placement will become the biggest factor even for "long tail" search keywords.

I wish I had a clue about how bad my IS sales are now. My stats page stopped updating a while ago, just times out. Bunch of clowns.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with time-out troubles. It's getting so bad that it can take more than a day for me to get through to the payment page when I need to (not too often, unfortunately). Of course, all the failed attempts will just increase the congestion on their servers.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on October 01, 2014, 09:08

I'm around there, currently.  I had hoped for better.

*results not typical.

Right. At 31 cents rpi I have my work cut out for me.  This is a significant indicator of how OD's SOD and EL help boost RPI. I don't get a lot of these.

I think the point is that slow feeding may result in a steady appearance of your files at the top of the search before they disappear as they age. As a result, people may see one of your files and then be encouraged to look at others in your portfolio. If everything arrives in a single block they will all move down the search together and disappear together, so you lose the benefit of having at least something in an early search page.

Still strikes me as "folklore". Without any kind of real guidelines, maybe it makes sense to upload a few thousand files over say a few months as  a compromise or safeguard.

Quote from: Realist on October 05, 2014, 15:03

All these RPI comparisons are completely useless for the OP.
I assume an IS-exclusive dropping exclusivity would want to upload their portfolio in a reasonably short period of time. It would make sense. And this is the problem. Their files would compete with one another. The download numbers would be divided by all the images of one subject and as a result none of the images would take off. Most of the images would be soon burried in the endless gazillions of SS images.

The trick at SS is getting to the first page, preferably to the top of the first page. Yes, it's true for most agencies, but not to the same extent as at SS.

It's much easier to achieve good results at SS when you slowly feed them and don't compete with your own images. See if one image of a subject takes off. If yes, then don't compete with it, let it accumulate download numbers and establish itself high in the search results.

If you upload hundreds or thousands images in a short period of time that is one great way to fail at SS.

IMHO the last good moment to join SS was around 2011 or 2012.
My RPI used to be around $1, now it is lower.

It used to be fairly easy to reach the first page, now it's no longer the case with over 300.000 images added every week.
Do the OP a favor and don't compare established ports with portfolios of newcomers to SS, no matter how good they are.

Help me understand this (I am not trying to be facetious, I am seriously trying to understand). I have heard about the recommendations to "slowly feed them" so your files do not "compete with one another".
But, aren't your files competing with all the "300,000 images added every week" (not to mention the entire SS portfolio) anyway?
Isn't that a far more dominating factor than the relative handful of images if one was to upload their entire portfolio within a few weeks?

The only way it would seem to make sense to slowly upload is if SS was playing games within a given contributors portfolio based on its size and upload rate.

What am I missing?

Look, everyone here is just guessing. If you upload at once, your portfolio will be pushed down. The best pictures will survive (the best pictures will survive in any scenario). If you upload slowly, you lose money buy keeping your pictures on hard disc and not selling them. So, no perfect solution here.

I considered a working vacation, someplace different that could fill a hole and make money. Including writing much of it off as business. Then I looked:

Easter Island Stock Photos, Illustrations, and Vector Art (2,482) - IS 1,844 - Alamy 8,913.

Probably double what the demand is and they are very well done, creative, nice images. What would set mine apart?

Why spend thousands of dollars and ten days, for what?

I might as well take weekends locally and get things that aren't over covered.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on October 09, 2014, 06:47

Quote from: Hobostocker on October 09, 2014, 05:33

and that's just for SS.
on Alamy there are 15000 photos of Papua, 1.3 millions for London, and 3.5 millions for UK

So the ratio of roughly 200 London pics for one Papua pic holds on both Alamy and SS.  I've always felt that "low commercial value" is a bit of a red-herring, because people don't shoot so much of it, so it benefits by having less competition. There are some LCV niches with so little stuff in them that a buyer can easily browse everything there - and if you have the best shot it will pick up most of the sales for that subject.

sure, but Papua is too expensive, you won't recoup the production costs and you'll probably catch malaria.

there must be little demand for it and yes, low commercial value.