Quote from: thijsdegraaf on October 20, 2021, 15:08

I left it as a holiday photo on my website and did not put it on Shuttestock.
Now it is of course much worse at sunsets photos.

Keep in mind that you could win the competitors with the correct keywords.

I don't think the lottery has much to do with the correct keywords - but with luck. Most people tend to use rather too many irrelevant keywords than not enough relevant ones. And, with for example a sunset photo - what would be the "correct" keywords there? What would a customer search for besides "sunset" ? He would possibly narrow it down to "sunset at beach", "sunset at forest", etc... but other than that? I think 95% will just enter "sunset" and go for one of the frst search results.
Now, I think the main factor is really luck - you need to upload an image just at the right time and be lucky that one or preferable more customers are looking for it at the right time and look at the "new" tab before your image gets burried among thousands of newer images with the same keyword. Then it rises to the top of the serach results and newer photos get an additional boost on SS - Some get mixed in with the "most relevant" search for a short amount of time (not sure it's at random, or has something to do with downloads or views as well. Could not figure that one out)
It's not the "right" keywords that get you to the top (or, better said, not "the right keywors alone". Of course, of your image is missing the most obvious keywords, like you only wrote "sun going down" instead of "sunset", you will not raise to the top for the "sunset" keyword), but mostly luck.

I can try to illustrate this with an example of mine: I do many dog costume photos and am doing quite well with them. Last year I wanted to do some photos with my dogs before Christmas in two specific costumes, but it wasn't snowing and didn't really look very Christmasy outsides. So I did these photos somewhere on our walk on the field with some shrubbery in the background. Strangely that image made it to the top of the serach results for "Christmas dog" and is doing really well for me. Later I had the chance to recreate the photo under better circumstances. I actually got to photography my dogs with the same costumes once in snow and once in a Cristmas studio setting. Both are much "better" photos in the sense that they fit the Christmas theme much better than two dogs in front of some green shrubbery. (Technical quality wise they should all be about the same) I used the exact same keywords for these photos, just copying them over. I probably added "snow" to the one and "studio" to the other, but no keywords were removed. If the sucess of the photos depended on the keywords alone, these images should have been found and bought by the customers just as well, or actually better, yet they never did. They might have had 2-3 sales maybe, while the first one literally has hundreds of sales. It was just luck with timing that lead the first photo to be successfull.
It's actually one of the things I find so extremely frustrating about microstock - Luck is too big of a factor, so you can spend lots of time, effort and even money creating a really great photo, but a much worse one (and usually not yours), will get all the downloads because of sheer luck.

Quote from: SVH on October 18, 2021, 14:22

Lol! Four days without sales. That will teach me not place paranoia topics like this

Get use to the no sales day-- sadly they are getting more and more common.

I understand that the glorious microstock days are over, but it's not all just as gloomy as some people like to make it appear. I had no no sale day on Shutterstock in over a year. Sales aren't really the problem - It's rather the low payment I usually get for them.

Quote from: For Real on October 17, 2021, 19:30

What if the OP works for the agency? Would they be considered a double agent spy (007) 

LOL!

With the way things are going these days with Shitterstock, Crapstock (whatever that is), and Stinkystock, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to find we've got double-agent spies in our midst! :/

I would be surprised, because it would mean that Shutterstock would need to use recources (=money) on contributors. And we all know they don't want to waste any money on us.

After reading this thread I was staring to think to myself, "Stock ideas for Christmas: what you should NOT do" and going along with your thoughts the answer was, don't shoot Christmas, or any other over produced holiday subjects, invest time on other areas. Now there's an easy solution?

But what does this solution actually solve?
You'll just end up with the situation you described yourself above: By producing "not overproduced" content you just end up creating content that is less in demand and therefore will generate you less sales, or you'll produce content that is equally in deman through all the year, which means you'll have the same sales as all year and not profit from any holiday boost.


Personally I am always looking forward to holidays on microstock. It's when I have the most sales, especially around Christmas - I am already having Christmas-related sales daily again by now, which are additional sales to my normal sales. So it would never cross my mind to not  produce Christmas related content before Christmas. Might as well shoot myself in the foot.

I can't see how you join istock. I think I tried to get photos accepted in 2012 but were rejected as I only had a P&S camera at the time and knew nothing about editing. I may still have an account there but doubt it. As for SS I'm nearly at min payout amount (I only have a few 100 photos) because there's been more $1+ DLs lately and only a few dime DLs.

If it has been that long you might want to try again. IStock doesn't seem to have any real quality standards at all these days. I don't know how it used to be in 2012. They tend to reject photos for reasons other agencies don't reject photos for, like, for example, you can't submit editorial content of any news-worthy event like demonstrations or product photos, but they never reject my photos for quality reasons.

Quote from: Firn on October 15, 2021, 02:05

...
 I also think that the difference will be more noticable the more sales you have.
You say you sell between 10 and 20 photos a week - If you think about it that's actually quite a high fluctuation of 50%, so not really stable at all. It just seems so similar to you, because the number 10 is rather close to 20. But if you upscale the numbers to 100 compared to 200 sales or even 1000 compared to 2000, which is the same ratio, you will see much clearer that your sales aren't as stable as you think.

but it's unlikely that will be the case - small sample size will have much greater swings & variation - eg, 1 buyer taking a series of 5-10 images will distort an average of 15, but have no effect on sales of 100-200.  this is the reason we get so many worries/complaints about swings when really it's to be expected. it's called regression to the mean - will happen quickly for large samples, slower for small ones.

As said before, I have differences of up to 60% in sale numbers between months and we are talking about quite some more sales that just 100-200.

I can't really see any stable volume with my port. If I look at my sales for 2021 in my "worst" month I only had 60% of downloads compared to my best month. It really depends on what content your port has. If most of your images are of very universal things that sell through the whole year you can expect more stable download numbers. My port performs much better in months where I sell a lot of seasonal images - The time before Halloween, Easter, Christmas, etc. usually brings me higher volumes of downloads, because, naturally, my seasonal photos will not sell very often out of season.

 I also think that the difference will be more noticable the more sales you have.
You say you sell between 10 and 20 photos a week - If you think about it that's actually quite a high fluctation of 50%, so not really stable at all. It just seems so similar to you, because the number 10 is rather close to 20. But if you upscale the numbers to 100 compared to 200 sales or even 1000 compared to 2000, which is the same ratio, you will see much clearer that your sales aren't as stable as you think.

Quote from: For Real on October 11, 2021, 07:22

never heard from support. I am surprised they don't seem to care about us? I would expect turnaround service within 24 hrs 

i reported & got a reply that tried to blame my browser, but the problem's fixed now

It wasn't your browser.

Quote from: Firn on October 06, 2021, 04:18

Quote from: Suspect on October 06, 2021, 04:05

Quote from: Camillo on October 05, 2021, 15:59

Hey I just want chime and wonder if those dudes from the shutter forum that claimed to be swimming in the riches and that we should keep the faith are gonna be around here also?

The Shutterstock forum member who did that the most left the forum a couple of years ago and is in fact a regular poster on this forum.  So you get the chance to swim in his success here...

You mean that one contributor who frequently boosted about being a world known successfull photographer and that he knew the secret to sucess (and would share it for money), but on the other hand complained about poor earnings on microstock...?

Nope.  The one who is actually exceptionally talented and often showed his earnings to prove it 

Ah, then I either don't know who you are talking about or it was before my time.

Hey I just want chime and wonder if those dudes from the shutter forum that claimed to be swimming in the riches and that we should keep the faith are gonna be around here also?

Who are you talking about? The really "big players" in this game like picture farms never took part in the forum.

I only know of only few regulars that really made big money, like Doug Jensen who made videos and never told us to "keep faith", but rather the opposite - to change our tactics and that we were doing it all wrong. Other people who made decent money there like Milleflore also rather gave tips on how to improve. I can't remember anyone telling us to "keep faith" and that alone would bring in the money. Everyone who has any decent income on SS and took part in the forum encouraged us to work differently if we wanted to earn money there.

The only yay-sayers that just told everyone to "keep doing what you were doing" and that they were on the right path were the ones who never made big money themselves, but encouraged every single person who whined about having a picture rejected for focus or noise claiming that everything was perfectly fine with their pictures and that it was just the bad evil reviewers - while the pictures were in fact out of focus or full of noise. Or that told people who wanted feedback on their ports full of mediocre snapshots of flowers and forests that their pictures were "great" when in fact they were close to useless. Neither one nor the other was really helpful. Sometimes harsh critisism and truth might hurt or seem not polite, but it's not helping contributors solving the problems to many rejections or poor sales if people keep telling them that everything was fine with their images. But I never saw people who have decent income do that.

I think all agencies accept all releases from all other agencies. I've been using the one from Shutterstock and it has been accepted by all agencies I submit too - Only with getty you need to make sure you actualy fill out the visual reference field, while it seems to be optional on all other agencies.

Quote from: For Real on October 01, 2021, 08:33

Someday there will be company run by us (the artist) where the commission is 70%  plus for the us and our voices are heard and changes are made to benefit us. Someday...

We talked about that with the pay cut last year. But then you have to compete against Istock, Shutterstck, sites with free photos, etc.
Only the very good professionals can do without stock sites and sell through their own site.

Of course an agency that has higher prices than all the other agencies will have a hard time competing with them and being sucessfull, but the idea was not to make prices higher, but commissions - so instead of, for example, a 10% 0.10$ commission the artist would get a 70% 0.70$ commission, which would make quite the difference already at low sub sales, but of course even more with extended licences.

Btw - I think Stocksy is kind of an agency like this, isn't it? I am not exactly sure about the details, as apparently I am not good enough for them, but I've heard they are basically artist-run and pay very high commissions compared to other agencies?

Thank you.  It's nice to be talking somewhere where you're not likely to be told off like a naughty school child if you criticise.
Thank you too whoever first created this forum.  Great idea to be independent.

Just wait for it. If you critisize Shuttertock while being a contributor, eventually you will have some people on your throat blaming you for the downfall of the industry, because you have not left SS.
No place is without its downsides. But at least you won't get banned here for speaking against any agency.