@sgoodwin & @pixelbytes

Do you sell photos or illustrations? And how large is your portfolio?

Photos, with the occasional illustration made up of photos.  The statistic I like to look at is total return per accepted image per year.  From 2010-2013 at CS this has ranged from $0.24 to $0.32 - not great, but much better than BS which was $0.08 to $0.16 and not much behind FT at $0.18-$0.41.  Of course, none of those are very good compared to SS, where total return per accepted image per year has ranged from $1.83 in 2010 to $2.33 last year and so far this year is slightly higher.

Stated another way, I have made from $24 to $32 per year for every 100 images accepted at CanStock - not bad for the few extra minutes needed to submit there every year.  I shoot mostly landscapes, travel and simple isolations so I assume most people do much better than that.

Sales there are very variable but overall I have made more there than BS and almost as much as FT.  Uploading is very easy and that keeps them on the upload list for me.

Just saw the Shutterstock ad on Facebook. More than 1,100 likes and hundreds of shares. Meanwhile, iStock's FB page collects more and more disgruntled posts, mostly from buyers. Time to buy shares of SSTK?

No, the time to buy was right after they went public - they are up about 350% from then and were up almost 500% at their peak.  I thought about buying some when they went public and didn't - missed opportunity.  I still think they should give contributors stock options.

Back to the OP - the new iS so far isn't doing much, won't hold my breath waiting for improvement.

Fewer DLs, less money per DL.  So far not working for me or iS.

Maybe this is just a summary of the data from a much longer actual thesis in Turkish?  I can't imagine awarding any kind of advanced degree for posting histograms of survey questions with no introduction, materials and methods or discussion.  We don't know anything about who was sampled except they do not seem to be very successful since most sold fewer than 100 images in a month.  I didn't look after the first few pages as I doubt it can tell us anything interesting.

Thanks for the explanation, but it still seems way too complicated.  Why not just: buyer pays Envato $XX, author gets 36%?  Isn't that the net result for non-exclusive sales?   Or does it depend on the sales amount?

I looked on their site and it's still confusing.  In the example they give of a $100 purchase it works out to be a 36% commission, with a 55% "author's fee" that appears to be constant on the 80% remaining after the buyer's fee is subtracted.  If the "buyer's fee" is always 20% then it would work out to a 36% non-exclusive commission to us for all sales - 3% more than before so that will be a nice raise.  Unless the buyer's fee varies then we will not know.  I assume a variable buyer's fee is unlikely so hopefully it will always be 36% to authors - a step in the right direction.  Thanks to Envato for that!

Quote from: Teddy the Cat on September 01, 2014, 08:13

Are we getting 36% royalties instead of 33% for none exclusives?

Good question

That's what it sounds like to me, but they sure make it confusing with all these fees - why not just list the commission percent like every other site?

I have submitted them as commercial before to those agencies and it was not a problem but haven't tried recently.  As long as they are taken from public areas or roads it should not be a problem legally (but I am no lawyer so don't take that for legal advice) - and public universities are public property.  Just be careful about recent buildings as they might be copyrighted.  SS used to have problems with individual buildings but not so much for views of campus.  Some agencies won't take them unless they are editorial - you will just have to try and see about current policies, they will let you know very quickly and most of them are overly cautious.  SS removed all my images of a certain campus a few years ago, presumably due to a complaint, but with others there has not been a problem with the same images and of course you also can submit them RM to Alamy.  They typically are not big sellers but you will probably make enough to pay for gas if the campus is not too far away.

If you didn't receive the e-mail then you probably don't have any UK sales.  If you go to the Build a Downloadable Sales Report button you can generate a report, then look in the Region column to see where they were bought.  Unfortunately that's as much as you can find out as far as I can tell - no way to find out the rest.

Then I probably should have put my account number there or maybe in the comment section - according to my bank they are not used commonly in the US if at all.

Thanks to previous posters for providing information about this.  I just went through it as well as I could and it was not as easy as all of that.  If you live in the US, it might be easier to just let Alamy handle it unless you think the amount of money will be large.  Here is my experience.  If anyone knows how I should have done it differently please let me know.

I went to the DACS web site, registered and filled out the online form as indicated by others by putting in "Alamy claim 2013" in all of the fields.  I have no idea if my image was used for books, magazines or whatever so just put it in for them all except for TV, which based on the image seems unlikely.  Ok, fine up to this point.

Eventually you come to a page where they want bank information, including IBAN and SWIFT numbers.  The SWIFT number is no problem, but apparently most banks in the US don't use IBAN numbers so I couldn't put anything into that mandatory field.  Eventually I just put "No IBAN number" or something like that and it took it.  The interesting part is that they never asked for an account number so I'm not sure how the money will get to your account once it reaches the bank.

At the end, there was something about non-UK residents and taxes.  The US has a tax treaty with the UK to avoid double taxation making us exempt from UK income taxes since the IRS will nail us anyway.  For this you have to send them a DACS residency form.  OK, no problem, I printed that out, scanned it and e-mailed it back with my Alamy sales report in csv format downloaded from the Alamy web site.  OK up to this point - annoying but not too bad.

However, to avoid them withholding a 20% UK income tax, you also have to get certification from the HMRC.  Here is where it gets to be a pain.  After perusing the HMRC web site, I downloaded what I think is the appropriate form - Form US-Individual 2002.  This form of course requires you to enter a full description of the royalties, date of contract and the UK payer - none of which you know because neither Alamy nor DACS has told us.  So of course we can't fill out the form until afterwards, even though the whole purpose is to avoid paying the tax in the first place. 

The worst part is that you have to provide the HMRC with proof of US Residency for tax purposes, which requires the IRS to send them a Form 6166.  You get the Form 6166 by sending the IRS a completed Form 8802 AND A CHECK FOR $85!  So to do this and avoid them charging you UK income tax you have to pay the IRS $85 up front.  Not worth the effort nor the money.  I'm dropping it at this point, and if I had not already sent everything to DACS would just send Alamy their form and be done with it.  Unnecessarily paying the UK 20% I suppose is better than paying Alamy 50% but I could have saved myself a lot of time by not bothering.  Of course I'll change that opinion if it turns out to be a large amount, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

My recommendation: unless you have a lot of images that apply or think it will be a lot of money, it probably isn't worth the time and effort to do it yourself - much better to just fill out the brief Alamy form and be happy with anything you get.

That image would be perfect for a Cape Town business to hang in their lobby - I wonder what size print he sold.  Kudos to the photographer for pulling that off!