Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on February 24, 2016, 10:24

I had a download on January 25th for $21, but I didn't see anything from yesterday, unless it disappears completely from the records.

I had a image removal with a reduction in red type and a new sale by the correct amount this morning. So the original "sale" is shown

I haven't had any huge sales, but for prior refunds what I have seen is the reversal shown as a negative number in the Gross Earned and Net Earned columns and under that, in red, (Refund for another download).

Unfortunately, they don't connect the refund to the original sale, so you need to go back to find the image in the list with the same sale amount to know what goes with what - although for a $500 sale that'd be easy - I've never had anything over about $30 from 123rf

I haven't seen anything - and I just went to look at the site, but as the change isn't in effect yet, all the prices and terms are still for 10,000 copies.

But unless they're upping the price (I'm guessing they aren't), P-EL and W-EL are 50 credits each - so we get from 25% to 45% depending on the level. That's a lot of rights for not a lot of cash to us. Looking back, I see a range of $8.50 to $25.88 for my ELs

I also see that it's been ages since I got an EL.

Effectively this is another price & royalty cut - more rights for the same money. Problem is that I think I'd have to edit images one by one to turn off ELs - there's no batch editor and no overall opt out. I might just turn it off for all the level 5 images just to make a point.

Overall it seems to be a waste of effort for DT - their problems go way deeper than EL pricing - so they don't send out notice to contributors, which is rude, and I suspect they'll derive no sales bump from the move anyway...

... I had a large number or Rights Ready sales amounting to mere pennies - $0.04, $0.10 etc which came from an outfit called Wochit....

If you look at Wochit's pricing it's a subscription where you make 4 videos a month for $30 or 15 for $100 (there is a custom option but they don't publish prices)

https://www.wochit.com/pricing/

They offer unrestricted access to music clips and video for those 4 or 10 videos, so whatever portion of the $7.50 or $6.67 goes to royalties might be shared, but I still don't see how you get to 10 cent royalties. In other words Wochit prices are low, but it still seems like the creator is getting next to nothing. Even if 10 cents is 20% of what Getty receives, 50 cent royalty out of $7.50 paid by the buyer?

They also allow the video to be used to generate ad revenue - not sure what the standards are but it almost seems like the type of use that should require an extended license. Is this a standard right to offer with a royalty free video?

"How can I monetize the online videos I make?

Small and large businesses alike find great value in creating videos that generate revenue � they run ads against the videos (selling pre-roll on videos uploaded to their sites or monetizing on YouTube). You can do this as well. Once you create a video and click �Publish�, the video is yours to utilize. Wochit also has partnerships with syndication platforms like AOL.On, Yahoo!, Inform and others which enable further distribution and yes, revenue. For more information please have a look at our terms and conditions or contact support."

I got a 18 cent one. Go figure. A.

If you're at the 45% level, that's the minimum payout - such as when they offer a free promotional image

I have not had any downloads in the past 3 days at DT. That NEVER happens, whatever they did to the search algorithm completely killed my port. I've been with them since 2004 and it's never been this bad.

DT is doing very poorly for me. They have almost the same set of images that Shutterstock does but they manage about 1/10  the income. I've had 3 sub downloads today, but prior to that there was one sub on Feb 9th!! It's pitiful. I see weekdays without downloads and the occasional credit sale on a level 4 or 5 image doesn't even begin to make up for the loss of volume.

Looking just at January, I made less than half what I did in Jan 2015 and about 28% of what I made in Jan 2013.

Do you have a question related to stock photography?

The agencies set the acceptance criteria for images they will represent, and those are the rules we live by for work we want to license through them.

Same goes for model and property release policies.

If you want to explore legal boundaries, license directly instead of through an agency. Then you can set whatever rules you like and take whatever risks you deem worthwhile.

This showed up for me today (when logged in to my regular-not contributor-account). It seems to work well to find 100 visually similar images although there are some pretty odd things about the way it works.

With a picture of yellow beach umbrellas on a tropical beach, it found the image I fed it and the others were all along the same lines.

With a picture of a street in a village in Kent (England) it found the image I fed it but put it 2nd in the list - a street in Germany that didn't look much like my picture at all was first. Also, there's apparently no keyword component used, so you get images from many countries with houses with streets. You might imagine asking if the search should be narrowed by location and presenting some of the location keywords found in the first 5 or so hits. That search gave me images from Russia, Sweden, Germany, Galveston, TX, Michigan, Canada, various places in the UK...

I did get an error once: "Oops! Something went wrong, please try again. We only support JPG and PNG images under 5MB and no larger than 4000px on either side at this time." The image I used was 1200 px on the long edge and about 600K. It worked later when I tried it again.

One failure was an image of an isolated picnic basket - I fed the search a small PNG and the image I have on SS is a JPEG. Image search didn't find the one I was looking for although all the found objects were isolated baskets of similar colors. Similar failure with a PNG of a flower vase illustration. Strangely, an isolated PNG of a dish of candies worked OK and found the JPEG I'd uploaded, although it was 17th behind a bunch of pomegranates, grapes and other red items.

I fed the search a crop that was web banner proportions (very wide but short) of an image it could find when fed the full version but it failed to find it (and the key item, a lighthouse, was in the web banner version)

Another search that didn't work as well as I'd have hoped - I fed search a similar image to one that's in my portfolio (same beach, sandcastle and kids, but a slightly different angle) and it didn't find it. It did find lots of people on beaches but didn't match the subject all that well (e.g. standing with surfboards vs sitting making a sandcastle).

An isolated image of a woman (with long hair) was found, but the others in the 100 included lots of men, one bald and several with short hair - even with a beard!

One search that didn't work all that well, even though it did find the image as the first hit from a cropped version I fed to the search: It was a black cat on a hardwood floor at the top of a staircase. All the other images had hardwood floors, but had people exercising, stretching etc. Not an animal in any of them

One picture of a house in the snow was found, but it was placed 6th in the list and I couldn't see why the "wrong" images rated higher in the order.

One cropped version of an image of gold coins was found, but it was in 18th place - again, I wasn't sure why it was so far back.

It's a good tool (and quick) for getting the type of image - balloons or easter eggs or beach umbrellas or houses. It's not quite so adept if you're trying to find a specific image, although it's a great start.

From the IRS's web site:

"You may round off cents to whole dollars. If you do round to whole dollars, you must round all amounts. To round off amounts to the nearest whole dollar, drop amounts under 50 cents and increase amounts from 50 to 99 cents to the next dollar. For example, $1.39 becomes $1 and $2.50 becomes $3. If you have to add two or more amounts to figure the amount to enter on a line, include cents when adding and only round off the total."

https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1042s/ch02.html

The best unified solution that is slowly gaining traction (and would benefit everyone quicker if all the professional yet disgruntled contributors hopped on) is Symzio.

Symzio is just replacing one boss (Oringer or Enache or...) with another - Robin. As it's Robin's baby, I can see why he views it as best, but that's not speaking from the contributor's point of view. As to "unified", I don't have a clue what that really amounts to. There's talk about contributor control - which they have over their own site - but over Symzio, that's Robin's. Symzio has "I can boot you out any time for any or no reason" wording that all the agencies have. There's no haven there, which is perhaps a reason why more people aren't hopping on.

The last time this happened to me I got in touch with support and the explanation was that an existing customer had come back for extended licenses. I had a bit of a go-around with them as the images had been deactivated between the time they were originally licensed and the EL was sold.

They never explained by this was processed off books but I did get an amount for each file versus just a file list and total amount. They have the details if you don't mind waiting for answers to support tickets.

I'm seriously considering some sort of legal action. Some of the tracings of my images have tens of thousands of downloads on freepik...they've been up there for years.

Given that this crew appears to be based in Spain, going after anything in the US you can might be more straightforward, cheaper and faster. You already mentioned Shutterstock - trying to get them to cut off the affiliate status for all this person's companies. It gives them legitimacy even if they don't earn much from affiliate sales.

The hosting companies, if they're in the US, and payment processors are the other options. At some point, the earn-money-from-other-people's-work big gorilla, Google, was making efforts to appear to combat piracy by adjusting searches to remove or penalize sites that were mostly pirate work. Possibly you could convince Google that this was a rogue site - without search engine position, I'm assuming it would really slow them down.

If you know any illustrators based in Spain that they've ripped off, perhaps they might have some avenues to pursue?

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bfa-and-shutterstock-have-signed-an-exclusive-multi-year-global-syndication-deal-300217019.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/02/09/shutterstock-increases-its-media-reach-with-bfa-deal/#7f199df73d79
http://wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/shutterstock-global-licensing-deal-bfa-billy-farrell-10342632/



Stock hits three year low - go figure. I did hear a story on the radio today that tech stocks were getting hammered, so possibly it's nothing specific to SSTK or the deal

http://www.wallstreet.org/shutterstock-seals-exclusive-syndication-deal-with-bfa-shares-hit-new-3-yr-low-nysesstk/

I guess Premier customers will be happy to have something to add to the flood of marijuana pictures and identical icons in every color combo imaginable