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Messages - offisapup
101
« on: October 24, 2020, 14:25 »
Yes, no sales. I also had two entire batches rejected for "Poor composition". Never ever happened before. So either they've changed something or my skills have gone downhill.
102
« on: October 06, 2020, 16:58 »
Still wondering about the Instant Sales, because a friend told me, those are one time buys from Freepix! Yeah I like the $3.40 but I don't like them becoming free. Talk about competing with myself? On the positive, most of those are images that haven't make $3 in ten years, on the other sites.
Very conflicting that I should be happy to get the money and then have my images offered for free on a site like Freepix, that's killing Microstock.
I was wondering about the "Instant Pay" too because I had a few of those (all 3.4$). If they are freepik sales then that's a clear breach of contract and trust in my opinion because I did not give them permission to sell images to freepik where anyone can download and use it for free. Good thing I have only 50 odd images there. It's not about the money the images made but contributors need to know where the images are being sold. Without transparency, it's impossible for me to trust wirestock. So never uploading my images there again if these are proven to be freepik sales.
103
« on: September 16, 2020, 18:30 »
If I came to a forum about making money selling worms (this is much longer but just to make it simple... worm farming) and most of the posts talked about the downside of the market, how profits were dropping, how Worm Farmers were under paid and the product was over supplied, and the expense of producing, plus the competition was excessive. I wouldn't go into Worm Farming!
Actually, if you spend a couple of months building a website/blog about Worm Farming, doing some basic research, strategically putting the information in, doing your SEO right, you'll be making more money after 6 months than you would in a couple of years of photography on microstock.
104
« on: August 25, 2020, 07:19 »
Yes, zero sales in August. Even though AS has never been big agency for me, I used to see at least a few downloads a week till July. There's a bit of a decline on SS but just a decrease of 10 percent. More downloads on IS this month than June and July. So this drastic fall appears to be restricted to AS which is increasingly looking like DT or DP for me.
105
« on: August 23, 2020, 12:54 »
This is disturbing: Freepik said the hacker obtained usernames and passwords for the oldest 8.3 million users registered on its Freepik and Flaticon websites.
8.3 million+ users. No wonder we arent making much money. 🤬
Freepik, Pexels and Pixabay get a lot of photographers because of stock photographers writing blogs and putting up videos on youtube claiming to make a lot of money off those sites. Some dudes even claim they make more off Pexels and Pixabay than they do off stock sites. These are typically people who don't depend on stock income as a source of revenue. So yeah, it's incredibly annoying to see these free sites being peddled as a source of revenue and pulling in so many "photographers" when they are clearly hurting true sources of revenue.
106
« on: August 23, 2020, 08:07 »
107
« on: August 21, 2020, 13:01 »
https://pulsenews.co.kr/view.php?year=2020&no=848417In this interview to a Korean news site 3 days ago, Stan says, "the companys goal was to have the biggest library in the world,". I know corporate CEOs are the most notoriously unreliable when it comes to telling the truth but maybe Shutterstock is hiding numbers because their database hasn't been increasing at the rate they were hoping for. Which probably means, at least some of the strategy to delete/deactivate ports appears to have worked.
108
« on: August 19, 2020, 14:09 »
109
« on: August 19, 2020, 04:58 »
I get so flipping annoyed. Whenever Stocksy comes up everyone that hasn't been able to get in piles on with the hate. Most are just butt hurt seeing other people have success.
That's life. Some crib about the places they can't get in. Others crib about the people who crib about the places they can't get in.
110
« on: August 18, 2020, 14:38 »
The harsh truth is, SS and iS might be the worst, most exploitative agencies around but they are also the only agencies that bring in consistent money for contributors like myself. Adobe has been a big zero the last couple of months. On Alamy, you're lucky if you make a sale every couple of months. So if contributors like myself shut off our SS ports, we won't see any money. And we need the money.
So the protests are great but judging by responses from SS, they don't really seem to care. They're okay even if 80 percent of their contributors migrate elsewhere and if their trustpilot score drops to zero because most probably, they're headed to dump the company to some rich buyer and make billions. But people who aren't millionaires like myself need the money and will take whatever we get as long as there's a little bit of money to be made. Those are the times we live in.
The Stock Coalition made a deal with Pond5 and that's great. Great for video contributors. But people who sell images just can't afford to shut off their SS ports and move to Pond5 because pond5 hasn't sold a single image for some of us in years. They care as much for image ports as SS does for contributors.
111
« on: August 18, 2020, 12:39 »
I never liked the faded bad color effect pictures on Stocksy. Not my cup of tea. Maybe they sell but I doubt it...
That's the "trend" these days. Look at the front pages of any of the higher end stock photo sites like Stocksy/Offset (or hell, even the showcase of Pexels/Unsplash) and you see this ugly desaturated false color tone. Whenever I trawl through those and see them selling at over 300 dollars a pop (not at Pexels/Unsplash of course), I feel hopelessly out of place in the market because I like to make my pictures look clean and right.
112
« on: August 18, 2020, 07:30 »
I've been trying to access the site for over 3 hours and haven't been able to.
Same for everyone?
113
« on: August 12, 2020, 11:05 »
Think flickr over the last few years
Flickr is actually hasn't changed much since it's late yahoo years. It's still a boring place for photographers to dump their images for favs. Probably because they got a buyer who understood what it was all about. The true comparison is 500px where photographers were actually making some money before they got bought out by Visual China and we all know how that turned out. With Shutterstock, if/when they're selling out, the most likely scenario is going to be what happened to 500px. Like you said, a big player (probably Facebook or Microsoft) is going to buy it up and milk it to their liking with contributors not getting even the 10 cents they get now.
114
« on: August 12, 2020, 04:30 »
The way I see it, if SS is going to crash and burn through deliberate actions and ridiculous short term strategies of the people running it, it can only be good for all of us. The sooner it happens, the better it is. They have the maximum no. of buyers and the buyers would have to look elsewhere to get the images they need. Which hopefully means, they're going to look at the other microstock sites (hopefully Adobe and Alamy). So I would cautiously bet on those right now.
115
« on: August 11, 2020, 05:47 »
People would find their images being used, online or in the real world, without seeing the sales reflected in their Dreamstime dashboard.
And that didn't happen until now, I think they play that quite fair.
Most contributors have their portfolio spread across a number of different agencies. If your picture is on many different sites, you can't specifically point a finger at one particular microstock site saying your image was downloaded there. That explanation only works for exclusive DT contributors (are there really any these days?) or pictures that have been made exclusive on the site and there are ways to make sure those sales get reported while others who aren't exclusive don't. Not saying DT is doing it but my eyebrows get raised when they spend so much money on these things when evidently they aren't making so much and don't disclose sales data or the money they are actually making.
116
« on: August 10, 2020, 13:02 »
I think the number was 12.6 million dollars. That doesn't sound small to me when DT pays me 35c for a sub download?
I wonder where they got that kind of money to both pay for these adwords and for this expensive lawsuit. Fighting google in court certainly wasn't going to be cheap? The conspiracy theorist in me wants to suspect if DT misreports sales to contributors. Because clearly it's a pretty widespread consensus that people aren't making a lot of money there. Which means DT isn't making a lot of money either. But they're still up and haven't gone under (yet) and that must cost a lot of money too. So either they have a lot of highly generous benefactors funding them or they aren't paying contributors what they ought to be paying them. How do we find out anyway? Unlike SS, where there's a quarterly circus where you know how much they made and how little they paid you, all of DT's sales statistics are under wraps.
117
« on: July 30, 2020, 10:03 »
It doesn't matter. "Discoverability" on Alamy is calculated purely on the number of keywords and "supertags" you use and the optional information you give. It has nothing to do with the actual quality of keywords or descriptions.
So if you have 50 keywords and 10 supertags, you will have good discoverability by default.
119
« on: May 26, 2020, 15:20 »
Thank you for the quick response, Mat. Truly appreciate it.
120
« on: May 26, 2020, 14:26 »
My images are stuck in review for over two weeks. Usually they get reviewed within a week.
Now I realise there's a covid crisis on but this has never happened to me before, not even in April. So was wondering if this is happening to everybody.
121
« on: May 12, 2020, 11:33 »
I agree it's completely nuts that people go to the trouble to take great images, modify them in Photoshop, then spend all the effort to upload them basically for nothing, except to help the owners of the web sites. I suppose getting a lot of likes and attention is great for many people but they won't pay the bills. Totally bizarre.
That's because you underestimate the dopamine hit a million views or a 1000 downloads gives people. That's the reason people spend hours and even money on instagram liking and following other accounts (and buying likes and followers) while uploading their photos there even if they make no money from it. An ego boost or validation can be more valuable to people than a few dollars on microstock. The free sites offer those in spades. Also sites like Pexels and Unsplash pick out images to showcase on its front page. They need not necessarily be the best pictures (or even good pictures) because the point of the exercise is to give people an incentive to upload more pictures. People like their pictures being showcased. That's the reason people kept uploading to flickr, in the hope that they would make the Explore page. So vast majority of people on the internet upload images for reasons other than money. And it, of course, hurts the people who do it because they want to make money.
122
« on: May 12, 2020, 05:42 »
I hate to say this and may get a lot of hate for saying this but, the future of microstock (at least when it comes to photography) is Pexels and Unsplash and the other "free" sites and the reason is, more photographers every day are uploading their premium high quality images there. More buyers with every passing day are realising they can make do with what they get on those sites as long as they get them for free. And there's increasing funding for apps and websites which provide search algorithms enabling easier AI based search for clients who download from the free sites.
The only way the traditional MS sites are going to be able to survive is by reducing royalties, which means the people who upload make even less money until that money gets close to zero (or 0.02 as istockers will know very well). So if people are looking to make money off their photography with ordinary everyday photos on MS, they're in for it. They're going to have to supply images that make the pages of the National Geographic and even then, they would probably not get a sale.
123
« on: May 08, 2020, 06:23 »
The way I see it, Jumpstory picks up images from CC0 Flickr and free stock sites like Pexels, Pixabay and Unsplash and offers up a search algorithm that makes it easy for you to get the images for your project. So it is still limited to free images online. But they aren't lying when they tell you there are over 20 million images and a million videos because that's how many images and videos there are in the free market.
Now pretty much everyone who needs and buys images knows of the existence of these free sites. And yes, part of the microstock industry IS indeed affected by photographers offering beautiful photoshopped content on a platter for rich corporations to exploit. But they have no where close to the range of content that stock photography sites like shutterstock or Getty/istock offer. The people who are getting a bad deal here are of course, the people who offered these pictures and videos for free. Because while they made zero money, there are people making a ton of money off that content.
124
« on: April 22, 2020, 09:47 »
Maybe you should take a look at your own videos and see why they are being rejected instead of putting the blame on the 3rd world. I have a 90 percent approval rate in the last 2 weeks and it doesn't seem to be an issue for many other contributors either. As for reviews taking time, of course they are. Don't you know what's going on in the world?
As for speaking English, some of us who live in the 3rd world can speak and write better English than some of you can. So maybe, just maybe, keep your racist diatribe to yourself?
125
« on: January 25, 2020, 09:34 »
That's a bit like saying, "Hey, look at that guy. He had one hit song and he's still making a million dollars from it 5 years after." But for every musician with a hit song there are a thousand who languish in poverty.
The web designer space is no different. There are many who barely make a living. It is as saturated, competitive and overcrowded as the music/photography space and you have to either be a genius to stand out from the crowd or had to have gotten in early.
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