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Messages - pancaketom
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1076
« on: May 09, 2014, 16:38 »
Cannot say I have but I have noticed a drop in SOD's or ODD's but what I have noticed (over the last three months) is that my earnings/downloads are "definitely capped" every single day.
At first I thought it was a co-incidence, so I ignored commenting on it but just continued to monitor it.
After watching it closely and saying nothing (over the last 12 weeks) I am convinced that SS are regulating my income.
I have precisely (and I mean precisely) between 4.5% - 5% of my total portfolio number downloaded every single week day (Mon-Fri).
Without any exceptions. On weekends it drops to 2% - 3% per day. Consistently.
Furthermore, even with the combination of Subs/ODD/SODs, each day my earnings (for each day) are within a tolerance of 5% of all days in that week.
I remember reading over on the SS forum (about a year ago) from a very long standing and experienced contributor "that when SS start rationing incomes that's the beginning of the end for me, I'll close my account"
Genuinely, I think that is what their doing, certainly to me and my portfolio. And I stress again, this has been consistent for the last three months. And I continue to monitor it, and every week the numbers confirm it.
This week for example, the same downloads within a margin of 3 downloads every single day and I'm talking between 35 - 50 downloads everyday. No way is that a co-incidence over a three month period. No way. And that even includes Bank holidays, the tolernaces are too close to say they're accidental, they're programmed !
You cannot rationally explain the pure consistency of downloads/income per day over such a period. For me it's basically a flat line, it might be a high line, but it's still a virtually flat line.
You have gotta hand it to the software guys at SS - they're doing a great job in rationing my standard of living, ergo - my success.
And finally, and even more kudos to those software guys, they allow me just a 1- 2% growth each month, just enough to get my BME and the the occasional BDE, hence the virtually "flat line". Clever. Very Clever
I sometimes wonder is that just to keep me quiet?
Well enough, I don't think so 
#bustedSS
SS lovers vote me down, SS haters vote me up. I actually don't care. I'm stating the facts in my own case, if I could show you my numbers I know you would believe me.
This is a fix.
This is really interesting and I for one do not regard it as a conspiracy theory. It sounds exactly like something they'd do in an attempt to keep contributors hanging on. Unfortunately it also seems rather transparent and obvious.
My own portfolio is probably too small to be a statistical valid sample.
It would not be that hard to cap DL for a port, but if they were clever they would put some sort of random limit on the cap so it wasn't obvious - I guess the other thing would be to note what time of day your last DL was every day - and how do they stop sales - push your images down in search or just not report them? If your images drop off the searches once you hit your quota that should be very obvious. If your DL are capped at x% of port per day, then you need to upload a heap of quick and easy to produce images so that your port size goes up to allow the good sellers to sell all day.
1077
« on: May 09, 2014, 16:06 »
well, I would be happy to get 5% of my port to sell every day. I did notice the day I got a large SOD early in the day I didn't get another DL all day - which is odd.
I guess one solution would be to stop uploading there and open another acct (as a business). It would be painful 'til you hit the top tier there, but otherwise you could double your income if they throttle the second acct. at the same level. Or just stop uploading to SS and consider that your residual income and devote your time and effort to stocksy or offset or something like that.
For me OD sales are about normal so far this month, SOD are a little low. Sales in general are a little low.
1078
« on: May 08, 2014, 20:25 »
I liked Stockxpert a whole lot more than Istock, but in the previous owners 2cd acts Stocksy looks a whole lot better than Stockfresh.
1079
« on: May 07, 2014, 00:42 »
I think there are still plenty of reasons to keep exclusivity. If your images have good placement in the searches and especially if you have good sales with the higher priced collections you will take a huge hit leaving. If you have a more generic port then you won't take nearly the hit leaving, and at some point unless istock turns things around your income will drop down to a small percent of what it was before anyway. You need to compare your income after a year not to what you made a year ago at IS, but to what you would make at IS now (which of course you won't know), but if you have dropped 20% every year for the last few years, you can expect that is likely what will happen next year. So if you lose 20% in the first year and then it starts going up - you win. It will be more work though, especially at first.
I think the top contributors are sort of locked into IS (or made special deals), so unless your income at IS continues to rise or you fall into that category, you have to at least think about giving up the crown. Maybe you choose not to, but at least looking at the options makes sense.
A while ago every time I started thinking about going exclusive IS would change the best match and my sales would drop 20-50% and I was glad for the sales at other sites.
1080
« on: May 04, 2014, 00:51 »
In 10 years of microstocking I've never really understood the argument that high commercial value images are what we should aim for. Every HCV idea quickly has 1,000 photographers rushing to mimic it and I'm sure the top 10 do absolutely brilliantly out of it. I suspect the bottom 990 (struggling with prop styling, lighting, DoF, etc) make very little and can easily lose on model fees. If you shoot LCV images you have very little competition and a good chance of making a sale to the few people looking for that thing.
I shoot LCV and I'm pretty sure I make more than the bulk of people shooting HCV. In addition, we LCV shooters fill up all the gaps around the HCV stuff which, in my opinion, is probably more important to the agencies than having another 10,000 pictures of happy White families posing in front of a house, or athletic goldfish. Not that I've ever seen any indication from the agencies that they regard LCV as being worth shooting, so I'm probably wrong.
I think the goal should be to match the commercial value with the effort put in. - so maybe an image doesn't get a lot of sales, but if it is easy for you to get it is still worthwhile. The best would be some sort of medium to high commercial value images that aren't easy for others to produce. There is a lot of return in the long tail without so much competition. Especially as once your HCV image drops back a few pages in a search it won't get many or any downloads but your images without much competition will always be in the first few pages of images for the search because that is all there are.
1081
« on: May 03, 2014, 16:07 »
Maybe they consider free to be similar.
1082
« on: May 03, 2014, 00:16 »
I just checked and an 81 MP 8 bit jpeg file is only 40.5 MB, so I guess I can't get to 50 MB unless I add some noise. Perhaps this is more like the Alamy completely unintuitive requirements of X file size saved as another format but we want it saved as a jpg? (really, listing MP requirement makes so much more sense for digital files.)
It would be nice to have a higher value outlet for higher value work though.
1083
« on: May 01, 2014, 09:46 »
I notched up more goose eggs than ever before (0 sales at various sites). SS was the only good seller and was about 72% of the total (one big SOD near the end brought it up nicely). I have to go back to 2007 to have a month with less number of sales at DT, although only to last December for less $.
It was a little depressing really.
1084
« on: May 01, 2014, 09:41 »
Alamy was my 2cd best earner last year. April this year = 0 In general sales numbers have been fairly steady but $ amounts have been falling.
Yes Tror, that is how submissions work there - they check one image. If it is bad they all fail and if it is good they are all in.
I think P5 is boosted by good video sales.
1085
« on: April 30, 2014, 17:44 »
Hello, does anyone remember what exactly was in the old terms or what has changed in their new terms?
One thing strikes me - 16 e "You may bear some or all expenses incurred by us in paying monies to you."
does that mean we will have to pay any paypal fees in addition to 67% to them?
Also they can clawback basically any time.
for all I know these were in there before, but I don't know for sure. Any time sites change things they need to post the old and new next to each other or bold any changes. For some reason it seems like every time something changes it makes things worse for us.
1086
« on: April 29, 2014, 01:30 »
Similar results as Lisa for me (well, I am sure she has way better results) - but mine are better than the last few months but nowhere near a BME.
1087
« on: April 25, 2014, 16:47 »
Actually, if they could make this a lot smaller it would make phone cams very versatile and with more computing power and storage allow for some slick video things too.
1088
« on: April 25, 2014, 16:46 »
SS are growing their business (and ours). The growth however isn't coming from subs but mainly from all the higher priced image products that they are selling instead. As Jo Ann has pointed out the subs part of SS is now only about 40% of the total. It seems to me that it is only on SS that RPD is consistently growing (and has been for some years now). Everywhere else it has been moving in the wrong direction __ especially at IS.
Not for exclusives: in fact, RPD has skyrocketed in the last two-three years, going to numbers between 10-20 $ per download.
Agreed. For me, RPD has grown exponentially for 10 years straight.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
1089
« on: April 25, 2014, 10:23 »
Unfortunately with SS you also have to look at what they are doing with BS - promoting a crazy RC like scheme, TS level sub returns, and poorly communicated plans (we'll pay you more if you are in the bridge for now - but we won't tell you how long).
1090
« on: April 24, 2014, 14:41 »
Michael - my apologies. It is actually a quote from Sean's blog. I read his and yours back to back from Sean's earlier post. Following is the section I am in agreement with, and seems it is Sean's, and not your statement. Sorry to have attributed the quote to you.
No problem but thanks for clearing it up. I wasn't really sure. It didn't really sound like something I remembered saying. But you know, over time you can change opinions while learning new stuff...
Quite frankly, the "reputable" part made me wonder most. I have problems attributing this word to any of the microstock places these days. I don't trust any of them to actually be my "agent".
By reputable I mean: established, selling licenses, communicating with contributors, working with contributors openly and honestly, in a supportive manner.
Unfortunately that still leaves me wondering what sites actually qualify as "reputable", although at least some cover a few of those.
1092
« on: April 22, 2014, 21:09 »
They certainly downgraded everyone automatically.
1093
« on: April 22, 2014, 19:07 »
They weren't deleting for a few months, but they started again - it does seem like an odd policy to me, but there are a few odd things in this business.
1094
« on: April 21, 2014, 20:10 »
I think being actively exclusive is also somewhat selecting for people that do well at IS. If your income gets hosed enough you quit exclusivity - so all that is left are those that still do well there.
1095
« on: April 14, 2014, 12:18 »
Hello All,
This topic has come up in the past and I strongly recommend against downsizing and encouraging others to downsize.
First, it's not in your best interest as a contributor. While many of our images are licensed through the subscription model to both large and small businesses, many of you have seen sales through our enterprise products (where royalties can be up to $120 or more). Many of those enterprise clients are advertising agencies, Fortune 500 companies, etc., who are looking for images of good or high technical quality. If you're downsizing images, you're potentially losing out on some of your highest-potential sales in many markets around the world. With nearly 1 million customers now searching for images at Shutterstock, you want your portfolio to be of the highest quality to generate the highest amount of earnings across that broad and diverse customer base.
Best,
Scott
VP of Content
Shutterstock
Until you allow image or model opt out of the "sensitive use" many of us will not have any of our images available for these higher value sales (which would benefit SS and the artists). Please make this an option.
1096
« on: April 09, 2014, 12:16 »
I think they want to have all the images of one model with the same release so they can use that to show more images w/ the same model. I wouldn't be surprised that there is specific IS/Getty language in their release that is objectionable to other agencies.
Their levels system does make it a bit of a strategy with similar images. On the one hand if you spread the same number of downloads among numerous similar images then you earn a lot less (both for lower prices and a lower percent to the artist). If you only send one and all those downloads go to that one image, you win. But if they go to someone else's image or you get no downloads at all you lose. The DT search tends to group images by artist too much too, which means that if you do get a heap of similars accepted they are likely to show up all in a row in the search.
Unlike the old SS sales at DT seem to take at least a few months to a year to happen with new uploads (one of the reasons the level 0 at 20% after only 6 months is obnoxious)
1097
« on: April 06, 2014, 14:44 »
As far as I know GL has never accepted them.
1098
« on: April 05, 2014, 20:58 »
22 June 2012. I asked about it and I think the distributor stiffed Alamy so I am unlikely ever to be paid for that sale.
1099
« on: April 04, 2014, 18:36 »
What does "earn at full potential" mean. If all of my images that had applicable keywords showed up first in every search then I would be earning at my full potential perhaps? Maybe they do like DT and rotate portfolios up and down. Maybe they skew the search results based on where you are located and where the searcher is located. If they are pushing other portfolios down some of the time then maybe your images are earning over their full potential. If they really wanted to manipulate earnings potential they would just do it across the board all the time and the results would be more like the gbalex conspiracy than the christian conspiracy.
I have no doubt they could manipulate sales all sorts of ways. The question is why would they bother for the most part? It would make sense to encourage new photographers to get them hooked, and possibly to push lower paying sales a bit, but that would also tend to move them to higher paying sales more quickly, so only a short term fix. I think they have so many tweaks to their searches going on all the time based on the buyers location, previous sales history, seller location, previous purchases with the same keyword etc. etc. and they are probably tweaking it all the time that any simplistic explanation is going to miss the mark. Ultimately the thing they really don't want to do is have the buyers go elsewhere. (something that IS probably should consider).
1100
« on: April 04, 2014, 11:20 »
I have been seriously working on microstock for a couple months now and am just starting to get the feel for things.
Serious? I am been 'Seriously' working on microstock for over 2 years and Don't have the feel for things yet.
Be nice Two months is long enough to find out that it ain't half as easy as it seems. And he has got himself on a respectable array of agencies.
a blind person with a decent camera can get onto most microstock sites, they don't really set the level too high. seriously, can you name one microstock agency that has ever 'edited' an image?
Why would a microstock agency edit an image? - they just reject it and let you edit it or not. That said I did have a very specific suggestion for changing the relative color levels for an image from one site. It is microstock. The level isn't supposed to be set too high (that would be too high). Actually the level is probably set higher than the return dictates now.
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