Quote from: Minsc on January 28, 2019, 15:37

The reality is that climate change is a natural phenomenon. The climate of the planet has been changing for billions of years and it will continue to change in the next million years.

There is no denying that climate change is real, but at the same time, there isn't much that we can do about it. We can try to cut back on emissions and pollution, but it needs to be done around the world and not just be used as a political tool in the United States.

This is certainly true, and there have been many instances of dramatic natural climate change during recorded history.  For example, the "year without a summer" in the northern hemisphere in 1816 resulted from a volcanic eruption that caused extensive famines due to crop failures.  The explosion of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883 depressed temperatures in the northern hemisphere by over 1 C in some areas and it took almost five years to get back to normal.  The "little ice age" in Europe lasted around 500 years - those paintings of people skating on the canals in the Netherlands from the 1600s and 1700s were because they really could do it then.  There are lots of other examples and all completely natural.  And of course we seem to be in an interglacial period anyway.  However, the changes during the past 30-50 years are more extensive and due almost entirely to people.  It will be impossible to provide an exact estimate of how much is due to people with a backdrop of natural changes but we can be confident that much of what is occurring now is preventable.

Climate change is a real phenomenon not just a political tool, but I agree that the whole world needs to do something, not just the US.  We should be leading on this, not retreating.

And yet, people always used it as a political tool. Former Governor Jerry Brown immediately blamed Global Warming for the wildfires when he was the one responsible for vetoing the fire prevention bill in 2016 that would have forced PG&E to cut trees along their power lines. It was classic deflection to shift the blame from himself to Trump, and it worked because almost everyone in California hates Trump. He should have been the one held responsible for letting PG&E get off easy and then signed a bill to bailout PG&E from lawsuits at the expense of tax payers before his departure. That's corruption at its finest.

When it's immeasurable on how much humans affect climate change, that makes it a fairly abstract concept. We have more cars than ever, more humans than ever. We can all do our part by driving hybrids or electric, but we can't control what other countries do. By comparison, the U.S. use refined petrol while many parts of the world use low quality petrol that greatly contributes to the pollution of this planet. The human population will continue to grow and there is little we can do. It seems like over-population of the planet is inevitable and we end up with some sci-fi scenario we've seen in so many movies.

I don't believe we are retreating. We pulled out of the Paris Agreement because we were asked to give the world $100 billion dollars so they can do whatever they want with that money. And some of that money was going to China and India, who does doing little to curtail their pollution. Everyone is blaming the U.S. because we won't give them free money, but giant economies who claim "third world country" status like China does little to contribute. We can do our part to curtail emissions, but if the the rest of the world want the U.S. to lead, it must be a situation where we're not giving $100 billion dollars away.

What to do about it?  The rational world already decided on a way forward - the Paris accords, signed by almost 200 countries.  Those are not mandatory and are far from perfect but at least are a start.  To make a real effort we should eliminate coal and other fossil fuel sources as much as possible, plant trees, and promote birth control to reduce the size of the human population and slow its growth rate.  I'm not sure what else - I'm sure the experts have many other ideas for what can be done.  Wind and solar power can make a great contribution - come out to the midwest some time and you will see all the farmers making tons of money having wind turbines on their land.  They should provide tax incentives for the development of solar roof tiles and installation of solar panels on every rooftop.

The Paris Agreement was useless. They only reason why countries signed up was to get free money from the U.S. It treated countries like China and India (The biggest polluters) as "third world countries" and they were basically free to pollute for the next 20 years and when the time comes, they were not obligated to do anything. It did absolutely nothing to stop anyone from polluting. That only way to make things work is to make sure the biggest polluters get reigned in instead of given them a free pass. The biggest issues affecting the world are in China and India, including pollution, birthrates and heavy reliance on coal.

And we saw what happened when France decided to raise the fuel tax...people riot in Paris. There needs to be balance instead of forcing something that doesn't work. There are more trees now than we had 35 years ago, than 100 years ago. As our usage of paper go down and it will continue to go down as our reliance on digital continue to grow, the tree population will just be fine.

This is one thing that SS is dropping the ball on. I've flagged so many infringers over the years and it's starting to make me numb. People were straight up stealing or tracing my work. It unbelievable how many people out there think it's okay to do this kind of thing. And they all come from the same few countries.

SS need to implement some kind of machine learning into their approval process to automatically flag similars before they get approved. They should ban any contributor who attempts to upload infringing work so that we don't have to deal with this nonsense. For a company with so much money, they have the resources to do this.

Try to think like a buyer. Would you buy your own work?

There are too many duplicates in your portfolio. It confuses me, it confuses the buyer and everyone looking at your portfolio. Nobody look at sets, they just care about what they're looking for and what's in your portfolio. When I go into your portfolio, the presentation is overwhelming and I just want to leave.

Understand the market instead of doubling down on your niches. What's the point of 1127 images of the Lofoten Islands? Does anyone care? Simple 3D illustrations (unless they're amazing) are so 2000's. It stopped being trendy about 5 years ago and people have moved on.

You're basically fighting against yourself and competing against yourself. Focus on quality instead of quantity. You have over 100,000 images and very few of them stand out.

Probably due to competition from other websites and other contributors.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on November 28, 2018, 07:38

Quote from: Minsc on November 27, 2018, 13:48

New content does sell. Of course, not all new content are created equal, so most new content won't sell. The good quality content with good keywording will find its way to the top. It could take weeks or it could take months, but it will find its way.

Don't expect things to go back to the "good old days". The industry was in infancy back then. Now it's a mature adult. It's much harder to please and it demands more from all contributors.

New content doesn't sell like it used to, "upload today, sell tomorrow" because there's much more competition, much more established old content, yet new content can sell, like old content. I think some people are looking at old content and past sales?

Maybe we should be looking at new content current sales, vs old content current sales. I know that some of my older files that used to sell more often, don't anymore. I also have a few new files that have moved from, new upload, into passing old files that are top 20 in earnings. That's because some of the old are slowing down, while some of the new are gaining.

But what I'm trying to say is, current sales of old vs current sales of new, instead of looking at past history as a comparison, because the good old days are absolutely gone, done, over and never coming back. History in this business might not be an indication of the future, just a reflection of the past. 

good content don't sell because any mental healthy person won't even bother to look for a good file in the mess of new images, so they straight go to popular....look fotolia most sold images of week..always the same stuff....christmas sells mostly 100 photos establish who are in page 1. with this scheme is impossible to increase sales constantly working hard.  impossible. in ss i always selle 90% of files older than 2 years.it looks like having a small fixed income , is not a case i will end with the same earning of last year and i mean same plus minus 50 dollar, and same number of download, despite much more content added. i even doubt that uploading 50k images would be any difference. even if they were good quality.

till they abolish popular and add a curated or serious best reference files, nothing will change, and i say this knowing that i will lose the constant flow of my popular images

I don't see the problem with the Popular category. It's what people buys and it's what relevant. Why should new files that are unproven get precedence over files that sells well?

I was on a website that decided to sort their search by rotating images instead of by quality/popularity. The result was a complete failure. All the long time contributors income decreased dramatically and their search result showed low quality images. The website traffic dropped by half in a year because of low quality images in the search.

The communist approach doesn't work in real life or search engines. If a contributor want to rise above the noise, they must create good content and meticulously keyword heck out of it. Automatic keywording tools don't work, neither does keyword suggestions. If you're not putting the same effort into keywording like you do your work, your work will get lost in the flood of new images.

Can you post his Adobe Stock portfolio?

It took them between 1-2 weeks the last time I reported an infringer. That was about a month ago. Because of the Thanksgiving weekend, you may be looking at 2 weeks.

And you gotta love how lazy they are. Copy the exact same keywords and then have the image show up in the similars section. Makes it easy for them to get caught.

Whether people like it or not, the market is starting to consolidate. It's similar to social networks and search engines of yesteryear trying to compete with each other.

Everyone wants a piece of the pie until 2-3 giants take over the industry. And I believe the 2 giants of the microstock industry will be Shutterstock and Adobe Stock.

Adobe Stock because of its integration with its software and cloud products. Shutterstock because of their resources and business reach. I just don't see iStock or 123RF being able to challenge them in the next 10 years.

There's more competition among contributors than ever on SS and AS and it's not going to get any easier. Some contributors will do well, but most won't. There is no choice but to step up and compete against the best contributors of Microstock if you want success in this industry.

Your keywording is terrible. That's why.

If you're using Adobe's automatic keywording, you're destine to make nothing at Adobe Stock.

Search result fluctuations have been having for months. There is no doubt that SS is experimenting with different search algorithms during the day. Sometimes, it's favorable, sometimes it's not, but if you look at the results, popular images (with a lot of downloads) don't go anywhere and stay put in the result, while less popular images get swapped out every now and then.

I've been looking at the search results for a while now. I believe they reserve the majority of the 1st page for popular images, while reserving a smaller portion of results that allow them to swap images on a weekly basis. This is how they're trying to keep the first page fresh, even if some of the image swaps are of low quality.

There's no harm in changing the password to something stronger. I've had the same passwords for a number of years now and I certainly don't want anyone accessing my account, whether the hack is true or not.

Show us your portfolio on other platforms. I think we may get a better idea of why you've been suspended.