Welcome back!

To me it often sounds like you believe your account is being "held back intentionally" by Adobe.

But i am probably misunderstanding.

I hope you really enjoy your break and really let go and do something very different for a while.

I often take breaks from agencies and then focus all my energy elsewhere if one place is pissing me off.

That is why I could never be exclusive again.

Workshops are a lot of fun!!!

Please do them. Because you look at good stock content every day I don't think it will take long to improve.

And as stock is only a part-time job for me, I can consider myself lucky - the last 6 years of stock have enabled me to do some travelling - I was able to go on a safari, see Iceland and was in the Seychelles from the income, surprisingly the pictures from there hardly sell at all.

I had a look at your pictures. I also had a look at the other pictures in the collection.

Lack of sales is not surprising, your files are not competitive. In addition maybe seychelles/Iceland are very specialised and niche markets.

Many of your camera images are underexposed and have no clear composition. A simple 3 day camera workshop could easily fix that.

Maybe something to consider. Or perhaps a nice photo safari somewhere with a good coach teaching image tricks and giving good examples.

Everybody can learn and improve their photography. I used to take classes every year or at least a one day workshop about something I usually don't do regularly.

I will start doing that again when I have less personal responsibility and can travel again.

Jo Ann and my own experience is making me more dedicated to upload camera content again.

Before the January algo adjustments I paid little attention to the ratio of ai/camera sold.

But now I am realizing that on many days half my sales are still older camera files or videos.

So I will make that a clear focus, plus it gives me content for all agencies.

For ai I am processing my backlog every day something, but I only prompt very little. Mostly testing new prompt strings in subjects I did not offer before.

s and s* is only for the exclusives

non exclusives can have sales via getty, I had a few editorial sales last month.

but our content is not added to the prestige collections.

Has anyone seen him on pond5 forums? Or had private contact with him?

I just hope he is ok and just taking a timeout to restart the year.

But the change on the website is weird, how will clients find him?

At least his p5 port is still there

https://www.pond5.com/artist/odesigns

Whatever happened, I hope he recovers soon.

The S+ files cost 3 credits, the normal files 1 credit. So S+ is three times more expensive. And in addition it gets mirrored on Getty.

Obviously you need good quality but the pros get a lot of their files into S+.

In addition many exclusives also have a separate contract with Getty house and can upload to only Getty if they want to.

That will then open the option of having your content included into more expensive collections. In my days Digital vision was very profitable, no idea which collection is the most coveted now.

Customers on istock can also choose to look at s+ only, which then shows them only high quality exclusive content.

A lot of people who are fully exclusive to istock/getty still make a full time income and can afford good quality lifestyle production.

If his website is gone, that sounds really serious.

I hope it is not a health issue or worse.

You really need a break.

I have files that sold over 10 000 times on istock that sold less than 30 times on Adobe.

Sometimes it is just poor luck, your file went live at the right time of day, at a moment when this kind of content was going viral on social media or something.

I can understand it feels like somebody is personally out to get you or holding your port back, but realistically it makes absolutely no sense.

Customers are the driving force of all algos.

But there are differencies between agencies.

On istock I sell a lot of "natural" looking content, matte or subdued colors, often also messy real life.

On Adobe it must be vivid, contrasty, very clean composition and very extreme amount of copy space.

Similar for SS when I still had a port there, lots of files that were bestsellers on istock, never even got accepted on Shutterstock.

For Adobe I cahnged my processing to finally get a good acceptance rate. I also started downsizing my files to around 6mp, because otherwise I would get rejections for focus...

Take your break, but I am sure you will be back.

you are right, my mistake, I thought I saw my files on storyblocks via bb, but they are not. somebody else uploaded some messy food shots that looks nearly exactly like mine.

but i wouldn't be surprised if they get added at some point.

as for istock, bb has lots of editorial content and i think istock does not accept most editorial from external producers, they only take that from their own people.

also istock was added later so some content might have been uploaded by producers directly and i am sure they have filters to sort out duplicates.

the bb collection is also not the same size everywhere, some agencies only take a selection.

but I think bb is a very good offer and I find that my files get ranked higher than if I upload myself. they simply have a much bigger volume.

I send all editorial to them and I am still trying to find a sensible distinction by genre what i should add myself.

It is very seductive to just give them all videos, but I still want to have some content directly.

sales are very stable, last year i only added 20 clips and I had the same income as the year before when i added more.

my port is still small with 550 clips. Hoping to add at least 1000 this year. Ideally 2k, but we will see.

@injustice,

my suggestion for your case would be to add a lot more camera video and upload via blackboxglobal.

bb removes any direct problems with agencies. as you know I no longer have a port on ss because they deleted me. and with adobe i am always scared that the hunter killer algo hits my port.

they are also on platforms like storyblocks, the elements video marketplace on envato, they are on vimeo and will probably keep adding new partners that as an individual producer i cannot reach.

if you look in their facebookgroup, people are now beginning to make very nice reliable income after adding thousands of clips over the last 4 years.

For sales on Adobe�I think it is obvious that something about what you upload is not the right content for regular sales.

Taking a break for maybe 3 months and trying to refocus is usually a good idea.

perhaps also go back to doing more camerawork instead of ai, because it will now have less competition and the content can earn dataset licenses.

there is a lot of useful content that is missing over all agencies, but it takes time to find little niches.

I sincerly wish you all the best and I do believe you will find a way to turn things around.

Every crisis is an opportunity and the buyers will be back end of January.

eta

yesterday i had 25 dl on adobe,  11 ai, 13 camera, pos 3080, 7630 files

I hope today will be better.

By end of this week I could have what I earned last January including istock and there is nearly another week to top it up.

So I hope it will be more, probably 15-20%.

Far from ideal but it will be an upswing.

I hope by end of this week we finally get a little push higher from buyers going back to work.

I am trying to add content with themes I never offered before, but they might then also need longer to sell.

My best bet for this year will be other agencies.

I think if there is a strong influx of new fully exclusive istock producers, there is a real risk, that getty might reduce toyalty payouts on istock. There would still be the advantage of higher prices, plus having files moved into even higher priced exclusive getty collections.

But I don't think any changes like these would happen quickly.

They first have to digest the merger, which might take 3 years to complete.

Also they really need to work an a midjourney killer app. Adobe has the advantage it can offer photoshop tools combined with ai, but Getty does not have that.

So if clients start doing more content with midjourney and then amend that to their needs with adobe photoshop ai, they lose these clients.

They also need to have their own beautiful and very high quality ready ai collection for customers to buy.

And since they will want a closed loop system of only accepting content from properly licensed ai, it will probably require producers using their own ai app only.

They will then also make a lot of money from hopeful ai producers who will have to pay getty for this new app every month.

But if the quality is better than midjourney, they will be able to attract a lot of people.

For the general public it will also require building a community to making the app more addictive and gamefying it.

They might also try to buy some ai apps and communities.