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Dear friends, do you worry about your rank, every day, all day. Do you find yourself concerned that the "algo" has changed and your best sellers aren't best anymore. You go check, to see what page you are on, at a minimum of daily? Do you see new images getting no traction and old images declining in sales numbers. Do you go to the best sellers page, every day, at least once, so you can see what other people are doing? And you check your earnings, morning, noon and night, then last thing, before you go to sleep, just in case something changed in the last few hours.

Is that what's got you down Bunky? Well let me tell you, there's an asteroid coming, that's going to hit the Earth and blow us all into cosmic dust. Making pennies from Nanostock, isn't so important after all? We have global warning, climate change, people in power that half the population, generally doesn't like. Dictators and wars, someone could push the big "end of the world" doom button and nuke the planet.

While you're more concerned about how the algorithm runs and obsessed with your image rank?

One can observe their rank without being obsessed. It's a useful piece of information. For example I also observe my Google rank (not for microstock obviously), which gives me a data point about what works and what to change.

And about the asteroid, you can relax. It's a small asteroid about Tunguska size (google Tunguska if you don't know what I mean). Also I think you're from the US and US is not even in the possible impact path. Also it's not so difficult to deflect with current technology.

I guess depends what you are shooting. A good glass still won’t be cheap. Example
I have Canon EF macro 100mm L which cost me nearly £1k, and provideds
Me with amazing results compared to the 50mm lens which cost me £130.

Yes, the quality will be better with expensive glass - I didn't dispute that . It just doesn't matter for microstock, where in probably over 99% of cases buyers don't care about high-resolution image quality.

Here my RPD numbers on Adobe (note the switch from Euro to USD in 2023 and 2024 if you compare the numbers). Port is 99% well selling photos with a few rarely selling videos.

2016: 1.34 Euro
2017: 1.25 Euro
2018: 1.25 Euro
2019: 1.19 Euro
2020: 1.17 Euro
2021: 1.04 Euro
2022: 0.91 Euro
2023: 0.88 USD
2024: 0.85 USD

Yes, microstock is dying. Admittedly not as fast as I expected, but the trend is clear

One small tip about making it in this dying business. AI is not the way as a Western person. AI can be made by anyone wherever they're from. It's just prompting and curating. The people that can do that are in the millions and they have the resources and the time. Worse is that any income that is generated by it will exceed much more then we in the western world will value it. Your dollar is way less then a dollar for someone like say in India.
What they can't do however (generally speaking) is travel and make actual photos of those places they make with AI. Even though that actual photography is overly satuarated as well, it's still less competitive then the AI market.
The AI market is just a no go if you want to get ahead. You can't seriously think you will do a better job then the other millions of people that have time and resources on their hands. And when some in these countries have a little success with AI, it will ignite a whole bunch of newbies trying as well. Lost cause, stick with real photography.

Fully agree. Agencies are "outsourcing" building their AI libraries to countries with cheap labor. Which is why at some point the price of AI content will fall.

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Adobe clearly changed the rules drastically to cut their costs.

Next year they could kill the free plan bonus completely or increase the amount of uploads to a ridiculous number. Thus mostly AI spammers from low-income countries will be eligible for the free plan - these people use pirated software and would have never paid for Adobe's software anyway. So, on paper Adobe looks generous and caring about contributors, but in reality hardly has any losses from giving away free plans.

Completely agree with Jo Ann!

I was also qualified for the free plan from the beginning on (2018?) and this year will be the first time I'm not.

If this is how Adobe thanks me for 6-figure revenue they got from my assets, so be it. I will pay for the plan from now on, I don't think I will ever upload more than 30-40 assets yearly, since now I am even less motivated to upload anything. I sell my best quality work for 10 to 50 times the price at Adobe, so probably loosing the Adobe free plan will just accelerate me leaving microstock completely.

For video work I will use Davinci Resolve and not touch any Adobe products. Thank you Adobe for making that choice easy 

If anyone does video or animation you can download Davinci Resolve.  There is a *free* version that has plenty of functionality, the paid license for life is around $300.

Second that.
I am planning on doing a lot of video work this year, which is new for me, and I was waiting to see if I'll get the free full Creative Suite plan to decide whether to learn Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve (I would have qualified for the full plan with my current numbers and the goals from a year ago - now not getting anything with my 30 uploads in 2024 ). So at least now it's clear - I will teach myself Davinci Resolve and not use any Adobe products for video production.

I have a feeling Adobe is preparing the frontend UI for separating the AI and the "real" collections by price. AI assets will be cheaper and the "real" ones will keep the current price. In this case it makes sense to show the customer the more expensive content by default, and allow him to see cheaper content by clicking a toggle. With their huge AI collection Adode doesn't need to pay the same amount as before to AI producers anymore - their work in growing the AI collection is mostly done.

Guys, you do realize this is a microstock forum, not the Twitter/X app?

I don't think separate page for individual photo will work on my website. Is not running on WP.

I'm running few plugins now on my blog website. But still thinking that current CMS with prints is way much faster than WP.

Coding is not an issues, can edit something myself, but nothing major.

WP is slow as it has a bloated code base. All that stuff needs to be loaded into memory for each request, plus any plugins you use. Server side caching should help in theory, as only some minimal WP code needs to be loaded in case of a cache hit. So it should make WP pretty fast in theory - I myself have no experience with caching as I went a step further and generated fully static product pages, which is even faster (and I don't have to care about cache busting and repopulating in case of changes).

Good luck with your shop, I hope you get some sales soon 

I now focus on quality as well. Any feedback on my website?

https://iskymedia.io

I don't like Wordpress as it's slow, requires expensive server to run fast and sometimes has security issues. But still have 1 website on WP

On the first glance:
- I think you show too many variations of the same subject. Upload only 1-3 best ones, otherwise you require the customer to make a choice from too many variations, which might be annoying and drive them away
- If you are selling prints, add that to your pages meta data or add it as a headline or so or use other SEO techniques - so Google can actually show your pages to people looking to buy prints. For example instead of "Aerials from Liverpool" use something like "Aerials from Liverpool on canvas and fine art paper" (depends on what products you offer).

Yes, WP is slow. But you can use server side caching for all static pages. Also I don't know why you need an expensive server for WP, I guess you mean paying for some kind of integrated solution. But you can also use the cheapest hoster and install WP there yourself - that's what I do. And if you use caching, server performance won't be the limiting factor for page loads.

Most likely, probably I forgot. Are you running ads ? I guess you had your website for a while if you have sales through search engines

No ads (yet). Yes, the shop is online since 2023.