cool. thanks for sharing!

Quote from: Minsc on June 07, 2018, 00:50

This is one of the stunning portfolios I've ever seen. Not because of how good it is, but how dedicated the contributor is. This is passion in its purest form. I have no choice but to admire it.

He just sets a 3D model and a camera with an helicoidal movement around it.
Then he starts the rendering and go to sleep.
The following morning he has 2000 frames ready to keyword and upload�

Thing is, keywords were probably auto-generated, as well as the uploads. So he just goes to sleep, wakes up, says 'ooh! portfolio of 260,000 images!'

PPS, ss says:

"199,570,752 royalty-free stock images / 1,392,424 new stock images added this week"

So his 260,000 "photo" portfolio is 0.13% of shutterstocks entire portfolio! OR... if he uploaded it all this week, 19% of the entire upload. Maybe only '4' people uploaded "photos" this week, and each did 260,000+!

Hmm, okay, thanks for the feedback. I think I am 'starting' to 'get' it.

Speaking of which - can someone please explain to me the advantage of a 'higher' bit rate?

I have a large monitor (25") as well as large TV (60") - and if I view HD/4K video on them at say 20MPS as opposed to 150MPS - they look pretty much identical to me.

So I don't get/see the advantage of a higher bit rate.

What exactly are you referring to/which program to participate in?

Yes - I had been hearing (reading) great things about how pond5 was so great, so signed up - spent hours and hours uploading videos (several thousand) - and a month or so later, jsut 0 sales...

Quote from: increasingdifficulty on May 19, 2018, 06:54

Quote from: stockmarketer on May 19, 2018, 06:50

Yes, it's clear WHY they did it.  It's always been their business model.

BUT people still show up here asking how and why their sales suddenly stopped.  The why has always been known. The how is that one day last year they flipped a switch to hide the marketplace collection, making our work invisible unless the customer flipped the switch back to the old default.

Yes, absolutely, fully agree with you. Just wanted to clarify some things.

The switch in combination with a now much bigger membership library results in very few people feeling the need to flip the switch back.

And furthermore, what does decreasing marketplace sales do to the sellers? Naturally, it makes it more likely that they will now say "yes" to a buyout... And so on, until the membership library is good enough to outcompete the rest.

I perfectly agree.
But even worse is the fact that something very similar is happening at Pond 5 with their membership program, which was much amplified only a couple of month ago.
Last year only the contributors left out of the membership were squeezed out, as the participating members were pushed up in the search rankings, but now everyone is complaining of very poor sales in their forum.
They did it in a very clever way: even the members who did not want to participate had no choice, as they knew that they would have been squeezed out of the search engine

Yes, I just noticed that literally 'overnight'.

Chances are - it is just 'robots' scraping their website (i.e., 'new' search engines, etc), which is being counted as views. Probably not a real person.

Don't buy your own stuff you could be booted for that.

Why would they boot you for that? Are some agencies afraid that you'd find out you weren't been credited? It makes no sense...

Curious...

Do you audit the agencies you submit to? In most cases - you have to take their word for how many sales you get, etc, because there are no type of 3rd party analytics you can use on those sites.

So do you ever say have yourself or a friend place an order for an image or video, to see whether you actually get credit for that sale? (In other words, if you do a random test - and you get a sale, chances are the agency is legit. But if you do a random test - and nothing shows up - maybe you aren't getting credited with everything?)

Ah..... thanks for the FYI re: the seo... makes sense. I am thinking I can/could probably tweak my seo even a bit more then/make it better/etc.

It's been a bit of an "interesting" journey so far. Much more (initial) work than I expected, but hoping to see good results sales-wise. I enjoyed doing the photography/videos anyways, but obviously would like to see sales too

OKay, I may be relatively new to pond5... only there about a month... portfolio size of several thousand videos... how long should it take to start seeing sales? Right now, just looking at '0'...

Depends what your use is, and whether you are concerned about paying for bandwidth (if your host charges for it).

Since it is relatively speaking 'cheap' to host large images, you might as well do that. Benefit is sharper images with less lossiness (depending on compression algorithm) if someone zooms in on your picture.

Thanks, very interesting.

A couple of points:
I don't see any privacy problem, no more that the ones you could have in traditional agencies that own your ID card, transactions, earnings history ecc.
I don't believe your data will be digitally printed in every image, there should be a "pseudo" name with a unique hash, and after this noone can look in your wallet to see how much you earn.
That means probably a little more privacy than traditional agencies.

Other point: if they get 15% of every transaction, it means that is in their interest to push the market side, because they will earn more. So I don't believe that the business is only or mostly for financial reason, if it would in this way there could be simply no fees and 100% for authors (according to you, the company will be however very rich)

If other companies will arrive lowering their fee to 10% or 5%, well this is only a good news for us: it's exactly the opposite of what happens from years, where agency gives to contributors less and less

re: privacy - difference here is agencies supposedly keep that information private. this one tags every single image with your name (not pseudonym, according to their site). And right on their site they do say they tag every image. Not a hash. But the actual details. And have your personal ID to back it up. And so yes - someone can look at your wallet, trace it, and see precisely how much you earn.

For the market site - while yes it is true they are interested in transactions - they are more interested in the 'velocity' of transactions. They don't care if you make money or not - what they care about is you buying/selling/buying/selling their coins. And because the price of the coin will most likely be volatile just like bitcoin, etc - you'll have a coin one day worth $200, and the next day worth $50, so a photographer say with 100 coins might think "cool! I'm rich, 100 * 200 = $20,000". And then the next day, those same 100 coins only worth $5,000. And you'll most likely get more panicked photographers, so more likely to sell then say try and hold.

So basically - they will most likely be encouraging lots of buying/selling/buying/selling, and each time that happens - they take 15%.

Because they are doing that though - it will most likely keep the price of the coin low. I.e., every time there is some "inflation" (more demand for the coin, and people willing to pay more for it) - they skim 15% off the top, and all of the sudden the coin is worth less.

So, ultimately, with most things like this... I think the investors will get rich (i.e., $50 million+ each). A few photographers (by luck, portfolio size, being the first in, etc, etc) will get "relatively speaking" rich (between $20k-$400k). And then everyone else will make maybe $100-$200/month from it, if they chose to continue using it, and they don't mind each image being tagged with their ID, and customers don't mind their entire purchase history being completely transparent...