same here but a lot of them seem to be GI Premium Access downloads. whatever that may be, i'm not expecting much from it. probably a few cents each

I opted out but I wanna make an informed decision.

those who opted in, how did it affect your earning on SS? If you can share bits about your portfolio size, type of images you have (lifestyle, travel, editorial), average earning before signign up for the unlimited plan, your earning now, it'll be helpful.

perpetual use and all that crap. 0.16 gross and 0.06 net. Is this the standard they're offering now?
And they are telling us to bear their legal fee.

Exactly like Brasilnut I had two images of newsstand that included German magazines among others.

Except my images never sold and they have been promptly deleted years ago at the first warning.

It's ridiculous that I have to pay this fine when I benefited nothing at all myself.

Are we gonna let this happen really?

I've been having an issue related to payouts. I tried to contact them using the form in Support Center & Contact Us seciton but I encounter an error (a generic message just saying there was an error) every time I hit "Submit".

It's been like this for the past two months and I missed receiving my payout two months in a row.

Is there any other way to contact them? Perhaps an email address to which I can directly write?

Just allow withdrawal into Wise accounts. I don't even mind if AS takes 2% off of it. That would be still better than the current options. Absurd situation.

I'm a little confused over this so need clarification.
With Adobe Firefly officially released now,  is it now allowed to use Generative Fill in Photoshop for commercial use? Is it okay to upload retouched photos using Generative Fill to Adobe Stock and other agencies (unless they specifically forbid it like iStock)?

by the way didn't they raise the sub download from 0.35 to 0.38 briefly? what was that about?
I kind of like how they adjust the royalty for credit download according to the popularity of images. I wish other agencies consider something like that too

Rejected: Translation required

Is anyone getting more and more rejections because of this recently?

Used to have a few rejections over this in the past but now it seems that they're immediately rejecting anything that includes non-English sounding words in the description. For example, photos of mountains and beaches with no text get rejected if I include their names in the description, since they don't sound like familiar English words.

Had the same issue and had to re-submit with Month Day Year. They probably implemented some AI crap to auto-reject everything that doesn't follow the Month Day Year format?

All they've done for the past few years is to make everything more and more insufferable for contributors. This month's looking to be the worst in years for me with nothing but 10c downloads.

Honestly, if Adobe introduced an exclusive scheme, I'd go all in without hesitation at this point.

not directly addressing your concern but I tend to oversaturate my travel photos (including urban architecture) in general as buyers of travel photos seem to prefer that more, as opposed to de-saturated images that have been popular among designer folks.

Moreover, over-the-top sunset/sunrise sky replacements seem to make them even more popular, despite I feel they look, well, over-the-top and really kistch...

Quote from: Annie on April 08, 2023, 23:03
I used to be full-time, but not anymore. I used to make around $30,000+ per annum from stock photography & video. Now that's fallen to a little over $20K per annum and, based on the first 3 months of this year, possibly falling. My biggest losses have been caused by video subscriptions, and lately by SS's photo rates and reduction in DLs. AS is doing OK photo-wise, and with a couple of exceptions, the mid-tier agencies are holding their own. For the past year or two, I have been making up for losses in other related areas (PODs, Direct Selling, Designer Resources). Video has become almost worthless compared to the amount of work that goes into production.  With the exception of mainly AS, I have largely stop uploading to stock agencies. I live in Australia.

$20k (USD?) is still impressive though I can imagine it's not possible to live on that in Australia. That'll be more than enough for me to go full-time in South East Asia. Did you build up your portfolio all by yourself?

Quote from: Brasilnut on April 09, 2023, 11:03
My earnings reports dating back to February 2019 can be found here:

https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/category/earnings-reports/

In summary, 2019 was my best year and now I'm earning about half of what I did then, on average, despite having many more images/clips on sale. It's been tough going but always the optimistic that at least my investments in drone aerials and book cover will start paying off.

I've been following your blog and now I'm considering to get myself a drone too (of course not only for microstock). I hope I can get something out of it too.

I was making like $200/month in 2019 and my monthly sales have been growing steadily. Then COVID happened, SS changed the royalty structure, Alamy not performing as good as used to be. So I'm still averaging about $200/month despite my port being bigger now.

Obviously I don't do this full-time and I mostly upload stuff from my travels.

Does anyone here do stock photography full-time? Which country do you live in?

I had about 50 downloads so far this month and my earning is barely above $5. all sub and 10 cents sales barring a few (12 cents, wow). I used to be at $0.33/download so this would've been $15 at least. this is just so demotivating

Just curious about this. Has anyone ever made a >$1000 sale?

I had two $150 (net) sales last year and they're the biggest I made so far. But this year nothing was over $100.
Started in 2017

Forgot to opt out initially. I tried to switch them back to Premium manually but nothing is happening.
Did anyone successfully switch back to Premium?
Could we do a class action against this exploitive company really?