Going private isn't as effective, imo.

By EXPOSING the scale of the problem, it's easier for others to care and even help out. Also, there's a psychological shame factor involved. Numerous thieving contributors contacted me directly to plead to have me remove their name from the list. This is a potentially powerful deterrent.

Interesting, the thieves come to the SS forum, I suppose to troll for images to steal and ideas to copy.

Ive made this in 5 minutes.

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/prescription-pills-paper-colorful-medication-256578076

Totally sucks, but it's one of my top sellers on SS, FT and iS.

Or this one: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/corn-field-early-morning-light-443097361

Nothing special, but also one of my top sellers on SS and FT.

Nice colorful pills and the cornfield has a nice dreamy look with the corn and the haze? My pill shot isn't nearly as good, but it was one of my first "inspirations" when I started with Microstock. 



I need to do this with more photogenic pills.  But I spent the rest of the props, so it's a no deal. Hmm, M&Ms, Skittles, some aspirin?

If SS had a real reporting channel that actually responded and looked into image theft, the forum thread would never have been started.

I'm sure their reasoning is, if one person is reported in public for having stolen images, and it's false, that would make the whole project negative for false accusations. But if they are looking and don't close down someone for a mistake, I don't see any huge problem. The reason they take time, is to prevent a false locking of an account. Fine, I defend that.

Now back to the start, many people reported a number of different stolen or copied, some stolen parts reused or traced vectors, and most of the time, nothing happened.

Before the public effort some of us wrote and got back a standard form letter telling us how to file a DMCA if we were the owner. Asking again, the same letter and "this is the way it is." Now I see they do allow private reporting. You need to post the link to the actual image and the copy, not just files or numbers. Lets see if private reporting works and the project was a success by creating a channel for reporting?

While we're all writing to ourselves, the OP posted and hasn't been back since Jan. 19th 

I just want to add, that I had no problem and DT was very fair when I closed my account. It took some time and the whole waiting period from last deletion, they sent me payment for all that was still owed. I didn't have many new uploads because I was planning in advance and stopped sending new files.

But I wanted to mention that they were very nice, and after my polite message request to close account and send payment, they did. Might have been 90 days to account for any pending downloads.

Today they rubbed salt in the wound. A sale from last week was refunded and repurchased for the same price, except they took 20% more of it and I got 20% less.  ouch.

How did that work? What I mean is, we got a 10% cut, how did they take 20%? I don't understand.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 23, 2019, 10:42

Image description is fairly important if you want your images to be found in a web search, not so much if you don't care about appearing in searches.

That doesn't apply to Adobe Stock. They only use keywords.

Wrong... want to try again? 

Read below

In the INTERNAL search, yes, but Google (and other search engines) pick up the descriptions, so they are very important there too. I have seen it mentioned several times that a rather large portion of traffic/sales comes directly from Google.

I would argue that the #1 most important thing in selling stock (and everything else for that matter) is the metadata - descriptions and keywords.

Furthermore, not just relevant (obviously), but also UNIQUE (as much as possible) descriptions/keywords are very important. Google does not like duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content. Google penalizes duplicate content. 

So, good descriptions and keywords are more important than the actual content, or at least as important. If you are lazy and don't spend any time on that, well, expect low sales.

A good image that is found, will outsell any very good or perfect image that is not found. Actually, many times mediocre to bad images will also outsell the good if they are more visible.

Good points all. However I want to add Adobe also gives a better rank to an image with the same words in the Title and the Keywords. So let me say, yes it matters in many ways.

 

Google has been penalizing repeating metadata on websites since about 2000. Although that's about SEO and being found, they figured it out a long time ago. The same applies to photos being found.

Image description is fairly important if you want your images to be found in a web search, not so much if you don't care about appearing in searches.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 22, 2019, 10:52

Quote from: pancaketom on February 22, 2019, 00:29

I got an Alamy sale today.

I made $7.40 less than I would have with the same sale yesterday. It was also a lot easier to see how much I actually made from the sale when it was a 50/50 split. I'd be perfectly willing to do the calculations if the 60/40 split was the other way though.


I wonder who and how the screws will tighten next.

You mean how low can they go and who's leading the race to the bottom and lowest commissions for us. 

I hate to say "old timers" but honest, since I started, I've watched the agencies nibble and cut and adjust, almost always down. Only upwards changes I've seen were SS when they added the highest level to subs, which is a long time ago. Not sure about Single and On Demand, they didn't exist back then. And the AdobeStock recently raising commissions to make them more consistent.

Every other announcement has been, no more referrals, cuts in commissions, drops in prices, removing levels, adding new partners (which are always lower returns for us), changing pricing packages = discounts which means we get less, and all kinds of Good News or Exciting Changes that always mean, they make more and we make less. 

I won't know on Alamy until I get some sales, but I just went through and marked almost everything as Exclusive. A small number are too close to call, similar, I didn't bother. I seldom uploaded the same things to Alamy that I have on Microstock. I didn't want to get into that game and I don't know how many buyers would be so set in their ways that they wouldn't at least check SS, FT or IS when they found something on AL?

With the lower Alamy prices I have more downloads now and make less money. I'll guess if I get the same number of downloads in 2019, I'll make less money than 2017 or 2018? OK so I'm not going out of my way to feed the slightly better than Microstock agency, unless it's something I think will do better there, like travel or scenic.

Lets all give Alamy a year and come back to see what we found out?

Give them a year and all you'll see is lower sales prices and reduced income.

Then give them a year or two and they come back with a 70/30 split in their favour.

I had an RM exclusive sale today and made a whole 98 cents 

I won't disagree with the likelihood of anything you wrote, but I'd like to give the new program a fair chance, before deciding. I'd expect income for anyone with regular numbers to be down 10%?

Didn't we start at 60/40 We got 60 they took 40. Then it went to 50/50 and a slight adjustment when they added partners, 50/50 of the 35% that was left. Now it's 40/60 (our cut starts first to keep it the same) and I suppose somewhere in the future, we might see 30/70, I don't think for at least a few years, but so what, that's not great news either way.

Let me express my view. For 40% and if I understand 40% of 35% when a partner makes a sale? I'm not going to go out of my way to upload much new to Alamy. I don't think they care, just like I don't think most of the agencies care if 1 person, or 100 people or 1,000 people, stop uploading, or clear out and leave. They have millions of images, all they need, with duplicates of nearly every subject.

The only choice we have is where we want our work to be sold, and that choice for myself is getting smaller and smaller as they (the agencies) take a bigger cut, until I'm not feeding them anything anymore. Personal decision and I honestly don't think any of them are concerned about getting enough good materials for the market.

Haven't I said this before? 

I'd rather sit for nothing than work for nothing.

Quote from: lcodacci on February 21, 2019, 04:39

Year To Date were about 100 dls vs while seeing Deepmeta stats my dls were 41.
What happened?
Btw, my best Jan ever

Are you exclusive? If so, any plussed images get double in Year to Date. The only effect that has is that you have more 'sales' towards your target.

No (or nearly no) stats agree with any other stats on iS. They choose to do it that way.
Classic Mushroom Management, though they have a tech 'excuse' for it.

Interesting as the obvious is, 2 x 41 still doesn't = 100 so they have some other magic added to the real number of 41 downloads.  Must be exciting being an exclusive.

Does everyone here understand mushroom management? I do from a long time back. Was used to describe the relationship with the board of regents at the university, the teachers and the students. 

I got an Alamy sale today.

I made $7.40 less than I would have with the same sale yesterday. It was also a lot easier to see how much I actually made from the sale when it was a 50/50 split. I'd be perfectly willing to do the calculations if the 60/40 split was the other way though.


I wonder who and how the screws will tighten next.

You mean how low can they go and who's leading the race to the bottom and lowest commissions for us. 

I hate to say "old timers" but honest, since I started, I've watched the agencies nibble and cut and adjust, almost always down. Only upwards changes I've seen were SS when they added the highest level to subs, which is a long time ago. Not sure about Single and On Demand, they didn't exist back then. And the AdobeStock recently raising commissions to make them more consistent.

Every other announcement has been, no more referrals, cuts in commissions, drops in prices, removing levels, adding new partners (which are always lower returns for us), changing pricing packages = discounts which means we get less, and all kinds of Good News or Exciting Changes that always mean, they make more and we make less. 

I won't know on Alamy until I get some sales, but I just went through and marked almost everything as Exclusive. A small number are too close to call, similar, I didn't bother. I seldom uploaded the same things to Alamy that I have on Microstock. I didn't want to get into that game and I don't know how many buyers would be so set in their ways that they wouldn't at least check SS, FT or IS when they found something on AL?

With the lower Alamy prices I have more downloads now and make less money. I'll guess if I get the same number of downloads in 2019, I'll make less money than 2017 or 2018? OK so I'm not going out of my way to feed the slightly better than Microstock agency, unless it's something I think will do better there, like travel or scenic.

Lets all give Alamy a year and come back to see what we found out?

As always never follow any link in an email. If you have questions, use you usual agency bookmark and check.

If you use the same password on two or more agencies - DON'T 

"On 2019-02-21 Mostphotos noticed some suspicious activities and potential account theft. While logged in at www.mostphotos.com some of our contributing members received a message in their inbox to provide their emailaddress and password. This message was not sent by Mostphotos but from a scammer/phisher (someone trying to get hold of another persons information).

The scam has been handled and even though only a small number of account may have been effected we have temporarily disabled the possibility to message other users on mostphotos.com. The possibility to message other users will be switched back on once we have looked further into the matter.

From what the suspicious activities show, the main reason for this infringement is to try and make withdrawal requests to paypal accounts not own by the contributor (don�t worry, we have not accepted any withdrawal with suspicious activity!). To ensure the safety of your accounts we have asked you to change the password to your account. But since we can not exclude the risk of a hacker trying to get hold of your personal data we would also recommend that you change password on other services as well.

We are constantly looking for ways to improve your accounts security and your experience on mostphotos.com. We will shortly release an improved security check when changing password, e-mailaddresses, making withdrawals requests and changing payment methods.

If you have any question about this matter you are always welcome to contact us at [email protected]!"

Ha Ha these people at Mostphotos are lost. You can't change the password, their site doesn't send the email.

I think I worked by Submission groups. Click a group. Go down a few groups and Shift-Click a group to get the whole range. Check the selected file count at top right. Click the Only On Alamy box and Save. Worked pretty quick. I later came back to search and find a few individual files that were not exclusive and reset the box.  You will have to eyeball the number of files in each submission and do the mental math so you don't exceed the file count capability.

Also correct, you can click by groups, upper right box, and deselect within that group if there are exceptions that aren't exclusive. Control+click

I don't know if it's my slow internet, but everything takes a couple seconds to react to any click or change. Selected have a blue highlight or box around them.