It seems w/ the microstock cushion you have you could fairly safely explore a more gratifying life path, even if it isn't micro, it seems unlikely that it will cut down to the level of your day job over a few years. It is a bit riskier, especially for example if you were in the US you would want to get good healthcare etc. Still, it seems like you should be able to put away a pretty good next egg w/ 10K a month or whatever you are making between your day job and micro - especially as the micro isn't going to drop to 0 overnight - even if it cut in half, that is still more than your day job.

I lost my job quite a while back (not so stable after all) and went on a roadtrip financed by renting out my place and savings - I ended up not tapping into my savings at all - but I am single and most would consider me insanely stingy - I think my cheapest year I lived on less than you make in a good microstock month. Still, if you have to you could probably do without a lot of the things you consider essential - I guess it really boils down to how is your day job effecting you - if it is as bad as you suggest, you owe it to yourself and everyone around you to explore other possibilities and your micro income gives you some financial freedom to do that.

Quote from: cthoman on November 01, 2012, 14:36

On a side note, did your SS earnings not clear out at the end of the month? Don't they usually start at zero to begin a new month?

I noticed the same thing.

I saw that too, maybe something to do with Sandy?

BME (so far) for me. SS had the most DL ever but with enough less EL and OD to keep it from being a BME there. Alamy did quite well - another BME unless things are refunded.  In fact just SS and Alamy made for a decent month - better than last months total.

I have no idea how IS did, but relatively unimportant at this point. Veer also has some reporting issues for me. 

BS was a non EL BME but still a small player. PD was another small fry BME. DT was back up to about average for the last 12 months - better than most of the last 4 or so.

Once I sort out Veer and in a few years if/when the IS and PP income are all reported it should be an even better month.

I think I added around 1% new images to my portfolio of up to 3,000 images. One thing about the port growth vs income growth is at some point you should hit some sort of steady state and if your work to produce new images isn't too onerous you are making a pretty good income at this (although it might be some time before past work is fully recouped).

I do not envy you the task of getting all the iptc data on all those files. ugh. I am guessing that as soon as the iptc is done then you upload them everywhere.  - a daunting task, that is for sure. For anyone starting out or for exclusives I second the advice to keyword etc. in the iptc.

I think that IS has been insulating exclusives (mainly by shafting independents it appears) from any downturns - unfortunately for them they seem to have run out of shafting to be done to independents, so the pain is starting to hit the exclusives. It will be a painful process to jump ship, and a long road to get back to the kind of earnings you made as an exclusive. Thanks for keeping us posted.

Probably not spam - they want to put a link on some text on your web page - or modify the text to put a link in and will pay a certain amount for it. You can decide if you are willing to have the links for what they are willing to pay - it is up to you. The fact that they pay via paypal makes it pretty safe for you, and if you don't like the offer, just say no.

(I myself have added a few links to some of my web pages and been paid), other links I said were too far off the mark and didn't put them in. It is a bit mercenary, but so is selling pics for cheap at microstock.

As the previous poster said - I think they want a page that has high google page rank so that the paid links will be worthwhile - possibly to increase the page rank of the pages they link to.

I wish that DT would indicate when a picture is found w/ the geotag.
I have tagged some of mine, but I don't do it 'til after they are accepted.

I've had acceptances and rejections for these sorts of things (like strength ratings and so on). If it is easy to remove, then I'd probably do it.

It looks to me like a way to move more images into the 20% commission category and to drop prices - a double whammy for the artist.

As far as "bad" images gumming up the search - they need to seriously combat spam and work on the search engine - instead of showing 20 or more images from the same artist in a row.

I agree SS commission percent is a low, but it isn't as low as a few sites like say, IS or FT.  The commission percent might have gone down, but they didn't lower the amount you got for a sub sale - maybe more of the buyers were downloading less of their total.

I think I make more at SS for a sub sale than at any other site, so it is in my interest for all sub sales to be at SS. (I might have made more with the DT levels system, but they scrapped that).

I calculated my total RPD at IS for August - the last month it is available -  the total is 36.56 per sale - yup - less than what I get for subs sales at SS.

(for the same month my RPD at SS was 85.44)

Now that was an atypical month, so we'll look at July.

IS = 57.5
SS = 68.6

so with the rise of PP sales at IS it is quite clear to me that they are not my best place to sell things.

I think RPD is a bit of a useless statistic unless you are trying to decide where to send business.

No sales for me this month.

Quote from: lisafx on October 05, 2012, 09:51

Quote from: stockastic on October 04, 2012, 17:43

The point is to help the agencies build huge collections of free images off of which they'll make money and you won't.

So true.  I was browsing photoXpress the other day, for the first time.  Isn't this the site that Fotolia sends "free" images?  You have to buy a subscription to download them.  So they are making money on images donated for "free" by contributors.  And as far as I could see there was no link back to the paid Fotolia site, much less the portfolio of the donating contributor.  Struck me as obscene.

Maybe they didn't intend this when they opened the free site, but I truly believe they discovered how great it is to be a distributer AND a partner at the same time.  We signed up with Fotolia.  They open up a 2nd legal independent corporation, shift our work there and sell it on behalf of Fotolia.  They take their commission, then Fotolia takes their commission of what is left, and we get our pennies.

Now they need to open up a 3rd and 4th site and shuttle the images through all of them so that they can skim 99% out of each sale.

Maybe they have decided w/ cash sales they can keep all the money and don't have to report them to us anymore.

When they announced the RC #^&$ I stopped uploading. When they forced the move to PP I deactivated nearly 2 orders of magnitude from my port. Curiously my income only dropped about one order of magnitude most months. PP income is similar to regular sale income now though - so unless they are actually stealing SS customers that could be the source for a lot of their drop. I know they actively recruited IS buyers to thinkstock.

In any case I hope they hang on to just enough customers to keep the big exclusives from jumping ship, but otherwise I hope they die a painful death.

There are so many points in their history where they could have either done the right thing by their contributors or done a brilliant move to completely dominate the industry. So many times they have failed to do either. They are still a major force in the microstock business though and probably will continue to be so for years to come.

You can't (because laws are so different in different countries). Anything pre 1800 should be fair game though unless it is owned by a museum.

No, all sites don't accept these and with the ones that do it is not consistent.