Not sure that anyone's tried a co-op with video, but it has been tried with images and so far, nothing has taken off.

You could certainly argue that video is different and that the monthly all-you-can-eat model is different, but I think that many of the same issues would come up.

Beyond the internals of running this co-op, why would buyers come to you versus any of the established agencies?

When you consider the momentum and marketing budget of the big agencies, having amazing unique content or some radically different approach (such as how Canva differs from Shutterstock, although SS is clearly trying to eliminate as much of that gap as it can) are the only ways to draw buyers away - I'm assuming you won't try to undercut on price as no major contributors would be interested.

How do you persuade major, successful contributors to forego the known income from an established site to give you exclusive content? Stocksy was able to get off the ground with that request because (IMO) they had Bruce Livingstone as a founder and agencies were behaving very badly at that particular time.

I'm leaving out a lot of other issues (such as the unlimited clips business model or the size of market for video vs. images (and I know everyone's currently breathless about the future of video, but the market is inherently smaller)). But even with just the above, you'd need to answer a lot of business questions - not how to build the site questions.

It's up to date on the phone app.

On iOS, the Activity page number is not up to date (like the main contributor landing page on the web), but the Earnings page is. I see the same on my Android tablet.

I just went to check my stats and for November so far, my non-US sales are 24%

For Oct 2017 it was 20% non-US. I'm based in the US.

In the thread about this last month I had noted my recent average over the last (almost) year was 29% non-US. As I noted in that thread, that is down a lot from earlier days.

In 8 years I had never had a refund on DT until today, but fortunately it was only for a 35-cent sub.  Hopefully not a new trend for them.

I don't have records from pre-2011 (I returned to being indie in June 2011; have been with DT since 2004), but in the 6+ years since then I've had 16 refunds, the biggest of which was $16.20.

It's completely bogus that the accounting isn't done transparently (sale should stay with a mark indicating it's been refunded and the refund should be a separate entry). It's also a crock that they claim they can't provide a reason "due to the high volume of daily transactions". They could automate this with a set of reasons for the refunder to choose from.

Somehow it's always seemed like a final insult that the robo email ends with a plug for the referral program telling you how to "earn $$$!"

I think that in part you're starting with SS at a hard time - massive collection and there isn't the almost automatic download of new images that used to occur, which helped give you a boost in searches that allowed popular images to take off.

However I also think there's a lot in your images that explains low sales - and remember this is about your images as stock, not in a more general sense.

For your outdoor images, you should perhaps consider correcting perspective and editing out people (where it makes sense) so you can avoid an editorial license. Most of your architectural images are of things, not events, so there will be much more sales potential if you can avoid editorial license. The comments above about post processing are worth considering too. Bratislava returns over 13K photos on SS and if you look at the first couple of pages you'll get a sense of what sells.

For the still images, I think a big problem is odd styling - you're over thinking things and over complicating the composition, leaving something that will have very few buyers able to use the image in their design. For example: This image is full of fruit, glasses, blender, etc. in ways that you'd never see if someone were actually making smoothies. You've also put objects behind one another and half off the edges that further reduces usability for a designer.

Another: this says it's in a beauty salon but this is someone painting their own nails. There's a bracelet and part of a watch showing on one arm which I think would be better removed, and do the whole thing on a white surface as an older woman painting her nails would sell better.

This is just a jumble of Christmas objects that would be hard to use as a background in any design - less is more. Where does the designer put text? Also, if you search for Christmas background photos, there are nearly 3 million - it's a very competitive segment.

This how to buy a house image just doesn't work. Houses aren't bought with cash (mostly) and the headings on the paper don't make any sense (to me anyway, and I've bought and sold a few houses in the US). And if it were a cash transaction it would be huge piles of much larger denominations

Who puts a pear on a vase?

You don't inject pills, so unless you show crushing these pills into powder, I don't see why these objects go together

Lighting on food shots is really important - it needs to make you start drooling when you look at it! This might be a local dish served in a traditional way, in which case highlight that in description & keywords

That last image has a lot of spam keywords - it says it's chicken meat but pork, cutlet, turkey, beef and burger are there too. It also has healthy and diet, but the meal looks the opposite and wooden although there's no wood. You must stick to what's in the image - it won't help you sell more to add in irrelevant keywords.

There are more examples, but I hope this illustrates my point well enough. Apologies if it sounds harsh, but it's about the sales not about you or your photography. Good luck.

The short answer is no, I don't, but you want to compare this November with last November, not with October 2017.

If you don't have seasonal images, you might see a drop as this is the peak time of year for seasonal downloads - I just checked my last 200 sales on FT/Adobe and 39% were seasonal; SS was a bit lower this year at 33% of the total.

I have generally seen November be the peak sales month for my portfolio (started doing this in fall 2004)

That image is on Shutterstock too - I've written to Ruth Black to see if she can get Shutterstock to take those down (there's a whole bunch with that frosting)

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pink-cupcake-48159160

Are you talking one or two files or all? If it's one or two, it's trivial with the Adobe interface - in your portfolio view, click the image and click "Delete file"

Maybe they run some sort of automatic search by place name and come up with a list of keywords that come up empty.

Lots of the US cities on the list I have content on DT already.

I got the popup today and also email from DT yesterday with an even longer list of places "Buyers are looking for these places in your country right now:"

It seemed so amazingly idiotic and slightly funny that I didn't delete the email - there were probably 500 place names in a four column list!

I'm in the US, but they included small towns - Zephyr Cove, population 565 - and big cities - Tacoma, population 210,000. They also included places that aren't towns or cities, like Yellowstone National Park. There were lots of places I've never heard of - for example Tok (it's in Alaska) and Egg Harbor (one in Wisconsin and one in New Jersey, they don't specify which )

I find it literally incredible that buyers were searching for all these places. So what is DT trying to do?

Somewhere in a thread here  Mat confirmed that the odd amounts at higher than normal rates were from custom deals from large customers. I've had some around $5.xx. I don't know what the range of royalties is.

... but I'd be very surprised if they turn anyone away who happens to find out about it.

of course. Which is why trying to make the program more acceptable to contributors by saying they won't market it to existing customers is misleading spin.

Just tried uploading a couple of images to see if the new interface had reached the Seattle (US West Coast) area - not yet. I tried Safari (normally use Chrome) just to see if that was a factor, but still the old interface