applies and exports up, $ down. This seems to be the usual for Canva these days. The all time earnings look like the left side of a half pipe. Down maybe 30% from the first half of 2024. The drop is slowing, but it is awfully low and still dropping. I'm not sure what accounting tricks they do to avoid paying us much, but they seem to be working.

The Chinese plagiarism program plagiarized off the US plagiarism program and does it cheaper with less energy, maybe time for the US program to plagiarize back.

Yeah, some of those "violations" are pretty silly - like an old linoleum knife, someone rock climbing, a woman in swimsuit standing about 10 feet above a river, the Manzanar Camp in California, or a steak dinner.

Sure, don't show the dead animals or people free soloing to educational buyers, but a steak dinner?

Of course the way they report this to us is completely ridiculous too, like we violated their terms (that they didn't even have when we uploaded this images).

At one time Canva was actually a new way of selling our work, now I think they are just pushing the race to the bottom.

Personally, I'd prefer AI to be off by default and I wish there was a way to turn off AI for social media,  news, etc.

Maybe Adobe (and SS?) are hoping that at some point they can use AI to clean up the horrible AI images that completely litter the library. Or more likely it will be like spam keywords where a few of the most egregious get a little slap and the rest just sit there polluting everything. How can you expect them to fix AI when they can't even fix images that are labeled as multiple sites (like listing 10 national parks when it clearly can't be more than 1).

I do wonder about the drift when AI is used to train AI. Careful AI producers look at the images at full resolution and fix all sorts of things, others just post anything that looks good at thumbnail (or worse) scale.

The fires are pretty bad (I'm currently in Orange County, so pretty much the entire city of LA is in between me and the fires). The winds were pretty fierce here the last 2 days, it is pretty calm now (right where I am), but I think it is supposed to be at least 20 mph winds where the fires are for the rest of the week (as opposed to gusts up to 70+ mph last night). This area hasn't had any real rain for many months of unusually hot weather so everything is quite dry. Once a fire gets started in those conditions it is pretty much unstoppable and embers blow downwind and start new fires easily. These conditions were in the forecast with some pretty dire warnings, they knew if fires started it would be bad - and they brought in a bunch of extra firefighting equipment but with thousands of homes up against tinder dry foothills there is only so much you can do.

What did Biden do? - cancelled a planned ceremony for a new National Monument here, and declared a state of emergency. surely you don't expect him to grab a fire hose and get in the way?

ETA: While it is possible transferring water from the N could have resulted in slightly less burnable material once the fires got into built up areas, they wouldn't have put that water into the foothills chapparal where I think most of these fires started. While global warming possibly contributed to the extended hot and dry conditions, Santa Ana winds and droughts are nothing new here and happen no matter the politics of the government.

Other than maybe Adobe buying Fotolia (and this is a big maybe) I can't think of any big acquisitions that were good for the contributors. I think the worst as I see it might be the purchase of StockXpert and Getty buying IS.

I skimmed through the report - some interesting data. I do disagree with the risk with regards to income conclusion. Just because there are less people at the higher levels of income doesn't mean they are less concerned about the risks. Maybe interesting that most are worried most about either the change in royalties (sites paying us less per use), AI, and competition.

nothing at that level for me, one custom at ~20 one at ~6 and one at about ~5 everything else was $3.30 or less.

People who sell more in the USA presumably will be down this week while those that do better elsewhere might be up.

It seems most of my latest sales are from the old best sellers from a year or more ago, but my sales don't seem to be all that good. I haven't been uploading much lately though. Also a lot more .31 custom sales than I would like, possibly slightly offset by the rare but nice sub sale for more than 2$.

Yes, everyone starts in the middle and stays there for awhile because they know how hard it is to get a sale on Alamy.

Re Tag importance, once again Caption is by margin the most important. Holds true for my port over and over.  Cram the most relevant words in caption, and do not repeat them as supertags as it will have no effect.  I believe we discussed this before.   

I had a strange one this month.   Sale on Nov 5,  refunded on Nov 19, then immediately sold again.   Difference:  Original  (refunded) sale was 49.99 and

84 MB
5469 x 5389 pixels
6 MB compressed
Use in a single magazine or book (print and/or digital), inside use, 2,500 circulation, worldwide (excludes advertising).

Repeat sale was 49.00 with only data

47 MB
4102 x 4042 pixels


Anyone has experience with something like this?  I am guessing this is same customer, decided to get smaller resolution for whatever reason?

I have had numerous instances of image sales on Alamy that are refunded and rebought. Usually the new sale is for a small bit less $ - often just cents. The most frustrating was when they cut our take 20% from 50 to 40% and a big sale from before the slash was refunded and repurchased after the slash (months later) for maybe a dollar less, but I got a lot less because of the percentage cut.

They don't even care about exact copies (or they are incapable of seeing them despite the fact their search engine suggests them as similar), do you think they care about AI images?

In the past they turned a blind eye to people using multiple keywords in the title to game the search, I doubt they are any better or care more now.

Do you have to caption your own work?

My own work is already captioned and keyworded, when I go to submit I have to agree to all sorts of nonsense about AI (I don't submit ai) and then often a captcha and then there is an image and they ask me to caption it. Those are the ones I make stuff up for - I think one I said was a clandestine drug deal.

Back to topic, I heard back from Bigstock, and it was a legitimate e-mail. I have requested my earnings. I used to wait until they hit $100, but that takes so long there now I guess I need to start doing it as soon as possible. Boy they really went downhill after 2018 or so.