Normally I don't complain about bad earnings since a) there are so many variances out there and b) my works are not very commercial oriented, so no big expectations from the start. But this month is my worst in the last 24 months, 60% down compared to March '17, and 65% down to April '16. Many days with 0 downloads, sometimes even on workdays. Medium port (1100 images), regular downloads each day and flat to small increases in revenues up until this month. What happened?

I know there were Easter holidays, but not so much as to ruin monthly sales. Anybody else can report something similar this month?

A person at iStock's forum suggested that February subscription sales show only half of February's sales:

"The subs plans that started halfway through the month and beyond won't be reported until the next month's report. So going forward every report will show the last half of the previous month and the first half of the current month. Should even out with the total but if you're using a tool like Stock Performer the monthly subs for the most recent month will always be about half. "

If true, this may explain at least half of the problem (i.e. super low earnings for month of February as reported now).

So, it's out and we got so close to giving our assets for free. How about a license fee 0.00612 USD and a gross royalty of 0.00092 USD per image? Got 10 such sales... Laugh or cry?

Of course, it could be always a mistake, as usual with iStock, but something tells me it's not...

where can you see that?

You need to download your report in txt format, open it in Excel and create a pivot (summary) table of the huge and long table originally provides us.

I have succeed to open the pdf with my earnings. Indeed, there are a lot of files given up for free (I do not recall to give them my permission for this) and I also have 2-3 files marked with red. Should I sign a check to send them money for covering the expenses? Because it sounds I owe them some money.

In my case most of the .0 sales are always accompanied by the same title/agency sale with positive royalty, so it must be some sort of accounting element that they needed to include. Same goes to negative figures marked in red; they are also most of the time go with the same figure but with "+", at least in my case. Now, I still counted 13 sales with "0" gross royalty and absent figure in Licence Fee (as if nobody did buy anything, or was given for free) and one case where Licence Fee was $1.29 but I received .0 royalty. Finally, from a very quick look I noticed that PDF statement may differ in some figures with the txt statement (which you can import to Excel, comma separated). So if you want to have a more detailed and controlled analysis of your royalties, I recommend the latter format.

Finally, I must also add that I had quite a lot of sales grossing 0.04 - 0.09 (since 0.10 sales should be considered already as significant ones, lol). If not for a couple large sales and total overall quantity of sales (grossing more than 50% of all other agencies' revenue), I would quit the next day. For the moment I'm still observing, whether this ship is sinking or merely stagnating.

Slightly unrelated to the issue of accessing ESP, but still equally outrageous, the reason why we won't see the current balance on IS/Getty anymore (official response) is:

You cannot find your balance because it is not there to be found. ESP does not show your current balance because we no longer calculate a current balance. This is partly due to the fact that the vast majority of sales are subs and the royalties for these can only be worked out at the end of the relevant period that the subscription was valid for, so they cannot be reported live. Once the sales reports are published on Feb 20th though you will see what you have sold and what you have earned.

I just wonder how other agencies manage to report live balance which is composed of subs sales as well? Where's the catch?

I first couldn't believe my eyes when I came upon this image (there are a number of them in the set). Then I saw the title: "Defocused background with wild coastline....".

Obviously the first thing which comes to my mind is who on earth will buy this s*&t, but then logically came up with another: why would SS refuse so many images for being "soft" or "out of focus" etc. and allow this type of things?

Starting about September 2016  to today, my sales and volume are at downfall. I have had a number of 24 cents sales, and recently 27 cents seems to be the max.

Can only concur with that statement and confirm the same behavior for my port at Fotolia.

I had a couple of 23 cent sales , I queried it with Fotolia saying my minimum should be 27 cent , I got a reply saying the sales in question were  in fact credit sales and not subscription sales.

Strange, because I also get 23 cent sales which are below my minimum guarantee and Adobe Stock's sales statistics says these are subscription sales:



Needless to say, my tax form has been updated and replaced the old one (despite the fact that I too didn't get any notification anywhere about the expired previous version).

Would appreciate Adobe/Matt to comment.

So now you get to put your two cents in. 

Already put in all of the initiatives published here so far (petitions, polls). Good luck to all of us!

After climb up to the top. Spammer edited it back to normal. so depressed. T T

Would you mind sharing the name of the tool/service which allows seeing the asset's (photo, illustration, etc.) position, like in the screenshot above? Thank you!

"As has become Adobe's tradition, the strong Adobe Stock push continues. In addition to the new asset types introduced to support Project Felix, the company's ramping up visual search -- similar to Google's Search by Image, with the additional ability to refine by keyword or another photo -- and will offer templates for Photoshop and Illustrator. This comes at the same time as its contributor portal leaves beta. Adobe's also entered into a partnership with Reuters to deliver access to that company's still and video content."

Not quite sure if and when that happens, since as of 2 November the contributor portal still bears the 'beta' logo next to keywording tool. The latter is in fact a bit awkward now, since prioritization of keywords in batch mode for multiple photos of the same content doesn't work, although in the very beginning this was possible. Really hope this will be fixed, as I have quite a number of pending photos from various shoots which require the same keywords, and I don't really feel prioritizing them one by one, like in the now old Fotolia's interface.

Although not strictly about the original topic, but 4 days to go still in October, and I'm pretty shocked with the drop in sales at SS this month: -45%.



The lowest results in 14 months, the largest drop in almost 2 years, without any logic behind the drop. And that's during supposedly the busiest month of the year?! Following this trend, November and December will be even more dreadful, taking into account the looming never-ending holidays and vacations.

Loosing faith in this model faster than I thought.