Congratulations!

I'll help Russians. The ones who were killed during 8 year war.

Not quite sure how you can help those deceased Russians.
Putin will be ecstatic you want to help him; he's welcoming people like you to go and support his army.

Quote from: Zero Talent on March 08, 2022, 11:30

Just got the answer from Alamy:

We�ve now added the geo-restriction to your account, so you won�t see any direct sales to the territory of Russia.

Does that mean that they will sell it, but you don't see it and you will get no commission from it? Lol then

That's what I wondered when I saw the reply!

Oh, dear. 

Then there are images that make no sense in the search if you separate the compound keywords. Like Golden Gate Bridge. You could separate and have bridge as a separate keyword but golden and gate by themselves wouldn't apply at all. FWIW.

That's totally correct.

At least one of the micros, can't remember which (Adobe? not sure), actually splits the phrases. At least, on a file page I can see keywords alphabetised so that Bridge, Gate and Golden would appear like that, maybe with intervening keywords, when it's the Golden Gate Bridge.
(Unless by weird coincidence, the authors of the random files I clicked on all separated their 'phrase keywords'.)
I have no idea if some IT magic imn the background somehow holds the original 'phrase tag' together for searches.

Quote from: ShadySue on February 26, 2022, 15:03

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 26, 2022, 10:03

I'm going to try to bring this back to the subject of Alamy?

Last year I had the most downloads ever. No I didn't have any of those 7c specials. This year, and I'm a bit ahead but feel kind of safe on this one, I have NO SALES for the first two months. Always a surprise when sales are rather even, spread out across the year, and now, nothing? Not one?

How will I make the quota so I get 40% when they have lowered prices and in June will drop me to 20%? I don't see anything encouraging going on there right now.

Remember that your rolling year for calculating your next year's percentage is from 1 July last year, and it's $250 gross sales, so you will probably stay on 40% (barring any further squeezes they might impose  ) until July 2023, but after that, it's not so certain. It's particularly egrecious to make it a $$ amount of sales, when they control the price of each sale, and seem to be handing out huge discounts like sweeties.

Yes, to the rolling totals but in my case, no. Many of the better sales were early half of the year last year, which will roll over. And correct, they have reduced the prices, so even if I should suddenly get some sales, I won't make the minimum. That and selling for less, I'll also make less even at 40%

Things don't look very bright right now.

Are you really sure?
I'm a low-volume seller there with low-value sales with a few low-medium sales occasionally, but I just summed my Jan-Feb gross on excel and the past two months alone have me at over $250 gross. Net, of course, is 

I'm going to try to bring this back to the subject of Alamy?

Last year I had the most downloads ever. No I didn't have any of those 7c specials. This year, and I'm a bit ahead but feel kind of safe on this one, I have NO SALES for the first two months. Always a surprise when sales are rather even, spread out across the year, and now, nothing? Not one?

How will I make the quota so I get 40% when they have lowered prices and in June will drop me to 20%? I don't see anything encouraging going on there right now.

Remember that your rolling year for calculating your next year's percentage is from 1 July last year, and it's $250 gross sales, so you will probably stay on 40% (barring any further squeezes they might impose  ) until July 2023, but after that, it's not so certain. It's particularly egrecious to make it a $$ amount of sales, when they control the price of each sale, and seem to be handing out huge discounts like sweeties.

Quote from: marthamarks on February 25, 2022, 10:14

Quote from: Brasilnut on February 25, 2022, 10:05

I'll heading shortly to a protest at the Russian Embassy in Madrid to get some content. Wish me luck!

Good luck! Stay safe! Give Putin hell!!!!!!!!!!!

Excuse me, but this is not place to talk about politics or geopolitics. Who are you to decide who is good and who is bad? And what do you even know about the reasons for this invasion? There is a big community of both Ukrainians and Russians in this forum, in fact the two largest microstock communities in the world. So, please, don't get involved here by insulting or praising anyone or anything connected to this conflict. We all agree that innocent people shouldn't be the victims and that is it. There are plenty of forums and subreddits where you can express your opinion and get involved in discussion.

Who are you to decide what is to be talked about in this place?
Sure, there's an off-topic forum, but thread drift is inevitable in online forums, and has been since the days of Usenet.

I have now tested the whole thing with a few of my pictures in your sense and you're right - it does not matter. Thank you, I have learned something again.

It's not your fault, Ralf.
The system doesn't work in the way that Alamy says it works, and it hasn't since I joined c2009.

However, different algorithms can thow up vastly different results, and at least at the moment, the first page results look good. (but I just searched my usual Leonard Cohen and because of my recent mis-hit, Will Young.)

There is no single correct answer to your question.
As already mentioned as an example, it certainly makes sense to take "red lake" together.

But if we take Las Vegas, for example, the terms should be separated.
From my Alamy statistics, for example, I know that many buyers search only for "Vegas Strip" or "Vegas Hotel". If then took "Las Vegas" together, you're out of the search.

No, that's not how search works on Alamy.
Any word in the caption or keywords can be combined with any other to make a false search hit. It's one of Alamy's most annoying features - just look through your own searches.
So for example, say you have a photo of two people, correctly tagged "Joe Bloggs" and "Jane Doe"
These will turn up in searches for "Joe Doe", "Jane Bloggs", "Joe Jane" and "Jane Joe".

Depending on the particular algorithm at the time, these 'wrong' results may or may not rank higher than the phrases. So, for example, in some phases of the algorithm, if you search for "Jane Bloggs", you might get a lot of photos of Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe high up in the mixture above genuine photos of Jane Bloggs, which could be due to photographer sales ranking higher in that particular algorithm iteration.  In the real world, I check-search on "Leonard Cohen". At this particular moment, having just checked, the first page of that search is impressively 'clean', but in previous times, fewer than half of the first page results, sorted by 'Relevant' have been of the man himself.

For example, a few days back, I see via Customer Search, I had three 'hits' on a search for Will Young, a UK singer of whom I have no photos.
Two of them were live news photos for which the caption reads:
"Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Young people skating in George Square in central Glasgow where an ice-rink was opened on 24th November 2012 and will continue until 6th January 2012. ..."
The other was also LN, with the caption:
"Glasgow, Scotland, UK. 02nd August, 2018. Two young boys having their photos taken wearing 'Big Hands' at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome (Emirates Arena) in the Dalmarnock area of Glasgow before the first cycling events of the Glasgow 2018, a multi-sport event. Most of the sports will be hosted in Scotland, with the Velodrome hosting the Track Cycling events. "

Customer search shows that all of my three irrelevant pics were in the 'top' 800 searches, i.e. I can see that the customer looked through 800 pics. Searching Will Young on Alamy shows 68,667 hits. The first page is very relevant to the singer, but my totally irrelevant hits based on the caption indicate that it deteriorates pretty quickly.

So, as long as you had "Las Vegas" and "hotels" you'd still show up in a search for "Vegas Hotels", how high or low depending on the particular algorithm at the time and possibly your own personal ranking. You could also hedge your bets by tagging "Las Vegas" "hotels", and "Vegas Hotels".

I seem to have got 2c more than I was expecting, but Getty figures tend not to match, IME.

However, the posts earlier in this thread about big discrepancies and getting payment while under threshhold are surprising.

The world has gone mad. Or I'm just an unwoke dinosaur.

I got tickets for a series of online concerts.
Afterwards, I got a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Not one was about the quality of the concerts.
All were about my ethnicity, gender choices, sexuality or disabilities and whether any of these had led to difficulties with the booking process or with accessing the content.

I'm trying very hard to understand this, but the only difficulties if would cause would be if any of these directly led to me having a poorly paid job, or none, therefore indirectly I couldn't afford a ticket or a device to view the shows on, or was physically or mentally unable to use a device - therefore I wouldn't have been a customer so wouldn't have got a customer satisfaction questionnaire.

If anyone can see where I'm going wrong on this, please feel free to try to explain. Because it seems to me that like with the Alamy questionnaire, it's just a ticky box exercise.

I canceled exclusivity at istock about nine years ago. After canceling exclusivity my images still sold for exclusive prices but i only got non exclusive 16%. Istock wasn't able to fix this. So i canceled my account and uploaded from zero.

Weren't you getting 16% of the 3 credit price?
And now you're getting 16% of the 1 credit price?
Looks like you were shooting yourself in the foot, UNLESS you get more than 3x sales when the prices are lower, which is perfectly possible; though like many things hard to prove cause and effect, as your reuploads would get different best match positioning.