Alamy is asking me to tell it where I live if I'm not in the UK.
Does anybody know what the consequences would be of changing my location? I'm suspicious that it might push me to the bottom of the search in places where Alamy actually has customers (while lifting me up the search in a place where they don't).

There's a difference between "I intentionally shot this out of focus on purpose for an artistic reason" and " I shot this pineapple in my kitchen at night with my macro at 1/10 2.8 handheld and it shifted because of a nearby earthquake".

Yup. I doubt if anybody is defending the latter. Though as a record of the earthquake......

What is a "Credit"?
What is the value of a "Credit"?

A Dreamstime Credit has not the same value as a Fotolia or a 123RF one.

The "Credit" is not an universal currency.

Take it further - the same agency's credits are not of equal value, some come from big, cheap packages, some come from small expensive ones. And on DT credits from the same package generate different commission percentages, depending on what image they buy and how often it has sold. The number of different values credits have is the number of different price-points they are sold at multiplied by the number of different commission percentages that the site pays. In DT's case I'm sure that runs into scores of different values and it might be more than 100.

Quote from: old crow on February 05, 2014, 10:01

""I'm still not down to eating ramen noodle soup and cans of tuna fish for dinner just yet.""

One small can of decent tuna fish is 6 shutterstock downloads  ! ! ! !

or...

Six cans of tuna fish is one decent shutterstock download.

Wow! That's a sharp reappraisal!

It's kinda sad that I post that microstock has become a waste of time and I get 17 plus posts for it. Time was when I would have got vilified for that (oops! it's just gone down to 16+ .... there are still people out ther who have hope! Good luck to you!).

Baldrick, you and I experienced the same thing.  My downloads are significantly up on most sites, but $ are 20% down from a year ago.  Up 11% from a miserable December, though, so I guess that's a small ray of sunshine. 

That and a mail I got from Goofy have really got me thinking Lisa.

After a decade at this game, if I work pretty much flat-out for a month then I might increase my overall portfolio by two or three percent. If I work flat-out for a year, I might add 2,500 images and maybe boost my earnings by 12% (because half of those images won't be there for half a year, so I reckon adding 25% over an entire year is equal to 12.5% more portfolio on average for the year). Even allowing that they will earn five times that much over the next 10 years. I would be looking at a year's really hard work only being worth 60% of what I earned last year. And that 60% would be less than half the British minimum wage per hour's work; looking at it just over the one year would mean getting one hour's pay for ten hours' effort.

When we started, I could earn (from my non-prime subjects) about $1 per image per month, which was probably better than the minimum wage, when comparing the time put in to the return over a single year.

So looking at it sensibly, is it worth taking the trouble to keep producing? How much have the last year's files actually added to the overall earnings? Aren't we old timers driven on by the weight of earnings from our back catalogue, not from our new material?

We may see newbies earning a few score dollars in their first year and wonder why they keep bothering, but how much cash have the files we uploaded in the last year actually made for us old-timers?

A newbie growing his portfolio might make $10 in the first month (if he's good!), and $40 in the second, and report a 300% boost in earnings. But in the 3rd month he makes $65, still a healthy 60% or so, in the fourth month $100, in the fifth month $120 and so on, with the percentage earnings growth falling very fast as the earnings grow slightly more slowly than the size of the portfolio, until at some point the files dying of old age exceed the new files coming on line and the earnings start to slip. And that's inevitable, even without search changes or massively increased numbers of files.

The one substantial advantage I have still got from 10 years doing this is a large archive of potentially valuable material. Using some of that for direct art sales via a gallery would probably be worth more to me than carrying on trying to prop up my microstock portfolio. In fact, if I were able to turn $2,000 clear profit on art sales this year, it might well be more than I would make working flat-out for 12 moths generating and uploading new stock, and I could probably make $2,000 out of selling a dozen prints - which would involve a few days' effort finding shops to display them and a few hundred dollars spend on getting high-quality prints made.

I think the time may have arrived for me to start thinking of stock as a useful sideline, and to put my main effort into other things. I still expect to make a lot more money from the 8,000-odd images I've got in various places, but I suspect that just as it is a waste of time for newbies to try to break into this market, it has probably now become a waste of time for people like me to devote a lot of effort to it - particularly when that effort could be directed to other more promising channels.

Leave 'em up. It doesn't cost anything and there is always some mug out there who thinks a picture you made in 2007 of clothes pegs on a washing line is high art .

Hey, have you been stalking me?
I agree, though. How bad does an image have to be before you decide to prune it? In any case, a good designer might see a picture with lousy WB and see immediately that he can clean it up and get something usable.  You might have something as dull as Rheinwater and it turns out to be the biggest earner ever

I've wondered if the system somehow thinks I'm inactive because all my uploads go via bridge instead of by active uploading. It seems odd that ever since bridge came in things seem to have drifted downwards (not that they were great before then).

It seems like a reasonable idea - but only if you need 36MP. If you don't you're just spending another 2k on a body that is surplus to requirements.

Almost the same as Dec 2012, which is OK, I suppose.

Yes ploink, I'm on the "bridge".  And despite thousands of images that have gone across the bridge, my earnings level is approximately what it was in my second month on BS, back in early 2005.

Nicku, I'd say that baby is overexposed, if you move the black slider up to the end of the histogram the exposure looks better.  That's probably what the first reviewer objected to.

Quote from: Ron on January 28, 2014, 05:27

I Am really thinking of starting with DT again, and just suck up the similar policy.

The only reason that I started uploading to DT again was that I'd read (on MSG) that they had abandoned the 'similars' policy. I only had one file rejected out of nearly 900 uploaded (it was a fairly boring background image).

Today I got seven out of seven rejections for "we already have this subject well-covered", which seems like a "similars" policy to me.