Everyone here is complaining about the low sales, and I'm in the same boat.  My sales are dismal so far this year when compared to previous years.  In fact, so far this month, I only have three sales on Pond5.

It's easy to put the blame on the agencies, but is that really the case?  If Pond5 or Shutterstock dropped the ball and lost customers, where did the buyers go?  If that were the case, other agencies would have picked up the slack.  But looking at my stats, I don't think that's the case.

While my Adobe seems to be going strong, it's improved performance doesn't make up the loss from other agencies.  And I don't see a dramatic trend upward at other agencies where I post clips.

Could it just be that overall, customer habits have changed?   Are they buying less, or just buying from somewhere where I'm not represented?

BlackBox is arguably the largest contributor at many mainstream agencies.  I'd like to know what their trend is.  That might put things in a better perspective.

I just had a camera-created image rejected due to "Missing Generative AI Flag".  The exact reason was:

During our review, we found that it is likely to be generated by AI and not labelled as such. We can't accept your image into our collection without the label declaring it is a generative AI image.

But the thing is, this image was NOT AI-generated.  It was created in-camera.

I don't want my account suspended due to such a misunderstanding, so I've decided to delete all pending photos and won't be submitting new images or illustrations until Adobe Stock handles such issues better.  The few shekels I get from a photo license isn't worth me losing my account.

This is a serious problem with Adobe Stock.  I think rather than the reviewer outright rejecting a questionable image, they need to push it back to "pending" with a checkbox for us to confirm this was NOT AI-generated.  Or, maybe ask for a property release to prove the image was camera-created.

Thoughts on how Adobe can better handle such an issue?