If you're hiring reviewers, I know some people.

Quote from: gostwyck on October 12, 2014, 12:07

Quote from: spike on October 12, 2014, 11:37

I'm not opted.in to DPC, but my earnings at Fotolia continue to grow month after month.

So I don't think there's necessarily a causation between being opted in or out and your normal fotolia sales. If there is, I'm not aware of it.

Realistically I don't see how those who have opted-out of DPC can be deliberately 'punished' with fewer sales at FT. It could only be achieved via modifications to the default sort-order and I can't see FT investing money to achieve that end. Let's face it, FT have the least sophisticated sort-order of any of the main agencies which indicates how little they do invest in such things. For example they seem to be the only agency that don't even give any weighting whatsoever to keywords. The likelihood that FT have actually spent money just to make their search even worse for buyers is highly improbable.

Apart from anything else they appear to already have 80-90% of the content at FT mirrored at DPC. Try a search on any particular subject on each site and there's not much difference in the quantity.

Interesting side-track here.
They do such things, but for a different cause.
I do have an image that shows up pretty high (now top thirty in a search leading to over 3000 results, was top 5 a few weeks ago) in their relevant search order.
But only if I search in German on the German FT site.
If I switch to English (US) the same (translated) search term shows a bit more than 5000 results, and my file can't be found in the first 500 (stopped looking after that).
Interestingly enough, if I switch to English (UK) my image is number two (of over 5000).

I suspect this is because I get paid in Euros. Somebody from the US buying in US-$ and them having to pay me in Euros is their worst case. And they know how to avoid that.

Proof: FT shows you a statistic how many files were bought from US buyers. From beginning of 2011 on until today, in my case that is about 1,5% of all sales.

Now, this is quite interesting.

I'm an EU contributor, but I made a mistake while opening my account, so I get paid in US$. So I suppose for them it would be the best if buyers paid in euro, while they pay me in dollars.
Where can I see this statistic?

Same thing here.

Your post is completely on point. I mean, "extra cash" is good, but it'd be good to know why/how/when.

Maybe it would be good to separate keyworders in two different tiers.

The top 5 keyworders (for example) get at least x$ per keyword and keep y% of that income. All the other ones get z$ per keyword (where z < x) and keep q% of their income (where q < y).

Or just disable partial keywording.

Thanks for sharing! May I ask your portfolio size?

It's in the thousands-range (I suppose you don't need precise information, you just want to know if it's statistical error or coincidence if I have a portfolio of 500 images I don't).

I miss the old days when there were more graphs and discussions, also a lot of blogs which reported income closed (and they were very helpful to me as a beginner), so this is my thanks to them and I hope you find this useful.

I started microstock in Oct 2009, and I did quite a lot of work, but not with spectacular results. I was a student, so it was lunch money. I was fine with it. However, as I started working, I've noticed that I'd like to improve my income, so I waited until my contract expires and during the summer of 2013, decided to populate my portfolio with quick-to-make, totally generic images. However, something peculiar happened. Now, enough talk, let's see a picture. Blue bars are income, red line is portfolio size.



When I write "spam started", I really mean totally generic images. This is why I was able to increase my portfolio size so quick, and my earnings. However, these totally generic images were not alone, I also tried some more creative stuff or things that I thought would sell. So it was a mixed bag. Upon analyzing my portfolio in 2014, I've found a couple of images which stood out and amounted to most of the income. To put it in perspective: less than 1% of the images were responsible for more than 50% of my income.

In Feb 2014, I updated the niche and, no surprise here, income increased once again - you can see almost a negligible increase in my portfolio size between Feb and March, but the earnings almost doubled. It's all due to this small number of images. In May, I updated the niche again. Income rose. To compare, I started "spamming" again.  But although I increased my portfolio size by a significant amount, the earnings did not follow, or at least not as dramatically as after uploading niche content.

What's the take-away message? Shoot in a niche, don't overpopulate stock agencies with generic stuff? I don't know. It'd be easy if niches were easy to find, or if you could predict them. So that's obviously not the advice I'd be willing to take. My advice would be to check your statistics more thoroughly, even with paid solutions if necessary (there are brilliant options available), and base your shooting strategy on numbers. It worked for me.

Hope this helps!

I can't see any problems with iStock but let's have a look at this. Are you getting any errors when you are trying to sync? Also, what type of sale is it? [email protected]

Nope, no errors. And all the other agencies update timely.
It's normal photo sales. Weird.

I'm actually surprised to see the amount of support iStock has even though they take 80-85% of the royalties for non-exclusives. They'll never increase this percentage.

Well, you* get what you deserve.

*not you specifically, it's just a saying

I was just thinking the other day, as I submitted a lot of similar garbage to iStock and it all got rejected with quite good reasons (reviewers went through the keywords, checked if everything was really isolated, and so on), that it must take a lot of time to review images .

So, instead of deactivating images (work for contributors, doesn't do much against them), maybe we should just SPAM them with as many crappy images as we can. I mean, just upload all of the (non-sensitive) photos you have ever taken, keyworded with no effort and incorrectly.

It's no work for us - you just need to import the images and let the upload continue overnight(s). The upload cap is currently 999 images per week, and if a significant amount of contributors decide to spam them at the exact same time, while they don't have time to adjust and enforce the new limits, the queue will grow so long that not only that it will hurt the processing times, but they'll have to hire new reviewers and so on, making their expenses even higher. If the action is coordinated enough and a very high amount of images is submitted, this could make iStock choke.

What do you think? naive or genius? Or none of those things.

Quote from: spike on September 25, 2014, 13:30

Stocksy is a joke.

All that you need to do is compress the tonal range (less contrast, push the RGB curve up in the left bottom and down in the right top) and do split toning (blue in shadows, orange in highlights).

You do this and you'll get accepted.

Good luck in your next try.

Really?  Is that what I've done?

No. But it sure helps.

Btw, distinction between necessary and sufficient is kinda relevant here.

Hey!

First of all - I really like the UI. Great job!

Issues:

 - shutterstock sales are not reported for me in real time in "latest downloads". I mean, I get the correct revenue and everything, but there are no thumbnails (or any data for that matter) from SS. Only Fotolia and iStock. Is this a bug or a feature? Images from SS start appearing in the feed only when the day is over.
 - the graphs below "revenue per download".. not very straightforward. At first I though this is distribution of my income over agencies, but in fact it's not, it's revenue per download. I think my idea might be more useful, but keep both, so that people have a choice.

Suggestions:

 - it would be great if an algorithm could recognize identical images over agencies and merge them into one item. It would be very useful to see how some images compare over agencies. And not just images, collections of images as well!
 - you know this, but - support for more agencies

If you want to be competitive (stockperformer, microstock analytics), you need to provide at least as a good service as they do. I see that your project has a lot of potential.

Ah, they've removed the feature (bug?) where you saw which files exactly your referred photographers sold and how many times. :/

It was quite useful.

Edit: So don't upgrade if you don't need to. Also, if someone has an .apk from the previous version, hit me up.

It's ok.

My portfolio is generally crap so people downloaded only small sizes. Now I get loads more for that.