That is better than I would have expected -  Yay for book covers. I guess you also need to take the cost of the drone into account and so on, but there is a value to learning new skills and so on too. For the last 10 years or more I don't think this has been a particularly wise way to make money - it can be done, but probably there are easier ways.

you forgot a few...

new submitters get a bump in search
sales stop right before I get to payout
posts in the site forum boost sales
reviewers reject images that will compete with their own images

I too used to have a SS resubmit folder - I think almost all of the resubmitted images were accepted. I haven't bothered renaming it AS resubmit.

It seems like there should be a way to demand the sales of illegally uploaded images along with the DMCA notice, but we all know that not only does SS not really care, they actively are annoyed at people that point out stolen ports.

If I were cynical and I thought that SS was greedy and evil I would suspect that they are trying to get everyone to cash out a few months before they stop operations so that they can keep all the new sales that don't add up to the cashout amount. That would be exciting news indeed.

good reminder.

At a minimum I would suggest opting out of China Distribution sales - you know the ones you get nothing for because out of a 3 cent sale the distributor gets 2 cents and Alamy gets one cent (or maybe it is the other way around).

I do remember scheming to sign up while on an overseas trip to get a Fotolia account with GBP (at the time I think that was the most beneficial) or Euros - still better than the $ pay at the time. I never put it into practice though. It was a little shady that people got paid more or less depending on where they were located. I also remember a few people in Europe that somehow were signed up with US$ accounts and had a very hard time trying to change them.

It sucks that you now have to pay excessive currency exchange fees, but it is perfectly reasonable that everyone gets paid the same for each type of sale - or at least has access to getting paid the same if they make enough sales.

This article may help explain why the number of "custom" versus "subscription" royalties has been growing so fast in the last couple of months:

https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/adobe-fights-off-canva-by-making-its-alternative-impossible-to-ignore/

I hope they don't next follow with the all you can eat but pay < a cent per use model

I think the last real improvement to the contributor experience there was about 2008.

Since then it has been nothing but exciting news.

Quote from: chris77 on March 11, 2023, 06:35

Quote from: pancaketom on March 04, 2023, 14:19

For February my "applies" are up 24% and "exports" are up 18%. We shall see if that translates to any increase in earnings when they report that later this month.

At least in my case it did not. The three bigger spikes are in February. Applied +51 and exports +17 when compared to the previous month. In January I made $ 874 and in February $ 887. So that's almost the same despite the increase in applies and exports.
For now the dashboard seems pretty useless when it comes to predicting income.

May I ask where to view this statistic? I can only find earnings for royalties and individual sales, but nothing that gives me an indication as to how many times an images has been applied or exported.

go to

https://www.canva.com/creators/element

and then select "dashboard" somewhere in the middle upper section of the page, and then you can select one of their selected time periods on the right side where it says "filter page by"

Thanks for sharing that analysis.

The other thing to remember is inflation - so even if things are steady they are really going down. It seems everything costs more except for stock. I know this isn't entirely true, but not so very far off either.

For February my "applies" are up 24% and "exports" are up 18%. We shall see if that translates to any increase in earnings when they report that later this month.

Thanks to Steve and your work for this data.

It would be interesting to chop the files count by lifetimes earnings at a finer slice - and then graph the total earnings by # of files - what is the sweet spot - is it really images that make ~80$ each, or more like ~50$ or what?

I still think there are a number of things out of our control that make the difference between a decent seller and a top seller - mostly those are the vagaries of sales and the how the sites decide to display the images. I'm sure Steve has produced more images of his cat and I suspect that some have done well and some not well at all - and as you say - it is hard to impossible to predict which ones will perform better - and the fact that some images do great on only one site suggests that it can be as much the site as the image itself. Still, producing a lot of good content is the most likely way to get decent and top sellers.

I suspect that Steve's top earners from 2020 are due to his recognition of trends - probably mostly around Covid and producing images that met those trends in a timely manner - well done. My facemask images produced early in 2020 didn't go anywhere, but it was a pretty half-hearted effort and I didn't have any old theater marques to play with.

I think timeless images could have a very long 1/2 life especially compared to current trend images - the fall off of sales is more due to how the agencies treat them than the images themselves. Stuff like wildlife and landscapes could age very well - unless the agencies just push them down over time solely based on their age - in which case maybe you should just re-upload everything every 10 or 15 years or once there are no sales after a certain period - in fact this is something that could be done automatically by a program even after you are no longer putting any effort into image production. 

My personal best seller at SS had daily sales until one day it didn't - it went from a top line on page one for a one word search to nowhere in the top 10 pages one day and the sales went away too. I think predictions for how sales would be 10 or 20 years out are on very shaky ground. I think with a large enough portfolio sales will go down to some low level and then putter along at that level - until the sites change something or technology like AI images comes along and they go down even lower. We have some historical data for the last 15 years or so, but the changes in the industry over that time are enough that predictions based on that data are pretty suspect.

I think the best seller sales over time graph would be easier to read if the 0 was the bottom line on your graph - not some point in space above it.

I guess the real takeaway is no secret - consistently produce images that meet a need and upload them to a lot of sites and you will get a lot of sales and once you stop producing images sales will fall off - rapidly at first and then more slowly.