I also shoot inferior photos: My average at SS is $1 per year (but rising), and my best sellers make $50 per year. Unfortunately I have only about 4 best sellers.

My balance also went up, but no sales are showing.

Quote from: Fotonaut on January 20, 2011, 18:43
Request to delete my Fotolia account sent. 38 euro credits forfeited. Whatever. One year into microstock sure has been waste of time, not many agencies left on my list.

Have they changed their policy on payout as well? With FT you could always request a payout even before you reach the payout amout, you just forfeited a percentage of your money.

Anyway, both FT and iS have changed from top agencies 3 years ago to about no 8 and 9 on my list now. Not woth uploading anymore. My top 3 are SS, Zoonar and DT at the moment (in that order).

December was my best month for 2010 at DT, but just by a dollar.

I have been experiencing something at SS latelly that seldom happened to me before: Photos rejected for "out of focus". This morning I had a batch reviewed, 5 of the photos rejected for out of focus. I checked them again at 100% view, there can be other reasons for rejection, but as far as focus goes, they are as sharp as can be. No shallow DoF either. Then there is one of the accepted photos in this batch where I had my doubts if it is indeed sharp enough and eventually I downsized and submitted, and it was approved! Perhaps a reviewer deciding on focus without even looking at 100% view, or not liking the photo and just hitting any reject button?

A while ago I made an experiment with SS, I submitted a batch of 20 photos, all previously rejected. The result, 100% accepted!

I had almost the same thing with keywords. The photos were put back in the pending area, so I removed all the keywords except those where the relevancy is direct and obvious and submitted again. It was rejected with the comment "Unfortunately, we cannot accept this image as it is the second time it has been submitted with poor keywords." No indication was given as to which keywords were unacceptable. For me its a loss, because some of those photos have more than 300 downloads at other agencies.

About 70% of my last batch was also rejected for  "Minimal Commercial Value". Some of the rejections are diong very well on other sites. I thinks a reviewer will look at a photo and ask himself "Will I buy this photo?" and if the answer is no, he will hit the rejection button without considering that that other might find it appealing.

I'm in Africa. Any way to change my dollar payments to euro?

Interesting one. It seems that every one of the 191 downloads are from Yuri's portfolio. I think I'll skip this one for now.

Its worth the effort to keep on trying at SS. With my first try all ten were rejected, and a month later all 10 accepted. The mass rejection on my first attempt forced to go back to the drawing board, and I just knew so much more when I tried again. Today SS is by far my best earner. I submit to 11 agencies, and get about 90% of my income from SS.

Did anyone else notice a sudden rise in sales at Shutterstock this month? It is only the 11th and I'm at double my best month ever. At the same time sales at ather acencies are slower than usual (as they have been for the last months).

Same here.

My strategy is to upload 5 images, and immediately after evaluation the next 5.

Sometimes your get lucky. I have two images, uploaded in 2007 and 2008 respectively, but from the same shoot and both have been selling consistently since upload. I've now had hundreds of downloads from both, and week for week those two images are my top sellers. If all my photos sold like that, I would have been able to retire by now.

Quote from: Elenathewise on August 14, 2010, 16:24
My sales just stopped there after it's been acquired. It's really weird. I used to make at least a 100 bucks a months there, now it's the middle of the month and my earnings are about 8 dollars!:)  I wonder if they disconnected my port from a search engine or something like that...
Regarding rejection reason stating the image is too "simplistic". Wow. That's really stupid. Did Masterfile come up with that one? I don't remember Crestock having one of those. In any case, all points to Crestock going down in flames...

My sales stopped even before the takeover. Since 1st of April this year I've had one single sale at CS!

After not uploading anything at Crestock for perhaps over a year, I decided to give it a go again with the new owners. About 5 weeks ago I upoaded a batch, and today got the result, everything rejected for the reason: "•As Crestock grows, we are tightening the acceptance of simplistic images that are somewhat easy for our buyers to create themselves. Thanks, Crestock." All the images were accepted by iS, SS, DT, FT and others.

I had another look at my photos: For the buyer to create that "simplistic image" he will just have to hire a professional photographer, get the neccesary props, travel to the location, pay for the use of the location, and for perhaps a couple of thousand dollars he can create the image himself.

My verdict: The newly owned Crestock is not worth the trouble.

My result looks a lot diiferent, but my acceptance rates are also not as high. I don't have statistics, but Dreamtime is the only one of the "Big Four" where my acceptance rate is close to 90%. At iStock I'm at something like 65%, and Shutterstock about 78%.

My income for the last year is more or less this: Shutterstock on top, Dreamstime second at less then have of Shutterstock, iStock less than half of dreamstime. Then I must add, I have more than 6 timees more photos at Shutterstock and Dreamstime, not only because of the acceptance rate but also because the iStock upload procedure that is not so user friendly.

I've had a 100% acceptance for this month, after submitting 8 different batches. Perhaps you just got the wrong reviewer, I don't think its a trend at 123RF.

My RPD for May was $1.72, down to $0.79 for june and is standing at $0.57 for July. Fortunately its still early days, a lot can happen before the end of July.

Got paid just now.

I haven't try to log on yet, but they are reviewing again. I got an email last night, 90% approved. Just that I can't remember when I uploaded, but it must be about 2 or 3 months ago.

I made $0-48 last month with a port of 565 photos. This was my worst month ever. But I'm not giving up on them and plan to upload perhaps 100 or so new photos during July.

Quote from: madelaide on June 22, 2010, 01:24
Isn't it a sign when people bother about saying "I've got a sale"? 

It is! I haven't had sales at SS for two days and I'm extremely worried about it. No sales at Mostphotos ever with little hope of sales in future and it doesn't really bother me. Perhaps I should also upload my entire portfolio for a backup!

And France is out, now I really feel sorry for Ireland. Bafana is out, but at least they don't have to go anywhere, they are at home!

To good to be true. I'm going to buy a Nikon D90 next week at almost twice the price, but I know I'm getting the real thing with the Nikon warranty.

I have had on a number of occasions had situations like this. I decided to just let it go. A bestseller at SS was rejected at DT for not what we are looking for, so I send a mail to DT asking them to reconsider because the item does so well at another agency. After that they accepted the image, and 3 years later still not a single sale! Last week I send my SS bestsellers to Zoonar, hundreds of downloads each, all rejected by Zoonar for out of focus. I just let it go, and will always wonder if it would have sold at Zoonar. For me its just part of the Microstock game.