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I don't understand the real reason of this sudden charity

My understanding is that they are throwing all our images into an all-you can eat buffet of a cheap sub plan. They fear many of the better producers would pull their ports to avoid this. They are guaranteeing $ doubles for 6 months to get us to stay and they at least think their profits will go up enough to support this action.

It will be interesting to see if everyones sales are exactly double meaning that Canva is putting up their own money to meet this guarantee or if they are something a bit over that, and of course what happens in month 7.

I am guessing this plan has been in the works for a while, as sales might be lower than they expect due to economic downturn. But they take 65% of every sale, so if it was business as usual doubling our take still leaves them with 30%.

I think That Canva has a very rough ability to control if the sales come from paid downloads (our images) or Getty images for which they pay ? and we get less, or from free ones (either wholly owned content or the free sites they own). So they can somewhat push sales from either source via the search results. (This is something I think, I don't have any hard evidence or proof of it).

I read that it is doubling the total earnings, not just subs - My March income is a little lower than Jan or Feb unless there is a huge bump in subs - at least they are putting some sort of guarantee for 6 months - although sales would probably be at the expense of other sales somewhere else - hopefully from IS/Getty.  A little more convincing than 123 saying our sales would double (they went down or were steady as I recall, and income went down even more).

Canva can pretty much turn on or off our sales depending on how they position their free content in the search. They had our stuff pretty low for most of 2019 but have bumped it up a bit - maybe so we don't all just leave when they pull this sort of stunt. If they actually do double $ that would bring them up to SS levels for me - because SS has fallen so far, not because Canva has gone up that much. It would still be lower than my best months at Canva of 2018.

Quote from: MicroVet on March 30, 2020, 00:33

When Shutterstock submission page deletes the keyword "Easter" as an incorrect word and makes it impossible to add it, in Easter themed images, than something very wrong is happening there.

I cannot understand how they did not learn a thing with what happened to IS. A few years back almost everyone raved about how well SS worked pointing their good decisions in contrast with IS, the agency everyone developed a particular hate. And that made SS without doubt the strongest agency.

Now, SS seems to be following the same path of IS, instead of preserving their strong points.

At the moment SS is still my number one agency but the fall has been so big, not only in terms of revenue but also in terms of review quality, that I'm getting fed up with them.

They deleted the word Easter? Was it an Easter Image? I have some images with the keyword Easter, so I'm trying to understand what are you saying?

2,397,414 Easter stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free

I have noticed they do this sometimes if for example "easter' is repeated a few times - like "easter egg" "easter basket" "easter" - they might remove "easter" - without telling you they removed it or why - if you try to add it they remove it again - at least once I removed some of the other instances and they accepted it, but if you didn't notice they removed the most important keyword....

I guess A$ = Australia and R$ = Rand (South Africa)

new one MX$20.00  I get $0.38

I'm guessing that is Mexico

Gerrymander is another interesting one, as the original politician it was named for had a hard G - but most people say "jerrymander".

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on March 10, 2020, 22:28

You've still got the $0.60 ones to look forward to then!

Never had 0.6, but did have few 1.5$ sales. And every time it happend i immediately wrote compalainment to SS to opt-out of any kind of "programs". To which they reply that it is a low-res-web type of sale.  To which i reply that i will stop uploading if this happens again.

Again, had 2-3 of these sales only.

and did you stop uploading?

I'm interested in what are the words searched for when there are a few options - I mean for example "cutout" "cut out" "isolated" "isolated on white" or similar. presumably Adobe and others have quite good data on which terms searchers actually use and although we can include them all, it would make more sense to put the one that is searched most highest in the order. For a brief time SS had a tool where you could see relative # of searches for a term over time - (also good for trying to decide when to upload holiday or other seasonal content). It was very useful, or at least interesting, so they got rid of it.

I am also curious about 2 or more word keywords. Is it good enough to just do "Yosemite National Park" or do you need them all individually plus "Yosemite Park" and "National Park".

I don't know about editorial on DT, but the return per image is pretty low there. They are almost all sub sales at 35 cents and the occasional 2 dollar ones. Actual credit sales can be more - up to maybe $10 top, but that is only for images that have sold a lot before.

This month my RPD is 2.24 (2 decent sales and a bunch of subs) going back in time they are .76 .35 .91 .43 1.09 1.10 .59  and so on.

The number of sales is quite low about 2 orders of magnitude lower than the number of images I have. If I didn't start with them and have a long history I probably wouldn't bother now.

I got one from Fotolia LLC in the mail (I'm in California, USA)

Yes, and deduct some things too. Give it a few more years and I might not have much to report though.

Quote from: pancaketom on February 04, 2020, 14:04

...
1 was an affiliate sale (whatever that is) -

It's what other sites call Partners, meaning they somehow link to Alamy images and if someone follows a link from their site and buys on Alamy they get a cut.
https://www.alamy.com/customer/help/affiliate-program.aspx

Thanks, I guess the referring site gets 10% and Rakuten gets 3% - seems like a pretty good rakut for them.

I still think that this should come out of Alamy's 60% since it is someone else doing the marketing for them, but nobody is asking me.

Sometimes SS removes keywords that it decides aren't allowed. Sometimes they are the most obvious innocuous keywords for the image. Sometimes they are keywords that SS suggests. They don't actually tell you which keywords they remove, so you sort of need to watch it in the submission process. I think it is how they went about "fixing" the problem of people spamming the titles to get top search position. For example for an image of barbecue chicken. Keywords are "barbecue chicken", "grilled chicken" "cooked chicken" "chicken". SS removes the keyword "chicken"