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Messages - pancaketom
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276
« on: March 22, 2022, 12:12 »
This is sort of like the agencies always claiming they want authentic content with real people in real situations. The truth is they mostly want real people only if they look like models and real situations only if they look like model houses or movie sets.
Sure, real people sell once in a while (I've used myself as a model, and some even sell), but at a few cents to maybe a few $ a sale you need to have volume for success in this business, and volume doesn't come from real looking people or muted neutral landscapes. So - back to the OPs point. The question is how fake to make the people and places and how far to push processing without going too far. For the most part we are selling an aspiration and a dream, not reality. I certainly haven't found that balance and I prefer something that looks a little more realistic, but looking at the first page of search it looks like my preferences and most of my images are too far on the real end of the spectrum.
277
« on: March 21, 2022, 13:16 »
A long time ago when SS was making me the most $ I looked at the best sellers for landscape / travel pics and noticed that the first page was almost all oversaturated overly bright images. I tried to make some like that but almost all of them got rejected for whatever the standard rejection was at the time - oversaturated or distorted pixels or something. I am guessing they would be accepted now, but SS is no longer on my list.
I do often mess with curves and darken the sky in landscapes. I have done a few sky replacements, but it usually seemed like way too much effort for the reward. Maybe if I was more efficient at post processing it would be worth it. Certainly a flat gray sky image is unlikely to sell, where one with a good sky might sell. Maybe I should throw a few puffy happy clouds into my numerous images with clear blue skies (I live in the desert).
I am often amazed at the blatantly unrealistic looking images on the first page - ones where the shadows go the wrong way for where the sun is or sunset skies over a mid-day scene. I guess as someone says - if it sells it is right. Someone recently pointed out an image where the sky was 90 degrees off complete with sideways clouds.
278
« on: March 14, 2022, 12:18 »
I think the cheapest gas within 40 miles of here is 5.439 / gal. (California) Nowhere near Euro prices, but a lot if you drive a big truck and commute 100 miles a day (I don't). Painful as it is for me, I think gas should be expensive because of all the external costs, I just wish the $ didn't go to the oil companies and the petro states.
It does seem that prices are all on the rise here except for stock photos and electronics (those might get more expensive, but also better so an equivalent device might be a lot cheaper if you can find one).
279
« on: March 04, 2022, 13:06 »
Alamy sales seem fairly random to me. So far this month I've got way more than last month (which was pretty bad - 2 sales for ~7.50 for me). This month they also refunded a sale from January for ~129 gross, but then re-bought it with the same terms for ~130. I have had plenty refunded and re-bought at the same price or lower over the years, but this might be the first that went up if even only a little bit, and they didn't even drop the percentage I got.
My click through rate was pretty high for most of Feb, so maybe there were sales that will show up later.
280
« on: March 03, 2022, 15:06 »
I'm not big on filters. Some people just take a good image and throw some filter on it and Oh Wow, look at that. Same as the other two, a good choice of a filer that is appropriate for the subject, is a good idea.
My personal approach on this: I do creative editing (yes, filters) on many of my images in highly saturated and competitive area's. I want it to stand out and be ready-to-go for those who prefer having a custom edited image. I keep most of my images neat and clean on less saturated and competitive topics. Or editorial, of course.
Does it work? Well, they do sell despite fierce competition. Admittedly, some more than others. One of those images, classic orange/blue split-toned, vignetted (Yes, I know!) dodge-burn landscape image in a highly competitive area is selling on daily basis on Shutterstock, found with very generic keywords, and does relatively well on other agencies too.
Is it the right strategy? I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to believe that submitting those images neat and clean would not result in the same amount of sales I'm getting now.
Anything anyone does that creates an image that gets sales is the right strategy. 
Other than outright spam - you should be punished for that (but I don't think the spammers are for the most part, and in some cases they are definitely rewarded) - so I guess in that sense that is the right strategy too. sigh.
281
« on: March 01, 2022, 22:53 »
SS separates them but for Adobe, my compound keywords don't get separated as far as I have noticed.
Ok, thanks for the info. I've just looked and it seems that a lot of Alamy contributors must split their own keywords.  Though 'no people' always seems to be 'stuck together'!
It also seems that files on SS can have 'phrase keywords'.
Hmmmm.
Dreamstime splits up the keywords to single words and puts them in alphabetical order. I think there is a way to make compound keywords - maybe in quotes, but I haven't bothered much. As to how it should be done - compound keywords should stick together, you should for example keyword the Golden Gate Bridge "golden gate bridge, bridge" so it shows up in a search for the actual named bridge plus any old bridge.
282
« on: February 26, 2022, 18:35 »
February is not great there for me, but it is definitely within the usual levels - just near the lower range of that.
283
« on: February 26, 2022, 18:34 »
They announced they were closing sometime mid last year, there was some worry about not getting a last payout, but they sent it. I did pretty well there at first, but then things slowed down to about bigstock levels. I am guessing they had pretty small overhead and made a bit of money but the $ to effort kept going down so they pulled the plug.
284
« on: February 26, 2022, 02:17 »
I had a refund and repurchase for the same amount but a lower percentage for me over the course of one of Alamy's grabs for a higher percentage. I was pretty pissed, but as usual the sites control the terms. Refunds do seem to happen fairly often on Alamy, a surprising number are bought for the same price, but most are either not purchased again or are for a lower price.
285
« on: February 24, 2022, 16:10 »
I think that at one point BS was a bit of a sandbox for SS to play with - lower payment to contributors there to see how it went, and so on before trying it on SS - we all know how that went.
Now I think they are still making a little money off it, so they can just let it ride.
286
« on: February 24, 2022, 12:55 »
Dreamstime usually breaks them up, but SS and others accept them, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. One minor site decided at some point that per your example if you had "united" and "states" and "united states" those were duplicate keywords and rejected it. How the search deals with those varies from site to site. I used to try to pay attention to that but I don't much anymore. Certainly for something like "christmas tree" I think a 2 word keyword makes sense.
287
« on: February 16, 2022, 16:03 »
getting a bit of thread drift here, but as I recall with DT subs you could get 1,2,or 3 sub sales for .35, .70, and 1.05. I quite liked that and even the lowest sub sale meant the image was making progress towards a higher tier. I think DT said the buyers were confused and complained about using up their sub allotment too quickly so DT dropped it. The higher level credit sales can be quite good, but they are also very rare. Nowadays it is almost all subs, although the rare other sales make a big difference in the total for the month. The percentage they pay is also tied to the image level for credit sales, so not only does a higher level sale cost the buyer more, but the artist gets a higher percentage of that. As far as people wanting images that have little to no sales, I've got heaps of them - have at it. (although I do wish DT would pay a higher percentage for the level 0 sales (and all sales for that matter)).
288
« on: February 16, 2022, 12:02 »
you should ask DT for the official answer, but are only some of these exclusive to DT? Prices have changed over time - especially for subs which used to go up at higher levels as I recall but now are all .35 (except for exclusive content?).
Another possibility is it is some sort of promotional discount - 30% off or something- but I think that might have only changed the cost of credits.
289
« on: February 15, 2022, 18:21 »
Thanks, I didn't see that other post. As a data point, I have not changed any versions of PS for keywording, and the vast majority go through just fine. I didn't try re-uploading, I just cut and pasted the keywords when I noticed they weren't right. If it happens again I'll try re-uploading to see if it repeats.
290
« on: February 15, 2022, 16:40 »
In each of the last few uploaded batches I have noticed that one image has had the keywords overwritten by pretty generic, sometimes wrong, and probably computer generated keywords. They seem to be the same as I get when I refresh auto keywords, but I never requested them in the first place. I know they read at least some of the metadata because the title is correct. I don't think I have clicked the auto keywords as I have to scroll down to get to that option, but I suppose it is possible somehow. I guess for now I just need to check my keywords a little more carefully (I do anyway to make sure the first few are important ones, but maybe I need to look deeper now).
Has anyone else experienced this? I am uploading with the web based uploader and the edge browser (I know it sucks, but I clear cookies on firefox regularly and it is a pain to re-log in to the sites I upload to).
291
« on: February 15, 2022, 13:27 »
SN
SNIP...
I thought the line about unsplash serving the semi-professional creators was cute.
I doubt they will be paying any more than 15% so they won't be getting new content from me.
Sounds right, I never considered anything personally, having to do with Unsplash. Visibility, Exposure, Giving Back, Praise, The Thrill of Competition? The idea of working for free and giving away my images for nothing, never really piqued my interest. Scuffling for nickels and dime on Microstock is degrading enough.
Are you saying with Getty buying Unsplash, they are actually going to pay something, even if it's 15%?
Well I could be the next modern van Gogh? Although I'm far to old to be a tragic early death, rising star. What I mean in reality is: Van Gogh died penniless in 1890 at the age of 37 And the money someone can make from Unsplash, they could also die penniless. 
The first was about Unsplash - cutting into sales at the bottom end (or more pressure to lower prices). The second was about Getty as a whole - No sign that they will pay over 15% to general suppliers, so I have no real interest in supplying them other than keeping a general eye on them in case they do more to ruin the industry or actually do something good to make me want to contribute.
292
« on: February 14, 2022, 16:23 »
I thought the line about unsplash serving the semi-professional creators was cute.
I doubt they will be paying any more than 15% so they won't be getting new content from me.
293
« on: February 11, 2022, 13:25 »
Thanks for the info and analysis.
I think that last column pretty much sums things up. Sad what has happened. I guess the slower growth in new contributors might be the result in the lower amounts to contributors. It will be interesting to see if that number keeps dropping. I am guessing it won't ever go down unless SS is more honest about how they report contributors than I suspect they are.
294
« on: February 09, 2022, 13:09 »
I look at other people's keywords, and sometimes I find a good one I missed, but usually I am just overwhelmed by the amount of poor keywording or outright spam. I guess that is what the sites should expect for pennies, but it is still sad.
295
« on: February 08, 2022, 20:00 »
Back when I cared about uploading to SS and SS cared about paying me I had a folder of SS rejects that I didn't agree with. Every submission I would include a few from that folder that it had been a while (at least a month) and they almost always were accepted. That was probably before the AI that would reject a speaker and floppy disk because they looked like a wallet...
If you could get on page one of the 1 word popular searches it would be worthy. But fighting the sliced tomato fight now is probably not worth it (and yes, I had isolated sliced tomatoes in my port, and they did sell).
Keyword spam is another issue entirely, I am amazed none of the sites have even made half-hearted attempts to fix it. For eg- look at the top page of the top 1000 search terms and drop the hammer on any obvious spammed pics.
296
« on: February 07, 2022, 11:45 »
In all fairness to Alamy, in January the lowest sale I got was $1.20 (for me, $3 gross) average sale for me was a little below $25 and they were my highest earner for the month. Plus I got another 26.7 ASCRL payment.
I will definitely complain about the drop from 50% to 60% and even lower for distributor sales and I will complain even more about getting pennies for sales to China (or anywhere else) and I think the 20% is even crappier (but I made enough in January to avoid that for this year), but they also deliver some bigger priced sales and those are what matter. SS used to deliver those, but I think I made more bigger sales on Alamy in January than I did at SS from 2018 until I turned them off after the ~50% drop in RPD and RPI.
Like most of the business I think they are moving in the wrong direction, but they haven't gone as far in that direction as some places with initials like SS and IS/Getty.
I do agree that the super low sales - especially from so called distributors are pointless as far as contributors are concerned and I wish they wouldn't pursue those "exciting" opportunities but at the end of the day the bigger sales are what matters, and although they are not very steady at Alamy, at least for me they deliver them more often than anyone else does, at least since 2016 or so.
297
« on: January 30, 2022, 16:53 »
The search placement is almost everything for sales of common easy subjects. Sure, you need a good enough image, but that is within the capabilities of almost every producer. What it takes to get onto the first page, or even the first few lines is a much more complex subject and you can endlessly try to game the system, but you probably don't know what all goes into the sauce and even if you did it might change or be something you can't control or can only somewhat control (like location based parameters).
For about 5 years I had an image almost always on the top line of the search for a common 1 word search on SS. It sold about once a day. One day they changed something in the search and I couldn't find it going back 10 or more pages. Eventually it moved back up to somewhere in the page 5-10 range, but sales were never the same (more like once a month). When I uploaded it SS had an indexing glitch right after it was indexed and no new images were indexed for a few days - so it was on the first line of newest first and got enough sales there to put it on page one where it stayed until it wasn't. Obviously that isn't something I can repeat or count on ever happening again, especially for a subject with over 11,000 pages of results. It certainly would be worth taking pics of all the things that they say not to bother photographing if you could be on page 1 of the search for them though - flowers, sliced foods, pets, sunsets, you name it.
298
« on: January 30, 2022, 16:28 »
Thank you for your kind replies.
I counted my sales of a certain time span. The average was 6.8$ per sale which is much lower than it used to be 2 years ago, when if was 18.4$. Last year was similar to now. From 45 sales 13 were the 0.25$ ones. I know I said it was more than that, but I was mistaken. There are many under 3 dollars, though. The highest one was 35$.
I could say all is good as long as I sell more files, but the question is: will the customers stop paying more at other places because of Shutterstock or not?
more likely the other places will lower prices to compete with SS.
299
« on: January 25, 2022, 12:12 »
I guess if you shot in a cold place (outside in the winter or a walk in freezer) or very dry air you might not get the condensation either. Of course you might have other issues to deal with.
300
« on: January 24, 2022, 12:40 »
If a January reset is equitable and improves motivation think how much better one every month would be.
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