If I were to take a cruise I'd be taking pictures of people ill with norovirus - not such a great seller probably

But I am heading for the Caribbean again this year, though not Aruba - lots more SODs needed before it pays for the trip though!

Quote from: old crow on February 05, 2014, 10:01

""I'm still not down to eating ramen noodle soup and cans of tuna fish for dinner just yet.""

One small can of decent tuna fish is 6 shutterstock downloads  ! ! ! !

or...

Six cans of tuna fish is one decent shutterstock download.

or...

A case of 48 cans of tuna fish is a nice Shutterstock SOD. Today's haul in return for a picture of Aruba

My issue has been fixed but can you explain why this keeps happening?  We shouldn't have to deal with this each month...

It's fair to ask questions, but if you make the questions amazingly general and offer nothing about your own situation - illustrations, photographs, 3D renders, video etc. - you'll get an answer that's largely useless or at best, funny (I assume that was a magic 8-ball?).

Back in Dec I emailed support to ask about a year-old sale that had yet to clear. After saying they were sorry but it was unlikely I would ever be paid for that (distributor) sale, they wrote:
On another note, it would be great to get some more of your images online.

 

Unbelievable! I haven't had that situation (although I did opt out of distributor sales last April as I was unhappy with the deal) but did you push back on that? Unless the distributor had gone bankrupt, I think if Alamy continued to do business with a distributor that didn't pay their bills, they are complicit in a very shady business deal. The end user has your image and never paid for it - and instead of going after them, the agency is throwing up their hands and saying - in best Rick Perry style - "Oops".

I received e-mail from Alamy this morning titled "Remember us?" and noting that I haven't uploaded for a while. It goes on to say "Come and see what we've been up to and make 2014 the year you start submitting to Alamy again. We've got some exciting things up our sleeves for this year so don't miss out."

The only thing I'm missing of late at Alamy are sales. I stopped uploading when sales just slowed to a trickle. Their uploading process is a pain in the butt and without any reason to expect sales in the future they're at the bottom of my To-Do list.

But what puzzles me is that Alamy is awash in content - why would they care about getting new uploads? Especially from a relatively small contributor like me?

I'm being paid at the wrong level - 21.6 cents for a subscription instead of 32.4 cents - and I contacted support to fix it.

The royalty level (4 which is 45%) is correctly shown although I don't think they've updated the RC total for February (I don't write these down but I think it's the same as I looked at last month).

This is computer based rather than some pencil and paper process that needs a human to be there to make it work - can't understand what's so problematic about having the right thing happen at the beginning of the month.

Your all time totals are at the bottom of the current month's chart - click on 0 or whatever it now says for your account balance. You'll see the current month's sales and at the bottom your all time totals

For your own sake, try to keyword as generally as possible in what's embedded in your file's IPTC data and you should always include all relevant keywords, regardless of whether they're in the title or description.

Stay away from specialized vocabularies in your keywords - if it wouldn't fly in a google search, it's language you shouldn't be using (and I'm thinking here particularly of Getty/iStock controlled vocabulary; DeepMeta can help you disambiguate and translate keywords to CV)

Don't shorten or lengthen titles/descriptions based on any agency rules - these files will probably have a longer life than your tenure at some of the agencies and you want the right information to be in there. You can edit down (or pad in the case of the daft rules on BigStock and DT that require a minimum length - why isn't "Isolated Granny Smith apple" a reasonable description?) when uploading

Think of SEO when putting titles together - don't duplicate titles and think about how you might type a search phrase if you were looking for that image. I used to do things like with clever or funny (I thought) titles and had a series of images with the same title and am now fixing those as I upload images to my own site.

I've never really had a clear policy for myself on alternate spellings color/colour harbor/harbour or differing suffixes - painted, painting, paint. Shutterstock will remove anything it sees as redundant but for DT (I think) you're better off having singular and plural if you have multiples of an object.

Put your most important keywords first so that if you have to cut because there's a maximum at an agency it's easy to chop from the end (if you use a tool that alphabetizes your entries this won't work, but Photoshop doesn't do that)

Try to remember important variants - yard and garden, for example - for images that are going to be searched for worldwide

If there are plants or birds or animals as the main focus, try and get the latin name or specific names. I found out earlier in the month that I sold a Christmas garland image from my own site because the designer was working on something for a university biology department that worked on avoiding invasive species (in the Pacific Northwest that includes holly) and liked that I had included - and keyworded - kinnikinnick which is native here.

Put in place names and region names for outdoor shots and leave them out for studio stuff. Most agencies will take a dim view if you include multiple locations on the grounds that it could have been there (because places look similar).

I'll stop now It's just that this is a very valuable resource for you and for the long haul; it's worth taking the time to get it right when you do it ('cause it's no fun doing it over again)

Apology accepted

Dennis was kind enough to talk about how he approached the content on his image pages to get optimal results in searches (in the thread referenced in the OP). I experimented with getting a handful of my own images to get a "green" dot from the Yoast SEO plugin and wrote a blog post about the process for anyone else who is interested to take a look at

http://www.digitalbristles.com/symbiostock-image-pages-go-green/

.. is the ridiculous RPD that makes it worthless for me to upload to them anymore!... My overall revenues did not go up year on year, and, to add insult to injury, the RPD has fallen flat on its face.  Cant understand, what kind of a strategy is that!!?! 

I argued a bit via e-mail when they introduced subscriptions last year, but as they wouldn't offer an opt-out (and I was not part of the bridge) I voted with my feet and left BigStock last March.

When SS was a new agency, they were very careful as the collection grew and they increased prices. After a price increase they watched what happened for a month or two and then set the new contributor rates. They needed to be sure that they could still make money given buyer behavior and a large part of what makes subscription pricing/royalty payments work for agencies is that buyers don't use their full download allowance.

I think they wanted to experiment with BigStock but didn't want to take any risks with being out of pocket in case buyers used a ton more of their allowance when buying at the lower BigStock prices. So they produced this insane royalty schedule - some wit contacted them to ask if BigStock had had 50,000 downloads a year total, let alone from any one contributor!

The only think I'm tentatively hopeful about is that this toxic rate schedule has not yet migrated to Shutterstock proper.

I think Paul's experience speaks volumes - BS was brand new in 2005 and to reduce earnings to those levels isn't what I'd call a win

But keep reading - it gets better with a Curator Network. To me, that sounds just like the setup of multi-level marketing schemes. You bring in people and make a percentage of what they earn.

Then there is some truly bizarre partnership with Instagram.

Sounds to me as if they want to sound big and exclusive but that they don't have enough content yet and are thus trying to actively recruit without appearing to be doing so.

The Moody's downgrade of Getty's debt wouldn't have put Getty at "$1 billion of turnover" - $897 million isn't a billion. They say they want top notch people: "We only invite contributors to join who we believe have highly salable content and we only take the content we believe has a very high chance of selling time and again." - but why wouldn't people that good just go to Getty directly? Why share the wealth with RooM?

Given how well Pocketstock worked out (ahem!) I don't think I'd give them my exclusive content even if I were the sort of contributor they're looking for (which I'm not).