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Messages - mindstorm
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201
« on: September 29, 2018, 11:35 »
It is pure spamming and I don't see the point in blackbox. It's hard enough doing stock with what the agencies take without adding extra middlemen. Complete waste of time IMO.
Doesn't even come close to the definition of spamming, since it has been written exactly once in exactly one forum, and in response to a relevant query. If you don't like BlackBox, that is fine. You are missing out by not understanding it though. In this case, the "middleman" as you put it, results in your making more money per sale than if you were working directly with the end agency. I don't pay for software to help upload photos, because they are all pure cost with little net benefit. I was skeptical of BB for that exact reason. I happen to be a convert myself though. Costs nothing to join and check it out for yourself. Again, your choice though. And I would NEVER consider going with a single agency in an exclusive arrangement, as Vimeo wants. That is simply a non-starter, be it Getty or Vimeo or any of the others that only accept exclusive content. Regardless, my earlier comment was not spam in the slightest...
202
« on: September 27, 2018, 21:35 »
What does this have to do with the topic of Vimeo Stock?
People are talking about getting in to this new video sales platform. I am pointing out that video is much harder than photos, and that there is a viable alternative that gets you on multiple platforms with a single (and pretty simple) upload mechanism. The icing on the cake is that you also get paid MORE when going through them, than if you had the same sale directly from the agency (unless you are doing insanely large volumes of sales). Thus, I believe it is very relevant to anyone wondering about how to get into the new Vimeo video sales platform.
203
« on: September 27, 2018, 18:30 »
Video is an extremely difficult market to get into, many have failed.
Following with interest if someone has interesting input
If you want to do video, I strongly suggest looking into BlackBox.global. Video is a lot more work to submit than images, since none of the metadata goes with the files (as they do with JPG). Also, BB aggregates all member videos, and thus negotiates a higher payout percentage. In fact, the % they get is high enough that, even after they take their 15% of the royalty, you end up with more $$ in your pocket than if you had submitted on your own. https://www.blackbox.globalIf you do use them, I would appreciate your using my referral code -- JKX5J2D3 . Yeah, one of those "I get a small % that comes out of the agency pockets and doesn't cost you anything" If you follow me at all, you know I almost never recommend a third party service. This one, I happen to believe in enough to break that rule of silence though BTW, they ONLY do videos. No still images, no music, etc.
204
« on: September 19, 2018, 14:26 »
That started happening to me back in February. When I contacted tech support, they said they knew of the problem and that I would have to single each photo 1-by-1 until it was fixed.
Zero update since then, and the problem still exists. I simply put BS on hold and will not upload anything new until they fix this. No way are they a big enough revenue generator to warrant such nonsense...
205
« on: September 19, 2018, 01:24 »
So I can pass on my code (not redeemed) to someone else?
You know, it is not really that hard to read the Abobe official docs on this promotion. And they say, very explicitly that the offer is not transferrable or salable...
206
« on: September 16, 2018, 22:51 »
Huh? From the OP in this thread:
"To qualify you need to one of the first 20,000 contributors to have 300 files approved or have $500 in earnings since January 1, 2018 with a 50% or higher approval ratio to receive a CCP member. "
(NB, "50%" isn't a ratio, "1 in 2" is. Just sayin'.)
Not sure where you saw that, but the 50% acceptance was not mentioned in ANY promo blurb that I read. And that includes the general news feed I read just today (Sunday, Sept 16) on this subject. I read it quite carefully to see if I had missed it, and nope, they talked about the "$300 revenue or 300 media accepted" but NEVER mentioned the "50% acceptance" requirement...
207
« on: September 16, 2018, 22:48 »
https://forums.envato.com/t/envato-api-incident-update/192039
So, for 3 hours, some users received some additional information in their MSP reports. Nothing important was revealed, and the reports were of a short term nature. Yet the OP panics and says this is terrible and the world is ending. Get a life! (and thank you SpaceStockFootage) for the source report...
208
« on: September 16, 2018, 16:58 »
#1) YES, there are free code remaining. (At least according to Adobe last week).
#2) What they don't tell you in ANY of the blurbs, is that you must also have 50% lifetime acceptance rate to qualify. 49% and it doesn't matter if you got 1000 images accepted this year...
#3) They send out the codes in batches. I think once a month (though I am not positive on the frequency). if you really do qualify, it will come...
For #2, when I asked them, I was told that I was not initially over the 50% threshold (huh? never saw that in any blurb about this promotion!), but that my acceptances this year had pushed me over the top, and yes, my code would be coming "soon." It came about 3 weeks later (hence my suspicion of once per month).
In my case, I had initially uploaded a lot of images last year, not realizing that Adobe did not accept editorial content. Thus, I started off at a very low acceptance rate. In the last year, I realized the issue and stopped sending them editorial, and thus my acceptance rate moved upward. Fortunately, it moved above the critical (and totally unannounced!) 50% acceptance rate threshold in time.
209
« on: September 16, 2018, 15:28 »
I have not seen any reported sales in my reports that were not for my photos. I am on a Mac, if that matters.
And, when I have had issues with MicroStockr Pro (a few, though none ever very serious), their tech support has been quick to respond, and fixes usually follow within a few days.
As far as "very serious," it might throw your report off for a few days, but I sure don't see any serious consequences. So what if you happen to see that someone else's image sells today? How does that harm either you or them? Nothing there that cannot be seen on the public interfaces at the agencies.
MSrPro is simply a nice, efficient way to consolidate your reports from the agencies and see them all in one place at any time of the day. It isn't actually changing what you get paid by one penny...
And FWIW, I have zero relationship to MSrPro other than as a very happy user...
210
« on: September 10, 2018, 16:55 »
Do they only want material from those who don't mind going through complex hoops for peanuts?
Basically, yes. They see themselves as the 800 lb gorilla. If you upload at anyone, you will upload to SS. Once you have done that, you may decide it isn't worth going to all the small agencies. Thus, SS gains if StockSubmitter dies...
211
« on: September 10, 2018, 16:51 »
Would you consider acceptable for an agency to sell your stock content on all major platforms given that you only need to provide the content (no need for metadata, keywords and other details to be filled)? Or instead you would prefer to pay for tagging service and upload by yourself? In the first option, you will pay a small fee per sale.
Look at BlackBox for videos. They have a ton of people picking them up for doing about what you suggest. One change though. They negotiated a higher payout with the agencies because of their huge volume. After only 3 months in business, they already have almost 100,000 video clips on Shutterstock, and BB says that the other agencies have higher number yet, with SS being one of the lowest. BB charges 15% of the received royalty. However, their payout is sufficiently larger than most humans could obtain, that the amount you receive from a BB sale is actually larger than a direct sale to the same agency. Now... if you could arrange that (a higher payout than I get by going direct) AND you could address all the major agencies (first and second tier), then I might actually consider your service. Otherwise, no. It just isn't all that hard submitting photos to the agencies myself to give a part of it up to someone else. (Videos are much harder to upload, partly because of file size and partly because keywords, titles, etc are not part of the video format, so must be copy/pasted for each clip for each agency)
212
« on: September 10, 2018, 03:58 »
Does anyone here really think a letter (or a ton of letters) will make the slightest difference in their position??
StockSubmit helps you submit to a dozen (or more) agencies all at once. How do you think anyone at SS thinks that is an advantage to them? YOU may like the feature, but I very much doubt that SS likes it.
I am now retired, but spent my career in High Tech. I can assure you that they are looking for how to create a competitive advantage.
Making themselves fully compatible to an app that allow you to submit the exact same footage across multiple agencies? Nope. Not even in the top 100 features they are considering...
213
« on: September 08, 2018, 22:05 »
Personally, iStock has never been much of an income generator. As such, I stopped bothering with disambiguation at the start of this year.
My stuff has all keywords set in ShutterStock (my main income producer). Other agencies get what SS provided. If they don't like it, tough luck. It is not worth the effort to go through their games for each image, knowing I will be making about $1/hr for my efforts...
SS, on the other hand, has proven worth the effort for me, so it gets it.
214
« on: September 07, 2018, 20:13 »
That technique should not be hard for the agencies to defeat. They simply need to encode the image url instead of using it in plain text. And note that this video is from a year ago. Yet one of the commenters said it no longer works as of July 2017 -- which implies that 500px saw they were being hacked like this and made a fix. Yes, it is disgusting that people steal our photographs. Now... do you steal songs or movies or TV or software or ...? It usually seems that people are only upset if their specific material is being stolen, yet come up with excuse after excuse about why it is OK to steal someone else's material...  And for the record, I pay for all my music (mostly from iTunes), all my audio books (almost all from Audible), all my movies (either iTunes or Amazon Prime), and all my software. If I feel someone should not steal my stuff, then I don't feel I should steal anyone else's stuff either...
215
« on: September 06, 2018, 11:38 »
If you are doing so well in micro-stock! fine! but when people start dodging their origin, their countries well that makes me suspiscious. tsk, tsk!
I have no idea why a "person's origin" is relevant??? FWIW, I was born and spent most of my life living California (USA, just in case there is any doubt...). I moved to Ecuador when I retired in 2013, so now consider Ecuador my home.
216
« on: September 06, 2018, 11:35 »
May I ask when you started? Are you in the .38 cent club?
Not yet. I am in the .36 club.  Though I started in 2011, I only had a couple hundred images online until about a year ago (summer of 2017) when I decided to get more serious. My portfolio has grown from about 400 in Aug 2017 to 3600 today, and I still add a couple hundred images per week. More recently (last month) I have started getting serious about uploading video clips also. I have about 120 of those online now, and probably another 200 or 300 by the end of this year. No sales there yet, but I am just getting started, and I understand video typically takes longer to get traction. If interested, here is my SS link -- http://shutterstock.com/g/mindstorm
217
« on: September 05, 2018, 11:37 »
I sometimes wonder if I am selling to a different SS than the rest of you whiners...?
1) I DO get rejections of submissions. Not a lot, but then I don't put up a lot of junk either. My last batch of 126 images had 9 rejections today (all for "main subject not in focus" or "noise" -- a couple were a bit crunchy...).
2) I DO get sales on new images. I uploaded a batch of Namibia photos last week of lions, elephants, and the like. I had 21 sold from that batch just in the last 2 days.
3) My sales DO drop every summer. August is always bad for me. But then it roars back in September and is good the rest of the year.
4) I DO sell most of my portfolio. Two months ago, I had 2500 images in my portfolio. According to MicroStokr Pro, 1729 of those images have had sales. (I added another 1000+ in the last 2 months, as I went back and added stuff I had overlooked in my older stuff on my disk -- and yes, those are starting to sell too)
218
« on: September 04, 2018, 00:09 »
To sum up - this particular video has been accepted three times by agencies and rejected one time.
Nothing in the least unusual about that. I have many hundreds of photos that were rejected on SS that are being sold on other sites. And others that were accepted by SS but rejected by other sites. It happens. Just move on to the next media and don't waste time on it. However, if you do post the video here and ask for feedback on why it was rejected, don't get all defensive about it. If you can't take honest criticism of your work, then you shouldn't post it (here or anywhere else on social media)... As is, you are getting awfully close to being blocked, as I really don't want to waste my time trying to help someone who has no interest in actually listening. To sum up (as you say) a gatekeeper kept it off one agency. Yawn. I would have rejected it if I were the reviewer too, for the reasons already stated above...
219
« on: September 03, 2018, 19:11 »
I was also wondering why I didn't get my code a few weeks back, so I emailed Adobe on their support page about the question. Someone got back to me a few days later. They said that I had passed the 300 accepted level, but that my acceptance rate at the start of the year was under 50%. I had never read about 50% acceptance rate being part of the criteria?? At any rate, she said that my submissions this year have brought my rate above 50% (I had uploaded a ton of editorial images early on, before I realized they did not accept them, which brought my early rate way down). I should expect my coupon soon. Sure enough, it came in the mail a week later. As luck would have it, the coupon came just a few days before my annual renewal of the CC Photo Bundle was due. Effectively, Adobe just paid me an extra $120, which is a nice bonus...
220
« on: September 02, 2018, 20:30 »
I upload whenever I have the material. I am not really selling for THIS holiday, but for every similar holiday in the future.
Typically I go to some celebration (New Year's Eve, Corpus Cristi, whatever) and capture it the best I can. I then edit all the material, which takes me several days. At that point, I have missed the news cycle (let alone advertising cycle) for this year. But now my stuff is there for next year, whenever a buyer decides to look for it -- and every year after that.
Sure enough, Corpus Cristi is a big deal here in South America. I shot a couple hundred images back in 2013 at one of the celebrations. My first sale on those images was in 2014, and every year in May/June I see them coming up again.
Doesn't make me rich, but those sales here and there for this and that is basically what stock photo market is all about...
221
« on: September 02, 2018, 12:08 »
@DragonBlade - I think you are missing the entire point of the discussion. Your video was rejected by the reviewers. Like it or not, they are the gatekeepers.
We are trying to give you an idea of WHY that reviewer probably rejected your video. You keep being defensive on what you wanted to do -- which doesn't matter one whit to the reviewer.
You say "we will let the buyer decide" but no you won't -- the reviewer decides what the buyer will see.
You can "shoot for yourself" or "shoot for the market." You have plenty of feedback now on why the market does not want this clip. If you want to "shoot for yourself," then that is completely fine. Just don't expect to get it on an agency where you might find some buyer who happens to agree with you.
222
« on: September 01, 2018, 11:48 »
Usually when I shoot sunset time lapses, I slightly overexpose at the very beginning because I factor in that it will get darker later on.
And there is your problem... Get LRTimeLapse, and it will raise the quality of your time-lapses during dawn/dusk into a whole new sphere. (I have no relation to the software other than a happy user -- it is a life changer for doing time lapse)
223
« on: August 28, 2018, 22:16 »
dumb question- if a company just decides to quit the business they don't have to legally pay us?
We are simply unsecured creditors. When the company files bankruptcy, they liquidate all their assets for whatever money they can get. The first money goes to employees, then to secured creditors (usually banks). If there is any left, then it goes to other creditors. There is rarely enough money to reach the unsecured creditors. If there were, then the company probably would not have filed bankruptcy...
224
« on: August 28, 2018, 14:46 »
Pauws99 has it right -- there is a time weighting of any decent search.
Think about it. If that were not the case, your search would give you results that were 20 years old, because they were popular at one time and that popularity kept them at the top... which means they stay popular.
The only way to get more current information is to include a time weighting.
225
« on: August 28, 2018, 14:43 »
not sure though about using the commercial label, as a still from the video would continue to be editorial
I have a timelapse along this same feeling that I did last week. I submitted as editorial myself. As you say, each still would be editorial, and anyone can stop at any single frame when reviewing, so...?? BTW, If you are doing time lapses, you should really look into LRTimeLapse. I have no relation to the company other than as a happy customer, but it is SO MUCH more powerful than PS for time lapses that you will never go back. (I use the Pro version myself)
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