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"

But part of the key is where you end up in the search for say "tasty tomato"  or maybe even more common by a whole lot just "tomato". If you are pushed back even a tiny amount from say page 1 to page 4 (out of 100's) that means you won't make many sales.

A much more interesting question to me is if it would be worth going for top placement in a less common search and just admit you will never show up near the top of a really generic search.

Of course it probably isn't worth it to try to be too clever about this since you would have to do it differently for each site and then they will go and change the search in some way which makes your attempts useless. I say put in the obvious keywords with a good description and in the long run that should be the best. Especially over more than one site and over time.

snip.... If DT is going to tell me my sales came from words that aren't in my title or description or keywords, how did someone find them? I'd like to know that trick.

I think they search with some keywords, then go down the rabbit hole of clicking on portfolio or similar images or others with this model. It might not take very long to get to a completely different image with really no obvious relation to the keywords listed in the search (and I definitely have some reported that don't make any sense to have shown up with a search of those words).

I looked back and I also have 0 sales listed for the first week of 2019 on some of the graphs despite sales during that time, I notice some discrepancies between local time and dates and whatever time and dates Adobe uses, so maybe that explains things as it gets weirder when the date changes?

OOH, Exciting news.   

I sure hope these don't become the new normal

IS was by far the most annoying. not anymore. Now it is probably Alamy. The DT automatic categories helps there a lot.

No real surprise there, although I am surprised at some of the terms that are banned. Chinese flag? how about Winnie the Pooh? I think that is usually banned.

I didn't have a card go bad, but I reformatted and took a few pics on a card once that wasn't fully transferred to the computer. I used some sort of recovery software - I am not sure what - maybe the one that came with the card? It recovered nearly every photo that I thought I had lost as well as some going back a surprisingly long time. - numerous reformat and use (although not to a full card) cycles earlier. The main issue was it took a long time - like 24 hours or more of the computer slowly churning through the data.

My card has dual slots, but I just write to one and then the other if the first card fills. Sometimes I do video to one and stills to the other. Maybe next time I travel and can't backup I should write to both cards. The price of cards is so much less these days.

I wish they had the Y axis labeled or even or something in that graph. eg 2015-2018 looks like a straight line, but the yearly differences are 23, 11, and 9. I'm tempted to put the numbers into a spreadsheet to see what it really looks like. I'm guessing vaguely like the left side of a bell curve. I'd also like to see a breakdown of SS, offset, premiumbeat, etc. or even more interesting see the SS broken down into video, on demand, subs, etc. I wonder what changed in the years it made a big jump - payout at a lower threshold? added offset? or is there really not much of a change, they just made the bars longer for some reason.

I am also surprised how low N America is compared to Europe. Maybe sales are all going to E Europe.

I guess infographics are OK, but I'd really rather some format that was higher in information and lower in glitz. I don't think SS really wants to provide much information though, or at least wants to obscure a lot and only tell the story they want to tell.

I wonder if they blocked submit.shutterstock too, that would be more interesting.

I imagine that SS is working along with the Chinese govt to block content, so why not bow down to the Russians too.

Isn't anything promoting LGBTQ+ illegal in Russia too - it seems SS is making a push for that content, I wonder if it is available there also.