Canva has always been the most lopsided site for me as far as the majority of the sales come from a few images. Since they went to the all you can eat mystery buffet I only get a few individual sales each month. They are still dominated by a few files.

Revenue continues to fall.

In cases of pics of myself I have used the same model release for a while - I presume I should upload a new model release when I cross an age boundary (or in my case is it possible to re-associate pics from a different age category with a different model release?) since it has been a number of years and photos since that happened.

I get a 404 error when I clicked on the "what do we mean by ...." link.

I presume we are to label people of mixed ethnicities/race as both or do we go with the USA method of just a little non-white makes one the non-white category.

At least it wasn't for 2 cents - but that is still unacceptable.

Not that they were great before, but after PA media took over their trustworthiness is even less impressive.

and the ranking is based on # of downloads, not $, so you might make a good amount with videos but rank very poorly because it is appears to be solely based on the # of downloads - perhaps per period of time, but I think it is just the overall # compared to everyone else.

I got the "top up" sales too. I haven't checked to see if they are all accounted for, but it is peanuts so it doesn't really matter for the $.  In other news I have more number of sales at Alamy than any other year and the gross total is higher than the previous 3 years although with the lower amount to me it might not be more net. Still, they haven't pulled a SS or an IS.

edit:
looking at the contributor report it looks like they took the commissions for Alamy and the distributor out of these top up amount - so they didn't really top things up all that much after all. I haven't tried to add up all the totals, but it looks like they messed up the "fix".

I think DT accepts them as an additional format you can upload. I don't know this 100%, but that was my understanding, and if you search on .png a lot of images come up.

What Pete said - except fix the math. More like .28 cents and 1 cent per image.

If it was linear (and it isn't) that means if you can get 3 more images accepted you will make less than one more cent in a month.

I finally got around to adding up my sales including the little earners and late reporters (I'm talking to you Getty - and I noticed Feb and Mar sales there were lower than what I had earlier recorded - <1$, but what's up with that?).

In any case it was an ok month - just a few $ above the new (much lower) normal now that sales and or prices and % I get have fallen pretty much across the board and I am off of SS and essentially off of iS (I did leave a few images there - mostly ones that weren't accepted elsewhere).

It doesn't inspire me to work on new stuff, but I am hoping that the brutal hemorrhaging of income is mostly over - until AI generated content takes over or the bean counters decide that it is best to prop up their quarterly numbers on the backs of the contributors again. In any case there I have only about 30% left to go from the peak (for me in 2012). Too bad inflation has prices for everything but stock photos about 30% higher in the same time frame.

The basics of how the algorithm works is obvious - put pictures that are likely to be bought in front of buyers. Obviously previous purchases on similar searches has a high rank.  What is less obvious are all the other factors such as location, age of the image, the port as a whole (and other factors about the artist suck as how often they upload, their location, and how well their other works do, and who knows what else), camera, image size, and who knows what other things that they use. Plus they are probably continuously doing testing and changing it.

Add in the fact that there is real money to be made in SEO and gaming the system and it is a lot messier than it started out.

I think of return per image or RPI and return per download or RPD as a more accurate way to post stats. For example if you have 1000 images at a site and sell 20 images at 100$ each (dream on eh?) the RPD is 100$ and the RPI is 2$.

Sadly, both of those are down a lot across the industry. I certainly don't feel like microstock is worth my effort these days, I will still keyword and upload a few pics that I am taking anyway and put enough work in that I can deduct some expenses, but I certainly won't be putting a lot of work or expense into taking pics just for microstock.

Fortunately I don't need it to put food on my plate, or I might be considering working for a king or a clown, or try to find another option like prints or book covers.

I strongly suspect that footage is following the path of still images, probably at a faster pace.

Interesting analysis. I think it would be very interesting to see if the relationships hold up for other companies.

Also do you think it is better to target only low or high competition keywords for an image or a portfolio or to mix them either for images or for the portfolio. For example if you go the low competition route, is it better to leave high competition words out entirely?


Search placement is nearly everything, but SS order - at least on my portfolio before I turned it off had almost no relationship to sales.

other takeaways - it seems word salad keyword pairs are good at SS, and at least some spamming works eg- adding "free" to every image?

I still feel like the keyword what is in the image and don't spam should be the best advice, sadly the real world results don't always bear that out.

I got the same e-mail saying it was an error etc.  This would be more acceptable if it didn't keep happening, but is sort of the minumum they can do for such a mess up. Also they haven't removed all the deductions so the 100 percent commission hasn't happened yet - it is also unclear if that means for a 2 cent sale I get a whole 2 cents, or if I only get one cent because the distributor who didn't have permission to sell (or give away) the image still gets their cut. The actual money is negligable, but maybe if they get nothing for their thieving they won't do it as often.

More worrisome is why they ever allow any distributors to sell images for 2 cents - or 10 cents or whatever that low.

over on the Alamy forum they posted

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/15988-sales-to-china/page/2/

"
Hi All,

 

We're very sorry that due to a technical error on our part some of you who have opted-out of distribution are seeing image sales on your account via distribution sales.

 

We are aware of the issue that these sales shouldn't have happened for those opted-out of distribution, and we're investigating to establish what happened so we can resolve this as soon as possible. We'll be paying all contributors 100% of the commission from these sales. If you think you shouldn't have seen these distribution sales on your account, you can email [email protected] however we will be getting in touch with everyone affected once we have a clearer picture on the matter.

 

Thanks,

 

Alamy

"

I got a bunch of distro sales from China for 22 to 2 cents for which I get 5 to 0 cents. I'm opted out of China this year. Plus 2 cent sales for which the photographer gets 0 is never ok. They need to put a floor on the amount the photographer gets. It doesn't have to be very high, but it should definitely not be 0.