I guess from the fact you are on this forum you are still supporting the Microstock middlemen?

I have a few hundred on Alamy and GL.  I get a sale once in a blue moon, but at least they pay a few dollars and I don't feel like a total sap. 

I get the frustration.  And I know some people still manage to make significant money from microstock.   They must be churning out very salable shots at a high rate, things that can sell so many times that they make it on volume.   I don't know how to do that. 

If you have a formula that works, great.  But seriously - won't you have to work harder every year, for less return?  Is that a career path that anyone wants to be on?  I suppose it can still work as a part-time thing IF you can find that niche that brings in enough to be worthwhile.

Good article.  It's sort of like the ethical treatment of animals: growing public awareness is steadily reducing the opportunities for commercial exploitation.  Operations like 500px don't like big bright lights shone on them. 

There will always be plenty of people desperate for 'exposure' and some sort of validation.  But I think crowdsourcing - as a business model - peaked quite a while ago.   And the same for it's corollary on the contributor side: "I want my work to be available from as many sources as possible".   All that does in the long run is is force you to spend more and more time uploading, for a steadily reducing total return. 

No worries, I'm in for the long haul.  I just closed my accounts at SS  and DT, because I was getting nothing but subscription sales and didn't want to support that 'business model' any longer.   But I'm sticking with GL. 

SS responded promptly to my support request, paid me my balance and closed my account.   

I deactivated all my files at DT, then sent an email asking how I would close the account.  They responded by closing it, bang.  Now I don't know if or when I'll get the roughly $150 they owe me.  I'll post the outcome eventually.

I thought they had some kind of formula where you could only disable a certain percentage at one time. Maybe it has changed since I disabled all of mine. Here's a thread where we talked about it 3 years ago...
http://microstockgroup.com/dreamstime-com/how-can-i-delete-my-account-(dreamstime)/
Ron said it was 30% of your portfolio, that sounds like what I remember. Hopefully they got rid of that silly rule.

The rule is still there but it depends on how old the images are.  I haven't uploaded in over a year so I could disable 100%.   Which I just did.

Getting out of DT has always been a royal pain.  Besides the 6 month lock-in, there's no way to disable multiple files. Does anyone know of something like a Greasemonkey script that will disable everything? 

UPDATE:  I'm doing it with iMacros.

Who's had any luck selling prints on Redbubble?   I'm not interested in t-shirts or coffee mugs, just wall art.

I've never really tried to get going there, because they don't read IPTC and pounding in all the keywords seemed like too much work for tiny returns.  But with FAA steadily morphing into Zazzle, and Crated going nowhere,  I'm looking for any alternatives.

I hope they will launch s�ciety 7 soon, with improved sales performance and a faster upload process.

Like I said earlier, we all had high hopes for Crated.com.  They started out doing just about everything right; but the sales never showed up.  Now they're sliding downhill, their standards have collapsed and they're flooded with junk.  Wish I knew the inside story there. 

There's a POD forum here on MSG where discussions like this usually happen. 

FAA is the big one, I sell a few there.   I have zero promotion of my own, any sales I get are though keyword search on the FAA site.  FAA has serious problems and shortcomings, but IHMO all the other PODs  are worse.  FAA at least reads IPTC on upload and lets you set your own markup.

I tried Society6 but the upload process was so tedious and slow (they don't read IPTC), I decided not to bother.  To make any sales on a POD you need hundreds of photos, and the time it would take to upload those numbers on S6 is just out of the question.

Many of us had high hopes for Crated.com but it seems to have gone nowhere.  I never sell anything there, others do report a sale now and then.

You'll probably here from others in this thread with more optimistic views :-)

I expected maybe a couple of "don't let the door hit you on the way out" posts but really, all these different opinions I'm seeing are fascinating.   

Apparently it showed up suddenly, with everyone "opted in" by default - there was a bit of kickback, and the default was changed to "opted out".   

I haven't submitted anything to microstock in a long time and will probably never do so again.   With about 300 old images online, my expectations are pretty low these days.  But I'm thinking about starting the new year by cleaning house.

In the last couple of months DT has completely dried up;  I barely made enough in December to pay for a latte.  Time to end it.

For SS it's been a year of out-of-control spamming, junk portfolios getting side-loaded without inspection (like those 30,000 photos of pot), crazy rejections wasting everyone's time, and steadily declining sales for individual contributors.   I've been waiting for them to make some "exciting announcement" about a new giveaway or royalty cut, but at this point they're in such chaos they probably wouldn't even announce it.  So I'll dump them too.   

I was ready to give up on Alamy after months without a sale, but got one a few days ago that netted me $10.   I really have nothing against them, so I'll leave my stuff there.   

The wild card, once again, is GL stock images.   I thought the new ownership might take it somewhere, and I got a couple of sales after the transition, but it went cold.  Unsure about this one.

Bottom line, I'm dropping SS and DT on New Year's Day. 

No doubt it's allowed in a legal sense.   And that all agencies are the same in this regard.

This makes make feel good about the fact that I stopped submitting to microstocks almost 2 years ago.  Since then, I've tried to do photos I actually feel good about, and sell prints on a POD.   I'm a small player with no advertising or promotion, but even so I now make a lot more that way than I do on the micros.  And my print sales are increasing, while microstock is sinking.

So most of my best photos aren't on microsotock anyway, and won't be.  And like I said, I'm thinking it's about time to pull the plug on these so-called "agencies" which, IMHO, are the furthest thing from being your "agent".

I've been waiting for the next 'exciting announcement' from SS so I could be dramatic about closing my account in response.  But maybe it would just be a good way to start the new year.