At 250 sales/month (which I don't know how they will limit it to that, but that is another story) we would get 0.0259 per sale. There would have to be around 18 sub sales per month for us to get the 0.35 we get now.

The details are what really matters - and they haven't told us any of them. I replied that 0.35 every time someone uses my image is fine, or some percentage of the sub price every time a user looks at an image (like spotify or Netflix).

They had a new model and were actually somewhat exciting (in the real meaning of the word). Since the Getty deal and now this they are more "exciting" in the microstock meaning.

I fear I'll be deleting my port there.

Legally, the model release covers it. If you have images of family members or friends or just don't want to deal with the hassle of a model that is pissed, you might want to opt out.

For me the time to stop uploading was when they introduced the RC system. Time to start deleting was a few years later.

Sure, you will make more than 0 money there, but you are contributing to the market paying less and less percent to the artists. We all have lines where we won't take it any more. Getty/Istock crossed that line for me. I strongly suspect that I would have made more $ if I left my stuff up and added more, but I also would have had to live with myself, and it wasn't enough money for that.

I uploaded a batch earlier this week and they made it into my port. I didn't check if they were searchable but they have had some views.

They had some pretty bad issues with different data on different servers (I presume) so that downloads would appear and disappear over a day or 2. I haven't had a sale in a few days, so I don't know if that is fixed.

I made a bit more there last month than I have most months lately mostly due to a few bigger $ sales, but more like income in 2007 with a few hundred images as opposed to early 2007 with 100 or less files.

The rejections there have usually had me scratching my head. Best seller = a background, most backgrounds rejected. Some .png files rejected. Also with no information given there is no way to tell why it was rejected.

For a while sales were quite good there (numbers of sales similar to SS) and with a different sort of market than most of the other sites, but they really fell off a cliff at the end of last year (in March they were behind DT). I fear that they can just get what they want from the Getty database, so why bother reviewing and accepting and hosting their own content. The fact that the artists percentage is double-dipped down to who knows what - potentially 15% of 35% (or 5.25%) doesn't seem to bother them, although it should distress any artist. I keep hoping they will turn around but I see no evidence of it and other than hope I have no reason to believe it will happen. Also they aren't going to be getting any of my new content and very little of my old content through the Getty route.

At the point AI keywording is actually good enough to not need human handholding I figure all stock sites will be using it and we won't have to keyword at all. Sadly they will probably start using it well before that time and it will make the searches even more inaccurate and spammy (but maybe to counteract that the sites will push older properly keyworded proven seller files and our old stuff will continue to sell despite the tsunami of new and perhaps better content).

I'm not understanding this "open another account" concept. Isn't the whole point of this exclusivity to be artist+video exclusive at P5? Except now they are suggesting we open another account, Gillian 2.0 and she is exclusive, and Gillian 1.0 isn't. So i can still upload other video elsewhere as before, and exclusive stuff to a new account at P5? I don't understand the point of this, just let us chose which videos are exclusive to P5 from within our existing ports.

Or, do they mean they'll let us keep our old stuff live with them, and live elsewhere but moving forward we can be exclusive only with the new account? What we all really want is to add another layer of work and complication, amiright.

Just let us choose which files are exclusive.

that would make sense, but they probably already coded something for artist exclusivity so it is easier for them to just have you open another account that only has exclusive content in it. That doesn't work well if half the stuff you already uploaded can be exclusive and the other half can't but...

Quote from: soozinz on March 22, 2019, 02:52

Would love to be able to see the live dls list that used to be on fotolia.  It just makes it easier to get a feel for what's selling and what's not.

This is the reason we have added the Top 10 Contributors of the week. It's an effort to provide you with real time intel on what is actually selling in the market at any given time. I'm personally finding it fascinating to see what style is currently popular.

-Mat

but it has a slightly convoluted algorithm to choose who is up there. I wondered how contributors with "100+" sales made it. Also without knowing how the portfolio is sorted when we look at it, it doesn't necessarily tell us much about what files are selling. Still it is interesting to see what is popular - except we don't necessarily know which images actually are popular or how popular they are. (I would love to see and know that information but I don't think it would actually be good to have it publicly available) - but it would be good to be able to get that sort of information about our own ports.

Back in the day I considered IS exclusivity, but then they changed the search algo and my income there would drop over 50% and then slowly rise over 6 - 12 months and I'd start thinking about exclusivity again and then bam - sales would plummet again. Then they changed the levels goalposts and then they started pulling all sorts of BS and I pretty much gave up on them. If they work for you, you should go for it, but know they can change something and your earnings could plummet - this can happen anywhere, but if you are spread out hopefully it won't happen everywhere at once.

Oh dear. It sure seems like a BOHICA announcement coming up. I sure hope I am wrong.

You can see US sales vs other sales on SS by going to the payment history page :

https://submit.shutterstock.com/payments?language=en

Last month about 55% non US for me (I'm US based and have mostly US content)

the month before about 47% non US.

Just eyeballing down the list I'd say it usually runs from about 55-70% non US for me.