Quote from: cobalt on February 12, 2023, 11:25

But it is a forum with many longtime users who have a lot of experience, this is true.

This place is a treasure trove of historical microstock information. After reading some of these really old posts, I can see how much the business has changed over the years. Gives a good idea of how competitive it has become, and also how the marketplaces have dramatically driven down the prices :/

Sadly microstock has become a lot less competitive with other jobs.

That is similar to what I looked at - although my numbers are much much lower. I wonder about the ratio of subscription plans to individual or credit sales - with longer term sub plans even if the dl # are much lower at the end of December the 4 should just be split about equally.

Something is making the amount we get per applies and exports go down over time. It could be people are taking more advantage of their plans or they are selling plans for less or ?  I'm a lot more annoyed about actual downloads that go for nearly nothing than if someone uses an image as part of a one-off design. I also am less annoyed if I am making close or more than what I make on the top sites. When $ amounts drop down into the lower tier levels it might be time to pull the plug.

I'm surprised they even mention maximizing "your" revenue, seems like a weird thing to mention since they so clearly don't care about our revenue.

So are you saying not to include the keyword "background" for a background image so as to not compete with hundreds of millions of images or not make those images at all or just stick it somewhere down after the first 10 or more keywords?  How about for an image with a white (or other color) background - should "background" not be one of the keywords or should it be included but just know that other keywords are more important?

When I look at what DT says was searched to find images sold it is usually a very simple one word search. Same for back when SS showed that info.

Good reminder to put in the words to find the image, not just describe it.

I guess they misread their database columns and did it for everyone. That is a big oops.


https://www.dreamstime.com/boards/forum-1/thread-52497

The subject pretty much says it all, I got a 1099 in the mail today from DT with my address and account name, but a different person's name and TIN and the $ amount was not correct for me either.  I did check to W-9 on file at DT and it is correct. I sent them an e-mail so I guess I'll see what they say. I hope my name SS# and $ amount wasn't sent to someone else.

The only place I've found to see earnings are at 

https://www.canva.com/earnings 

It usually takes me a while to figure out how to see that as you need to make sure you have selected the correct "team" first and there aren't any obvious links to it from the login page and I usually only do it once or twice a month.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on January 20, 2023, 11:25

And back to the part I was commenting on, percentage of sold images from anyone's portfolio, will also go down the harder we work and the longer we add new images.

That too, for me, is going up, not down. But I think that's mainly because my old photos were crap and I did not have a good understanding what sells well when I started out. But the more data from my own port I had, the more conclusion on what sells and what doesn't I could draw and the better I got at photography, the more I could produce content that sells and therefore the percentage of sold images is going up and not down.

There has been a pretty long history of discussion of "the wall" or whatever you want to call the point where downloads no longer go up or even start to fall despite continuous uploading. Unless you can continue to create more images than before or better sellers or the agencies sell more images it will catch up to everyone eventually. The question is how long before it catches up to you and if your income at that point is satisfactory compared to the amount of work you are putting in. 

I think that if you are making images that are more timeless then the falloff of sales will be slower and more driven by the whims of the algorithms than the buyers. Some who have stopped uploading have reported that sales fell for a while and then hit some sort of steady state. Depending on how timeless and popular your works are, that steady state level might be pretty good.

Of course if the agencies decide to pay us 50% less, our income will go down 50%.

123RF was showing good growth up to 2012 or so which is when they cut our take and promised double sales (that never happened). They held on fairly steadily until mid 2018 or so when sales really fell off a cliff for me. As they did a worse job of selling pics they took a larger share of the pie. They have been limping and crawling along ever since.

There are so many things wrong with the site these days I wonder if they even have anyone working on it.

Just think about how much more motivated you would be if you could have this race every month instead of just starting each year.

I am curious what happens when they take down a big portfolio like this - as far as I know they make no effort to find the actual image owners to pay, so my guess is SS just pockets all the $ they haven't paid out yet - this could be part of their new business model - allow fraudulent ports and then keep 100% of the sales - of course they keep so much of every sale anyway bumping it up to 100% probably isn't worth the effort and risk.

Individual sales for me have nearly completely dried up to just a few per month. The Royalty earnings were pretty good during the promised double what you used to make period - similar or better than AS for me. They have been sliding down ever since - down up to 50% from the best months - and based on the initial reporting of number of sales it was in the cents per use range - and I doubt it has improved although with the very opaque reporting we have no idea. I haven't submitted new material there in a while though - mostly because rejections were so plentiful and seemingly random, and partly because I don't like the mystery all you can eat buffet model. I guess mom doesn't like me all that much anymore.