|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - Roscoe
Pages: 1 ... 7 8 9 10 11 [12] 13 14 15 16 17 18
276
« on: December 06, 2021, 05:30 »
I just started to upload there and it accepted 60 images from 400. Most of them are because of technical issues. Typically Dreamstime acceptance is 70% for me. It makes me wonder if it's like shutterstock thing or they normally accept better quality photos.
DT is accepting EVERYTHING.
If you only have 70% acceptance rate with them, then you seriously have to revisit your technique.
When you get rejected at Dreamstime, indeed check your file, it's probably not even an image.  They just take everything.
277
« on: December 04, 2021, 02:42 »
...Can anyone make sense of what Connect sales are? ...
Getty launched this program a few years ago:
https://www.fastcompany.com/1817835/connect-getty-images-leaps-21st-century
You have to be logged in to read this page, but here's their rundown of the uses that show up in this section
https://contributors.gettyimages.com/HelpArticle.aspx?article_id=5176
But as you noted, the amounts are all very, very, very small.
I've even had items show up in this section that they're no longer entitled to license (I deleted most of my portfolio there years ago but have a small set of images I can't license elsewhere). Given how tiny the amounts are, I just can't stomach the thought of spending weeks arguing with "support" to try and get this fixed 
Sums it up nice. One small addition: there's a extra some kind of wrap-up (at least that's how I understand it) of connect sales in the March statement of each year. Sold items run in several thousands then (at least for me), pushing my connect earnings into double digit figures. 
278
« on: December 03, 2021, 07:58 »
Interesting to see the poll results have Shutterstock in the lead again. Despite the rhetoric, the reality is AdobeStock are performing badly in recent times.
Oh right, the poll... just had a look. What's going on at Envato? It started to rain gold overthere?
279
« on: December 03, 2021, 03:52 »
This is what I found:
Every file on iStock falls into one of two collections. Our Essentials collection gives you the everyday content you need, while the Signature collection features millions of premium handpicked stock files that you can only get from us. All content can be purchased with credits, or with a subscription.
I expect that you are non-exclusive, so all of your content will probably be listed in the Essentials collection.
There are two ways to buy an image from the Essentials collection:
All content can be purchased with credits, or with a subscription.
This is also mentioned in your sales report (Transaction Type column) in DeepMeta.
iStock Essentials sales will have the Transaction Type credit pack or subscription
Other sales, like Transaction Types RF Image, Premium Access Time Limited, Cost Per View, Price Per Image, Fixed Usage Fee, ... are listed as iStockphoto.
As I understand it, they distinguish sales between credit packs and subscriptions -> these are reported as iStock Essentials.
Everything else is iStockphoto.
For commercial images. Editorials or video have different Transaction Type tags.
Why? I. Don't. Know.
What does it all mean? Pfffffffffft.
Truly impressive to see how they overwhelm you with statistics and sales data, yet still fail to make it all transparent.
Too much data for penny sales.
280
« on: December 01, 2021, 02:21 »
Conclusion: My sales have not been hurt by the free image offerings.
I have the same feeling, looking at short term. My past half year has been very decent despite growing free collections. But long term is another story I guess. When I look at image credits in media outlets, the amount of Unsplash credits is still on the rise. Also premium outlets, glossy magazines, seem to use them very regularly. They use images from free collections wherever they can. At least that's my observation, and it would be foolish to think that this has no effect on our sales. Without free collections, these images would have generated sales. Probably small subscription sales, true, but still it's quite a volume.
281
« on: December 01, 2021, 02:06 »
Yeah, my bestsellers with hundrets of sales on Shutterstock are "not used yet". 
The dada is all messed up.
My best seller of the last year: hundreds of sales, Popularity high (seems to be fair), usage: not used yet. On the other side: an image that only sold a few times. Popularity medium and often used.  Or: an image that hasn't been generating any sales the past year and historically only sold 5 times: popularity high and often used.  It makes no sense at all, and it does more bad than good for their customers. I really wonder which criteria they use. Maybe Shutterstock bots are scraping the internet looking for usage of images in their database. But that would make no sense, as internet usage is only one part where our content may appear.
282
« on: November 29, 2021, 03:38 »
Decent but below October/November expectations for iStock/Getty and Shutterstock. The positive side of me expected a slight peak, which didn't came.
But I did had my best month ever at Adobe Stock.
What really stands out for me is the lack of sales volume at smaller agencies.
They shrunk even more the past two or three months.
I really wonder: how long are they able to keep their boat afloat?
283
« on: November 28, 2021, 06:15 »
Not sure if it helps, but these are my earnings from my last 10$ payout threshold:
0.25 (Adobe)
0.07 (Getty)
0.15 (Getty)
0.34 (Getty)
0.01 (Getty)
2.75 (EyeEm)
0.34 (Getty)
0.11 (Getty)
0.02 (Getty)
0.34 (Getty)
0.53 (Getty)
0.16 (Getty)
0.08 (Getty
0.20 (Getty)
0.04 (Getty)
0.25 (Getty)
0.10 (Adobe)
0.45 (Adobe)
2.86 (Getty)
0.60 (Getty)
0.06 (Getty)
0.55 (Getty)
I don't have much files online at EyeEm, only a few hundred.
Figures speak for themselves, not really worth it.
It would be a different story with more direct sales at EyeEm, but they are shrinking month after month so it seems.
I only had one bigger two digit sale this year on EyeEm, and it still was a partner sale at Getty.
284
« on: November 19, 2021, 10:36 »
Today for the first time, i had 10 downloads on Shutterstock in one day, all < $0,15
Should i be happy?
Sounds like mixed feelings. I try to determine how I feel about it by looking at my aggregated earnings across all the agencies I contribute to over a bigger period of time. Microstock can be very fluctuative. After two and a half years of contributing to microstock agencies, I learned that a run of bad days, weeks or even months can be compensated by good ones. Or a temporarily struggling agency can be compensated by an agency that's on a roll. Spread your eggs, don't let a stubbornly struggling chicken ruin your day and look at how the bigger picture looks for you. Then make up your feelings
285
« on: November 19, 2021, 10:01 »
Agree on the editorial front. In fact the only reason I am still image exclusive with Getty is that Adobe does not offer the editorial option and as I am not interested one iota in SS I stay with the Getty/Family because I have a lot of editorial content.
You can use Wirestock as a gateway to the Editorial collection of Adobe Stock.
Not perfect, but it works, I sell editorial content on Adobe that way.
Not sure whether it's worth it for you, I don't know the conditions of exclusivity at Getty.
How do you do that, my editorial uploaded via Wirestock are rejected and never appear on AS.
You can search your public profile (accessible via the contributor dashboard: contributor account -> see my public profile), get the file-id from there, and paste it in the search field in the contributor dashboard again. Hoover over title or keyword fields and the edit button appears. Not an efficient way to do it, but it's possible.
Also not perfect because takes all kinds of -> see profile, copy file id number, go to contributor dashboard, paste, click and then edit button appears.
Can't really say much other than I submit the images to Wirestock and most of them get accepted by Adobe. Two kind of editorials are not accepted: - Illustrative Editorial (but Adobe allows me to upload them directly to my personal account, so they go there) - Editorials with clearly recognizable people. Large groups of people in public spaces, or incidental crowd, without individuals being too close and thus clearly recognizable, should be fine though. Rules seem to have changed too, because I did upload illustrative editorials in the past through Wirestock, and they were accepted back then. But not anymore. Important to say is that I do my own keywording, and don't use the easy submission option. It's not the most efficient way, because you have to enter category, country, city and date manually. You don't want to bulk-upload your content that way! However, Wirestock claims that you can also use easy submission for editorials, on condition that you provide them necessary information in the reviewer notes field. So I assume you can also feed them your already keyworded content and use the easy submission option. The reviewer will probably take over your description and keywords, while completing the other fields for you. Didn't try it myself, but it should work. Maybe someone else can confirm. Regarding portfolio search: yeah, it's far from perfect, and I rather call it a workaround instead of a functionality. But it works in case you have an image that you want to edit or delete.
286
« on: November 19, 2021, 03:56 »
Agree on the editorial front. In fact the only reason I am still image exclusive with Getty is that Adobe does not offer the editorial option and as I am not interested one iota in SS I stay with the Getty/Family because I have a lot of editorial content.
You can use Wirestock as a gateway to the Editorial collection of Adobe Stock. Not perfect, but it works, I sell editorial content on Adobe that way. Not sure whether it's worth it for you, I don't know the conditions of exclusivity at Getty.
287
« on: November 19, 2021, 01:29 »
I am a small contributor, but there are many, many things about the contributor interface that need to be worked on - both workflow and stats.
Adobe has done next-to-nothing with the contributor interface (other than shutting down the Fotolia stats), and most of the things they have changed/added haven't been what contributors asked for. As but one example, contributors asked to be able to search their portfolio (on the contributor side) by keyword. Adobe implemented search by file number which is barely useful.
Until Adobe shows any interest in improving the contributor interface, giving them more lists seems a waste of our time. Possibly if you can get some other important contributors together you can gain some traction, but I don't think the problem is a lack of ideas about what to do.
Sales there are good and royalties are reasonable, so there's that
You can search your public profile (accessible via the contributor dashboard: contributor account -> see my public profile), get the file-id from there, and paste it in the search field in the contributor dashboard again. Hoover over title or keyword fields and the edit button appears. Not an efficient way to do it, but it's possible.
288
« on: November 17, 2021, 07:02 »
I created my own site to sell my best images, and the ordinary ones are sold elsewhere... but not on shutterstock, not worth the efforts. You might think 10c and image is reasonable, but it will go down to 1c sooner or later, unless you do something...
I didn't say I think 10c/image is reasonable. On the contrary, I probably dislike it as much as everyone else around here. My point is: I only look at total earnings, and Shutterstock still makes up for half of my microstock income. So for me, currently, it would be a foolish idea to drop them. Sure, that might change, and then I will re-evaluate. But I don't believe dropping them would actually be beneficial for my total earnings. Not for the kind of content I provide. Nor do I believe that me (and with me a few hundred or thousand of contributors) leaving Shutterstock or iStock/Getty would make them change their mind and raise contributor commissions again. We are less than a drop in the ocean, and thus powerless. The only thing I can really do is up my game, start shooting different content, and find a different market than Microstock for it. Now in all humble honesty: I'm not there yet.
289
« on: November 17, 2021, 04:10 »
I had uploaded two different photos of a statue in Slovenia a year ago, one of which was rejected as similar. When I searched Shutterstock, I saw that someone else had submitted the exact same photo. I tried again this month out of curiosity, but it was rejected again for similar. So it wasn't rejected because of my other photo, which is what I thought at first. I understand they've gotten stricter on that with the sheer amount of photos they have.
If I have slightly similar photos, I don't upload them at the same time. Then you at least have less chance that they will be rejected because of similar.
Also my experience Thijs. They'd better tag their rejections with "We currently don't need more images of this subject in our database" instead of bugging contributors with fake focus rejections. Subjects that are not well represented get through way easier than hopelessly saturated topics. Killer shot from the Canal Grande in Venice? Rejected. Out of focus sir. Crappy cheap ass panorama landscape straight out of outdated smartphone from a landscape in one of the lesser known outskirts of Spain? There you go, thanks for uploading, accepted!
290
« on: November 17, 2021, 04:00 »
I know I'm making myself unpopular here, but I am getting a little bored with these 10 cent discussions.
Nobody wants to get only cents for their images, that's why I left for example iStock. It just didn't fit, but I'm not making a big deal out of it.
If I had only 10 cent sales at Shutter, I would say goodbye and that's it.
But there are still some who earn good money with Shutter. I myself see sales in the double digits every day, which compensate for these stupid cent sales.
Except for Alamy, I don't have those sales anywhere, not even Adobe. That still makes Shutter my best agency.
The annoying review is another story.
And as Thijs rightly says, what are the alternatives? Exclusively 25 cent sales at Deposit?
So now you can jump all over me
I'm not about to jump all over you for writing the truth.
People should do what suits them best but it makes no sense to me to desert the market leader.
Right. It's an inconvenient truth. No matter how much I dislike some of the practices of Shutterstock, and how much I want to like some other agencies, the hard fact is that Shutterstock is consistently my top performer. Every month. Half of my microstock income of 2021 comes from evil Shutterstock. When I leave out emotions about how I feel about being a contributor to their wealth and thus agreeing with how they treat contributors, it would be a foolish idea to ditch them. So yeah, I leave my emotions out, accept that I have to struggle myself through their crazy review process and I gruntingly collect the money which is a frustrating journey due to cheapasscrappy 10 cent trains rolling by day after day. But every now and then a nicely decorated luxury wagon is hidden in the train, as if they forgot to take it out, and a lot of my earnings at Shutterstock can be accounted those bigger commissions, which mainly float between 20 and 60 dollar for me. I don't see those coming in at Adobe at all, and at 15% commissions they are very scarce at iStock/Getty. In the end, I just booked myself a nice getaway trip in December from the money I earned on Shutterstock this year (to recover from the psychological trauma caused by dealing with them. ;-) ) And I reward myself with some extra gear (thinking about a decent macro lens because I didn't explore that part yet) with the earnings from the rest. Without Shutterstock I would have to choose. After Shutterstock announced the change in earnings, I disabled my portfolio for a while. Joined the protest. At the same time, I dramatically increased my portfolio's on other agencies, and also included a few new opportunities by using Wirestock, Eyeem, Zoonar, you name it. While they surely bring in some extra cash, none of them come close to what Shutterstock brought in when I enabled my portfolio again. For most agencies, Shutterstock earnings are a tiny dot in the far distance, almost out of sight completely unreachable. Now, this is my current situation, and it might differ from others. My earnings increased, a lot of others saw a decrease. So I fully understand and sympathize with the ones who ditched them. From what I read, they have a very fair reason to do so: if it doesn't feel right to stay, then leaving is certainly the right decision. No discussion. I just think most of them are still, despite decrease in earnings, throwing away one of the bigger pieces of their microstock earnings cake. And that's fine. Dignity has a price. But for me, right now, it's just too expensive.
291
« on: November 16, 2021, 07:24 »
No, you only transfer the block chain rights, not the copyright. Seems bizarre, but there you are.
That's also how I understood it. Pretty worthless if you ask me, because the only thing that is being sold are blockchain bragging rights. Crazy world, and for first time I really think: I'm too old for this crap. Now, some creatives are making very decent money with NFT's, but I guess they are well established and famous in their real world niche too. Others seem to look at NFT's as an investment. Not sure how they are doing. I'm afraid a lot of them are losing (real) money. I still have to see the first typical microstock contributor earning money with NFT's. There's a lot of talk, but no results. At least, as far as I know.
292
« on: November 16, 2021, 07:07 »
My experience of Adobe editorial via Wirestock is different to yours.
My regular editorial are rejected when they have people in them but my illustrative are accepted.
By-the-way, on the subject of TV, I don't watch it either
Strange! My illustrative editorials to Adobe via Wirestock are rejected due to ... being illustrative editorial! (Illustrative Editorial Issue) No harm done, I just submit them via my personal account on Adobe, with all of them being accepted. Weird, but whatever. Regarding editorial images with clearly recognizable people: they are indeed also rejected by Adobe via Wirestock. I don't know exactly why, because other agencies seem to accept them. Other editorial images to Adobe via Wirestock are accepted without too much hassle, and they are generating sales. They are in fact my main source of income on Wirestock, as I still submit a lot of my other content via my personal accounts. Still waiting for my first direct sale on Wirestock, or Extra Channels bucks.
293
« on: November 16, 2021, 03:30 »
I didn't know that. Thanks Pete. Doesn't matter, because it takes a while before I reach 0.36. Reminds me of the good old days of Shutterstock.
I'll be glad when I reach 100, because the days are short now in the Netherlands and mostly cloudy like today.
Then I have enough time to upload photos on A.S.
I have no patience for television.
Just a small tip: you can submit your editorial content to Adobe via Wirestock. For some weird reason Adobe doesn't seem to accept Illustrative Editorial anymore from Wirestock, but just regular editorial shouldn't be a problem. You can upload your illustrative editorial content on your personal account later, when you reach the downloads threshold. Right about television by the way. Geen bal op de TV! ;-)
294
« on: November 13, 2021, 03:32 »
the last several replies is why I join this site! Love it. Taking notes 
This! Enjoyed reading the inspiring discussion too!
295
« on: October 15, 2021, 01:55 »
It's a topic that has been discussed in the past, without really clear answers or proven statements.
Nobody can really prove that their portfolio is being throttled or boosted, or like you say, that agencies are trying to force stable volumes on single portfolio's.
Looking at my own stats: yes sales and volumes can fluctuate quite heavily depending on the month or season.
To give you an example, my worst month this year earned me only 20% of my best month this year.
I don't keep track of sales volume, or weekly earning stats, but I do see strong fluctuations there too.
Figures vary across contributors, and what turns out to be a good month for me can be a bad month for others and vice versa.
Questions similar to "what's going on at agency A" or "anyone else experiencing sudden low sales at agency B" are popping up very regularly.
So it's quite funny to see someone complaining about stable sales volumes, while most of us are complaining about strong fluctuations ;-)
Now to answer your question: until now I've seen nobody really proving any other impact on the algorithm than individual image ranking.
This probably means views x clickthrough ratio x actual sales. Simple as that.
It's my uneducated guess based on own experiences:
- Every now and then I upload an image that takes off and gets significant better sales than others. So no throttling at all. (and I hear the same experiences from fellow contributors)
- I do see significant fluctuations in sales volume and earnings. So no compensation effects of the algorithms, a bad month is a bad month drama all over the place. (and I hear the same experiences from fellow contributors)
My uneducated guess is further strengthened by the fact that I see fellow contributors with significant smaller portfolio's hitting way better volumes than I do.
In all honesty: they have better quality content and/or content with better sales potential.
And I also see it the other way around.
So I guess your content fits within a stable market demand.
296
« on: September 10, 2021, 06:53 »
Yes. Every now and then I get an image sale on P5 at a good commission compared to nowadays microstock standards.
But. Image sales are scarce, so without upload automation or distribution it's probably not worth your time.
297
« on: August 31, 2021, 06:54 »
Thanks for sharing Alex.
You're a day early, and you might have missed the Instant Pay sales Wirestock just threw in.
I got a bunch of 3.4$ commissions and I guess I'm not the only one, so you might want to check your balance again.
298
« on: August 15, 2021, 05:23 »
That's if you only want to rely on empirical data, without trying to understand the medium/long-term logical consequences of these actions. We can safely predict that the night follows day, without having to wait for the dark.
Such a large collection of good quality free assets is rather likely to deter buyers from buying more stuff, instead of stimulating them to buy more.
That's because nothing beats free, especially when the quality is sufficient for the purpose.
So when your work is offered for free, even if you got your precious $5, you will kill potential sales not necessarily from you, but rather from your fellow contributors who are competing in the same category.
In return, their free stuff will kill your sales in other categories, very likely beyond your precious $5.
The bigger this collection becomes, the bigger the losses will be for the contributor's community.
Too bad that many of us are wearing horse blinders, seeing only a narrow and individual short-term interest, instead of seeing how fast we are cutting the branch we all are sitting on!
For the record: I think you are right with your analysis. Free collections will ultimately kill a big part of the industry as we have known it. We're not there yet, but definitely on our way. I'm the one who actually looks at photo credits in magazines or news outlets, and the amount of unsplash credits is still on the rise, also in so-called premium outlets. I think there's no profitable future in shooting well covered topics, apart from the lazy customers buying an image on subscription packages, as the amount of freely available "good enough" images is increasing day by day. Plenty of images in free collections outperform my images in terms of quality or creativity, and I'm not a complete noob, I do know how to take a decent picture. But I also think there's nothing we can do about it. When Shutterstock slashed the contributor royalties more than a year ago, I felt like we had a momentum. Enough is enough. So I joined the protest, and disabled my portfolio for a few weeks. As many others did. I truly felt that we had reached a momentum, and had to stand up against an evil corporation that displayed an unfair amount of greed and shamelessly profited from contributors. I think it's fair to say it was a mistake. The protest, despite being very vocal and from my point of view still justified, had no impact at all. Instead, we all lost money for the time we disabled our accounts, and those who pulled their portfolio, are still losing a fair amount of money each month. And looking back at it... well I just don't know. 2021 is my best year ever at Shutterstock, and I earned more in the first 7 months of 2021 than in the complete year of 2020 or 2019, while my portfolio grew with only a few percent in 2021. Both in earnings as in sales volume. At the same time I realize that my personal situation might be completely different from what others are experiencing. Plenty of examples of contributors who saw a decline in earnings due to the royalty changes. The lesson for me personally is that... well... I don't know. I really don't know how strategic changes of stock agencies will impact my personal earnings. The only thing I do know is that we cannot change it. There will always be plenty of contributors willing to give away images for free, or almost free. And yes, I think this impacts the potential sales of others. But again: there's nothing we can do about it. So I too nominated images for Adobe's free collection, and I was happy with the additional earnings because the pictures I nominated where not selling at any agency. No way (unless I got really lucky) those images would earn me more than 5$/image across the agencies over one year. I just take the money for as long as it lasts. Microstock is a very cynical game, and if you feel very emotional about the content you create: well, then it's just not your jam and you'd better quit. As a wise fellow contributor said recently: there is no single path to success. Plenty of other ways to make money from photography.
299
« on: August 15, 2021, 03:25 »
Can't even get into my account  My password still works but for some reason I can't get passed the "summit mobile number!" crap. I don't have a mobile phone and I cant even use the link they provided for codes.
There's an easy fix for that: buy the cheapest phone you can find, doesn't even need to be a smartphone, and get one of those prepaid sim cards. You'll only need it to receive the 2FA SMS. I can only recommend you to also enable it for your other accounts which hold personal and sensitive information.
300
« on: August 15, 2021, 03:21 »
You can be glad that in your country it's just for inactive bank accounts.
Don't worry, we have those too. In fact, the majority of the banks charge a monthly fee of a few Euro here only for having an account. They call themselves "Premium banks" while in reality it becomse increasingly more difficult to find one of their local offices willing to make an appointment with you. Most of the communcation with those banks runs over chatbots, or foreign call centers. Ah, yeah, PayPal added the requirement to add a mobile phone number some time ago, because you will now randomly be asked to confirm your log in with a code sent to your mobile.
Which is actually a good thing from my point of view. In a world of security breaches and stolen accounts, 2FA became essential in protecting any account that holds sensitive information, like for instance a bank or paypal account.
Pages: 1 ... 7 8 9 10 11 [12] 13 14 15 16 17 18
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
