I had the best start to a month since I joined SS. I don't know if it'll hold up for the rest of the month, but if it does, it's going to be a new BME.

I have a friend that makes $70,000 (USD) in Microstock and about $65,000 (USD) in his day time job. He thought about quitting his day to go full time in Microstock- he decided to keep his day job. A wise move in my eyes...

Smart man. I don't think I'll quit my day job even if I make 6-figures in Microstock. Interacting with people in a work environment beats working alone. It's also better to have multiple sources of income instead of one.

Whatever the reason it's all gone crappy. Sales in every income stream for me (music/sfx/image) have diminished drasticly in the last 12-18 months. Producing more and more work doesn't even keep you running on the spot anymore. I feel like I am under the table of a feast scrabbling around for dropped crumbs only the crumbs are less and less.

In 6 years my house will be paid for so that's my goal. After that the pressure will be off somewhat.

Good luck on paying it off. I think the Microstock market has matured a lot from its younger days. I've seen over a dozen large studios with over 100K images in many microstock sites. Some has over 1 million images and they're incredibly successful. That's over 1% of an entire agency's portfolio. If we assume that they earn 1% of the revenue (I'm guessing a lot more), that's over $1 million a year. Spread that across multiple microstock websites, and they can earn over $3 million a year.

They can use that money to get the best gear, models, studio setups, props, dedicated uploaders, keywording experts, designers and more. That's what everyone has to compete with. I think it's a lot of nonsense when people say that there is no quality in Microstock. There's so much good work in there by these large studios. Maybe 75% is garbage, but you're still competing against 25 Million+ high quality images from studios and elite photographers/designers.

That's why I encourage people to learn to compete against the best on the other thread. It's pointless to worry about new contributors who got accepted because they got 1 image approved. That's like worrying about a little leech on your leg when you're surrounded by a bunch of lions.

Still waiting on these guys. Hopefully we get it by the end of the week.

I dont see any difference.

For me its still showing my most popular images inside the same artist section regardless of similarity. And there is no change on my download counts. So business as usual...

BTW, Hi everybody.

Try doing a incognito search. I think they're slowly rolling it out to all regions. It worked on my computer in the morning, and then later on my mobile devices. I think most people will see it today or tomorrow.

Some people want images that haven't been used over and over again I would think

If that's the case, then I wish the best of luck to them. Every popular image will get reused eventually, some over 10,000 times. If they want something exclusive, they need to hire a photographer or designer.

I've download over 1000 images from SS and I've been almost always able to find what I need. It took a bit of work for some, but it's there. I don't know why anyone would use the New section for their main search. Popular is popular is for a reason.

There is a lot of good stuff on SS these days, some of the images rivaling and sometimes surpassing many Macro images.

I had a number of rejections lately as well. Most of them due to 'duplication' even though they're different. Another reason was "low commercial value". Sounds like they're getting stricter across the board. 123RF is still a decent agency. Sales have picked up recently and I like what I'm seeing.

I was a happy contributor until my income started dropping. Not so happy now. It's cute to see one of my newbie friends gushing on Facebook that he got ten sales on SS a couple of days ago. All subs. Lowest tier. $2.50 makes him giddy. Doesn't really notice the new dashboard because he still sees all his sales on one page, so what's the big diff?

I remember when I was excited to get ten sales too. Now my index finger hurts from the annoying click, click, clicking to see what I once saw at a glance. And ten sales in one day would make me cry.

All depends on your POV.

Everyone has to start somewhere. If he's new and he's getting 10 sales a day, it's a good start. I remember I had 3 sales in my first month and I became super motivated to do better. Today, he may have 10 sales a day. In a couple years, it could become 100.

Eventually I expect that will happen.  But as I said earlier in the thread, in spite of all the income loss, I managed to build a large, high quality enough portfolio to keep bringing in some royalties for another few years.  At least as much as I would make in a real world job, with my skill set. 

So no, I'm not going to drag my 50+ year old, sciatica plagued body out to learn a new trade that won't pay what I'm making now.  I'm gonna wring every drop of passive income I can out of micro, and I'm gonna be mad every time some greedy agency takes another chunk of my retirement income away to line their pockets.

If you can't understand the logic in that, you are free to disagree, but you're not gonna shut me up.  I have as much right to complain about unfair practices as anyone else.  And in case you didn't notice,  the people who are upset about falling incomes seem to outnumber the blissful ones by a pretty high margin.  It did NOT used to be that way. When there was nothing to complain about,  nobody had to run around telling people to stop complaining.

PS.  My sanity is in good shape.  Insanity would be to see your livlihood going down the toilet and NOT   have a problem with that!

Obviously, this is partially directed at me. If you look at my points, and read it in context, you'll see that I didn't ask you learn a new trade. I was suggesting learning other ways to generate passive income. If you think veterans have it hard, the newbies have it even harder. They have compete against 100 million images, whereas the veterans have many images that are well-established in the search results. You can call me inexperienced all you like, but I didn't break into SS's top tier and FT's weekly top 100 in less than 2 years if I didn't know what I was doing. I had to learn things faster than the veterans and I had to work harder.

You already know how to generate passive income with Microstock, so that experience can translate to a number of other fields that can serve as complimentary income. That's all I suggest. You don't need years, just months. I learned to make apps in 2 months with no programming experience. I went into microstock with no experience other than as a buyer of stock images. I know some people here are younger, and while you have some valid excuses, some don't. They waste plenty of time talking about Trump when they could put that time to better use.

I'm no spring chicken myself. In Silicon Valley, I'm considered over the hill, and yet I force myself to learn new things constantly otherwise I'll get left behind. My optimistic attitude isn't some delusion, it's a necessity. Believe me when I tell you this, microstockers have it much easier than app developers. They spend 2 months on something only to give it away for FREE to serve ads, and many people don't download random free apps anymore. Other than Getty, whom I've always said was predatory company, the other agencies treat people relatively fairly. Maybe things aren't what they were 10 years ago, but nothing ever is. The market is saturated and there are over 150,000 contributors. That's the world we live in.

It was discussed more fully here: http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/us-tax-form-1099-misc-which-agencies-have-issued/

But when did you get the Adobe one - was that in the mail or online somewhere? I'm waiting on that. I'm not sure I got a 1099 from 123RF in either 2014 or 2015.

Steve

The FT/Adobe one came in the mail. Istock/Getty also came in the mail.

Quote from: Microstockphoto on February 16, 2017, 14:14

blaming low sales on the new dashboard? thought I heard it all

And yet I saw the same thing - maybe it is more than just a new dashboard, maybe there's a change to the search introduced at the same time.

BTW - isn't it weird that the sales are listed numerically according to the first digit in the file number, rather than taking account of the whole number (i.e. file 10,000,000,000 first, followed by file 20, followed by 3,000,000, followed by 456)

Sales are listed in this order:

Number of sales, followed by newest upload followed by download order for that day. It was by newest upload a few days ago that I remembered, but looks like some thing changed.

There hasn't been any changes to the search that anyone has noticed. If sales are down, it's probably because of increased competition.