I see a sub from 2010. Wow, we got .36 for subs back then. My 2021 refund is only for .216. I don't feel like my income is doubling,

Maybe they are only going after exclusive content (which they do have) or they employ some sort of digital watermark - which wouldn't be hard to do at least for un-compressed images but they would have had to start doing this from the beginning which I doubt they did do or they would have been going after infringers earlier. In any case going after non-exclusive images that have been out in the wild for ages would be pretty hard. Although they do have a record of all the refunded image sales, so maybe they can go after them if they are still in use. If I had an illegal use I'd just say I bought it from Lucky Oliver or something like that.

In my very limited searching for my own images it seems like sometimes there was a legitimate use - often with a weird crop, and then a heap of copies of that very same crop - often in blogs that were not in English. I don't see them collecting much from those places even at under a dollar.

I think there is still money on the table. Just depends on your expectations really. I have been in micro since 2005ish, mostly with food and minerals. Income steadily decreased over time and I stopped taking photos in 2018 for many reasons.

About a year and a half ago, I pulled all my work from every stock site (about 12k photos), then uploaded 6500 to Wirestock without any restrictions. Then I simply sat back and forgot about it. Doing it this way took away all my stressing, and interestingly, took away all the history of my images (best sellers, etc) since they are basically "new" with Wirestock.

So for a "new" contributor, I make anywhere between 0 and 80 dollars a day. If you average it out, maybe 6-8 bucks a day. That doesn't count the thousand or so I pulled with Instant pay.  Remember, I have done nothing in almost 4 years.

If you've already done all the work, its just free money. If you do the research and planning that some other successful people here do, you can make a lot more.

my portfolio: wirestock dot io/terry.davis1/portfolio

Nice mineral pics. (in a previous life I was a geologist). I have a few mineral images that never sold much, and a few rock pics that have sold a bit better but not well. I wonder if going the wirestock route was better or worse than just letting everything ride. Probably less work total with wirestock though.

I started in 2006, but really started uploading a little more seriously in 2007. For me, 2010 or whenever it was Istock/Getty changed was the end of them and 2012 was the high point overall. I quit SS when they went 10 cent and my income there dropped in half again. I still collect $ and upload from time to time but mostly images I am taking anyway or something I just see when I am out with my camera. I very rarely actually set up and take pics just for micro anymore.

I certainly wouldn't be getting into this if I was starting now although there is still money to be made. Demand is as high as ever, but nowhere near the supply. Not only are sales much less in number, but the compensation is much lower than it was in the 2008 or so to 2017 time period.

I think with the skills and work required to do well now you could do much better with something else.

The future prognosticator suggests that if you really keep putting in the hard work you could double these results in the next month.

There is not a lot of information in the sales "report"

I don't have any for sale there anymore, but back in the day I remember from time to time images would disappear - usually because they decided on a new restriction on what could be sold based on intellectual property. So at some point they got rid of a bunch of vehicle images. Good luck figuring out which images they were out of ~8000 though.

A long time ago when SS was making me the most $ I looked at the best sellers for landscape / travel pics and noticed that the first page was almost all oversaturated overly bright images. I tried to make some like that but almost all of them got rejected for whatever the standard rejection was at the time - oversaturated or distorted pixels or something. I am guessing they would be accepted now, but SS is no longer on my list.

I do often mess with curves and darken the sky in landscapes. I have done a few sky replacements, but it usually seemed like way too much effort for the reward. Maybe if I was more efficient at post processing it would be worth it. Certainly a flat gray sky image is unlikely to sell, where one with a good sky might sell. Maybe I should throw a few puffy happy clouds into my numerous images with clear blue skies (I live in the desert).

I am often amazed at the blatantly unrealistic looking images on the first page - ones where the shadows go the wrong way for where the sun is or sunset skies over a mid-day scene. I guess as someone says - if it sells it is right. Someone recently pointed out an image where the sky was 90 degrees off complete with sideways clouds.

Alamy sales seem fairly random to me. So far this month I've got way more than last month (which was pretty bad - 2 sales for ~7.50 for me). This month they also refunded a sale from January for ~129 gross, but then re-bought it with the same terms for ~130. I have had plenty refunded and re-bought at the same price or lower over the years, but this might be the first that went up if even only a little bit, and they didn't even drop the percentage I got.

My click through rate was pretty high for most of Feb, so maybe there were sales that will show up later.

Quote from: Sheila_F on March 01, 2022, 19:39

SS separates them but for Adobe, my compound keywords don't get separated as far as I have noticed.

Ok, thanks for the info.  I've just looked and it seems that a lot of Alamy contributors must split their own keywords.  Though 'no people' always seems to be 'stuck together'!

It also seems that files on SS can have 'phrase keywords'.

Hmmmm.

Dreamstime splits up the keywords to single words and puts them in alphabetical order. I think there is a way to make compound keywords - maybe in quotes, but I haven't bothered much.

As to how it should be done - compound keywords should stick together, you should for example keyword the Golden Gate Bridge "golden gate bridge, bridge" so it shows up in a search for the actual named bridge plus any old bridge.

They announced they were closing sometime mid last year, there was some worry about not getting a last payout, but they sent it. I did pretty well there at first, but then things slowed down to about bigstock levels. I am guessing they had pretty small overhead and made a bit of money but the $ to effort kept going down so they pulled the plug.

I think that at one point BS was a bit of a sandbox for SS to play with - lower payment to contributors there to see how it went, and so on before trying it on SS - we all know how that went.

Now I think they are still making a little money off it, so they can just let it ride.

getting a bit of thread drift here, but as I recall with DT subs you could get 1,2,or 3 sub sales for .35, .70, and 1.05. I quite liked that and even the lowest sub sale meant the image was making progress towards a higher tier.  I think DT said the buyers were confused and complained about using up their sub allotment too quickly so DT dropped it. The higher level credit sales can be quite good, but they are also very rare. Nowadays it is almost all subs, although the rare other sales make a big difference in the total for the month. The percentage they pay is also tied to the image level for credit sales, so not only does a higher level sale cost the buyer more, but the artist gets a higher percentage of that.  As far as people wanting images that have little to no sales, I've got heaps of them - have at it. (although I do wish DT would pay a higher percentage for the level 0 sales (and all sales for that matter)).