It's because of the credit system. ...

Threadbare excuse.

If that were the real reason they could report earnings on December 1st for November but they don't. They could display real time sales stats with some items marked for delayed reporting (and use a minimum value as the placeholder)

They benefit financially from delaying payments to contributors for as long as possible and that's why they've stretched things out more and more over time.

What about auto payout (like Shutterstock) when you reach the step?

I would not want auto payout every $25, so if there were automatic payments (which would be very welcome), it needs to be a user-settable money threshold or, ideally, monthly (like SS where you can set the minimum so those who want to be paid less frequently than once a month because of transaction fees have that option too). Direct deposit to my bank account (like Alamy) would also be a plus.

But then I'd also like to be able to search my portfolio (on the contributor side) by keywords or image number, and to see the total earnings for each image, and...

Given all the missing features in the Adobe contributor interface, I'd probably put those at a higher priority than automatic payments

Until they have some viable marketing plan for their agency - and blah-blah-blockchain-blah-blah isn't a plan - who cares about their uploading setup?

The list is long, but many are ages old (such as Albumo or Gimmestock) where they looked promising but turned out to be a dud.

In general, the ones I've left have either done something scummy, not sold anything/enough, or cut royalty rates significantly.

123rf is an example of cut royalty rates - I was willing to see what happened with their tiered royalty rates based on sales, but left when their sales declined so much that I dropped one level (with a portfolio that was essentially the same as at SS but at the time, SS sales were growing and 123rf was shrinking). It seemed that their inability to sell my images would end up rewarding them with a higher share of whatever sales they did make and that p1ss3d me off, so I closed my account.

CanStock, ScandinavianStockPhoto, Veer, Pixmac are examples of declining sales.

I left BigStock when they introduced cheap subscriptions and would not let contributors opt out. I all but left iStock (I have about 100 files still there that contractually I can't license anywhere else that keep my account open) in February 2013 over the Getty/Google Drive mess - again they wouldn't let contributors opt out of a deal that was seriously unfavorable.

I left Envato when they dreamt up a lunatic new idea that a sale was between us and a buyer even though we never were paid the whole amount; I didn't want to deal with the tax issues for such a piddly agency. I left Creative Market when they changed license terms to allow items for resale in a standard license. To their credit they did engage in a discussion with sellers about the change, but it didn't work for me.

Canva left me when Lee Torrens blew a gasket because I was posting here about the progress on promised guidelines for contributors on wanted/not wanted content. This was when they started deleting approved content that had been selling and I had asked for some idea of what, if not the fact that buyers wanted to license the content, constituted acceptable images.

I haven't left GL Stock, StockFresh Pond5 or Dreamstime but haven't uploaded there in several years. I hope for change, but I think that's wishful thinking on my part

I did sign up with PhotoCase, but couldn't figure out what they wanted (tried two or three batches I thought might work for them but they were declined; they didn't give any specific reason) so that wasn't really leaving - more like annulling a marriage that was never consummated

At least with him gone I can think about joining Adobestock (though the last time I checked they were still only using Paypal for contributors).

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/getting-paid.html

Not sure if Skrill or Payoneer would work for you, but I would absolutely recommend joining Adobestock.

I was able (when I asked for and received Scott Braut's help) to get my account reactivated at the end of 2016. If you don't want to reactivate an old FT account, you can probably just do things yourself as a "new" contributor.

For the last few months, AS has been outperforming SS, so if you can work out the payment issues, you'd see a solid return on your work to get your portfolio back up there (I'd expect; you know your work sells and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't do just as well at AS)

I hadn't heard of this site before, so I went to take a look.

Only 5 works at a time seems to preclude making much money - how much can people cough up to just look at something online on a device? And rentals to other members via subscriptions seems strange too, as does variable pricing as the remaining items in an "edition" dwindle - what's to stop anyone from licensing a similar on Shutterstock?

Anyway...

Here are the terms and conditions that say clearly you can't delete your artwork once "launched" and that they tot up what you're owed quarterly and pay you 30 days after that. You agree to leave your works there for three years from first launch and they have 60 days to remove it from sale. That doesn't affect continued use of previous sales which can continue.

https://www.seditionart.com/terms/artist

Not sure that you have any basis for removal and has the quarter ended and the 30 days passed on the sales?

Hiring a lawyer is expensive, and unless you're owed a lot of money and these guys aren't following the terms of your agreement (as opposed to you don't like the terms), would you stand to gain more than the lawyer would cost you?

For anyone else interested in the artist info, here's their support page:

https://www.seditionart.com/support/artist

...The issue for me is I am a top earner so I don't want to subsidising other creators when I draw in buyers.

Then you have a problem, if you count being a "top earner" as being a problem. The agencies who set things up are not going to see this as undesirable as they want to get traffic to the web site and make sales, and aren't all that concerned that it's your image versus someone else's.

Another way to look at this is that possibly you became a top earner because of all the times buyers came for someone else's image but bought yours instead. Possibly the system has been subsidizing you not the other way around...

Not sure, but if it's this outfit, it's closed as of March this year

https://blavity.com/colorstock-announces-its-closure-but-this-wont-stop-their-effort-to-advocate-for-creators-of-color

So this post is for folks with knowledge of how websites, search engines, links etc work. So I did a search of one of my images.  Some of the results show my pic in the thumbnail but link to others work. I have seen this before with other images of mine. Is this normal? If not who is responsible for this? The stock site or google? How can I fix this? Is it fixable?

Many thanks in advance for your responses.

I don't think there's anything to be done about it. Your image is probably on the page, just not the primary one - at least that's when I've seen this in searching for uses of my own work.

I believe it's that your work shows up in the "similar" section below someone else's image and that gets found in searches. For some types of searches you'd probably want to find things other than the "main" image on a page, so I don't expect to see a "fix" in the search engine.

A stock site might be able to make one of the small "also" thumbnails invisible to a Google search, but I don't think you'd really want that.

I don't expect this would bother any buyer - who probably wouldn't look for images that way anyway.

Other than puzzling you, what problem does this artifact of how agency pages are set up (with images from other artists around the item a user clicked on in search results) cause?

FWIW, here's the press release on this new collection

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/introducing-shutterstock-select-premium-footage-filmed-by-industry-experts-300756876.html

Thanks for the heads up. I think it's clearly someone who doesn't understand - or doesn't care - that he can't sell products based on stock photos. He almost certainly didn't buy an extended license for all of those and the only way to check if he was buying a license for each new sale from whatever agency he obtained the files from would be to a copyright holder test him out to see if a new download shows up.

I didn't see anything of mine.

I find the utterly unpolished and apparently unscripted video a little bit charming - it clearly hopes to suggest honesty and trustworthiness in contrast to the slickly-produced PR stuff. That's offset by Mr. West's inability to speak clearly that they are cutting/reducing contributor royalties - he's talking about it as a change, as if it were neutral. It's also a bad idea not to prepare some notes about what you're going to say so that you're wasting our time while you're staring off into a corner trying to remember what to say next.

I originally had one of the 60% contracts and I seem to remember the rationale for the cut to 50% was that they were going to open a New York office and grow sales in the US market that way.

Mr. West clearly connects Alamy's rising total revenue to the 2010 "investment" based on cutting contributor royalties, but there could be many other reasons for that growth. I didn't hear much in the way of specifics on the future investment or on how cuts in future royalties on future sales really helps if you have a project in the here and now you want money for.

I'm not hung up on any particular royalty rate - I don't see any specific number as "fair" as it depends on what the agency is doing for their share of the buyer's money and how much business the agency can bring in. Back when iStock paid 20% to independents and made more per month for a given portfolio than any other agency did, I was OK with that. Earnings as an exclusive - and that lovely 40% rate with a great sales volume - was a *very* good deal for contributors. Very sad that they, with lots of Getty help, demolished that business.

Alamy just doesn't bring in the business, for me, that other agencies do. My beef with them is lack of sales volume - and I didn't see any rise as a result of their 2010 "investment" with 10% more of the buyers' money than earlier. I'm not holding my breath for anything magical to happen this time either.

I await a pleasant surprise should Alamy mange to do something useful - for contributors - with the extra cash

Wow! That's a lot of stuff (and no easy way to just opt out of all advertising options).

I expect you're right that it's not shown to US users. I'm assuming that's all pertinent to the US as well though, but we don't get to see any of it or opt out.

Thanks for clarifying