pancakes

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Messages - pancaketom

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526
Envato / Re: Banner
« on: March 09, 2019, 13:04 »
Depending on where you are perhaps, their accounting practices and reporting are odd - to verging on shady.

527
Shutterstock.com / Re: Crash Dive
« on: March 08, 2019, 13:09 »
Anyone else seeing their sales take a dive since SS introduced the buyer's page with the not so obvious filter buttons which appeared last week?

Well all I know is that since they effectively de-activated the Fotolia site my sales have crashed!  :-\

Things must be dire around your place? Diving and crashing.



Its miserable Uncle Pete made a fat nothing this month so far $36.22 compared to a $1,000 a month at the end of last year.

Hence my weeping and wailing  :'(

You made $1,000 in Dec. at SS and this month you make $36 from 3,000 pictures?

My interpretation is that it was so far this month - so more like on pace to hit ~200 - still a horrible drop. $1000 with 3,000 files in December is pretty awesome these days though.

528
Alamy.com / Re: Longest wait to get paid?
« on: March 05, 2019, 18:17 »
I had one that was over a year old. I wrote to Alamy and they said they were still trying to get it. Either they finally did, or else they erased it from the records.

529
Shutterstock.com / Re: Crash Dive
« on: March 04, 2019, 23:39 »
Feb was nothing to write home about for me, but I just got back from being gone for a few days and it looks like March is doing pretty well (for only 4 days, 2 of them a weekend). Not 2012 well, but better than things have been, so I was wondering if they changed something. So far so good for me for March.

530
Alamy.com / Re: New Alamy Member Question. What should do?
« on: February 27, 2019, 21:25 »
What she said ^  - my all time gross average is a little over $50, but it has been dropping - more like $40 so far this year (which is probably not a big enough sample to be all that statistically valid). If I knew which images would actually sell on Alamy, I'd be happy to put most of them there as exclusive, but I have not been able to predict these things at all. I guess they went about 10 years without taking a bigger bite from each sale so there is that.

531
Shutterstock.com / Re: Q4 2018 earnings call transcript
« on: February 26, 2019, 23:00 »
Thanks for bringing the highlights.

It looks like short story - content up 42-44% income up 6-7% plus lots of new contributors and much of the growth is in "enterprise" that regular contributors are not able to be part of.

In some ways it is amazing that my sales have held up as well as they have (dropping 50-70%). It seems like most of my sales are from images from 2010-2015, perhaps when they still had some quality control.

532
Canva / Re: How are the earnings going?
« on: February 23, 2019, 12:59 »
Pretty awful - back to about the amount I made with something like 20-25% of the images that I have now. Almost every day this month could be a weekend day there. I sure hope all the sales aren't going to Getty.

533
Cameras / Lenses / Re: Is megapixel important for stock stills?l
« on: February 23, 2019, 12:34 »
All things being equal the higher MP would be better, but all things aren't equal. I think the photo and keywords and where they show up in search are more important than the megapixels. If you make few sales with lower sized images it is unlikely you will make a lot with a bigger sensor.

There are advantages to newer and better cameras and lenses and other toys. I'm not sure that actually making more $ in this business is one of them. I have not noticed any increase in sales with better cameras - that might be more in the nature of the decline in microstock over the same time period. Moving from a point and shoot to a dslr made it a lot easier to get images accepted. Moving from a 10 mp to a 16 mp made much less difference as did moving up to a FF. In my experience there are very few sites where there are a lot more large size big $ downloads. Most of the large size downloads are subs and make no more $.

534
Alamy.com / Re: Alamy reducing commission from 50% to 40%
« on: February 22, 2019, 22:32 »
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.

535
Alamy.com / Re: Alamy reducing commission from 50% to 40%
« 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.

536
This sounds like "exciting news".

I would love to see a lot more details. For instance say this is for Facebook, does FB pay SS a heap of money to get access to this stuff and then the advertisers pay a very small price to get clips for FB ads. We get a 30% of this pittance. SS gets a heap in the deal, but it isn't for the license so we get nothing. I'm not saying this is what the deal is, since we have no idea.

537
General Stock Discussion / Re: adobestock keywords?
« on: February 11, 2019, 00:05 »
I don't think anyone here really knows other than maybe Mat, but Adobe says it goes into the search. I am guessing for search terms with a lot of results it is absolutely critical - if you don't show up in the first few pages you won't make a sale and if you don't put the search term in the first 5 positions you won't be on the first few pages (that is just my guess based on what I have read, but it seems reasonable). For search terms with less results it probably doesn't matter so much.

538
Canva / Re: How are the earnings going?
« on: February 07, 2019, 20:34 »
I thought January was pretty bad, but February said "hold my beer". I hope it picks back up and isn't a permanent change.

539
It would be fantastic if they actually asked contributors what they looked at and wanted to see instead of just making something fancy that makes it hard or impossible to get the information we want to see.  For instance what SS did putting lifetime earnings in a huge font first. Sure it is nice to be able to see that number, but I'd check it once a year or so after passing any milestones that make a difference there (once you are in the highest tier).

On the AS page there is so much blank space they could put all the information on one page instead of requiring a click to see each separate thing.

540
General Stock Discussion / Re: How was January?
« on: February 02, 2019, 00:56 »
Pretty lousy, and it would have been really bad without a few Alamy sales the 31st. Pretty much everywhere was below the average for last year and only a few were up from December. Usually Jan is a pretty good month for me but not this year.

DT and Canva were both about half of what they have been and 123RF is so far below what it used to be I might as well delete my port there.

SS was up on an absolutely horrible Dec, but not enough to make a decent month.

541
Alamy.com / Re: Alamy which photos sells best?
« on: February 01, 2019, 14:53 »
I wish I knew. In my experience it seems pretty random. Especially when I only look at those for a decent $ amount. Lately it seems like very low value distributor sales for which I get < a few $ and much better "regular" alamy sales which can be at least double digit $ if not triple.  Sadly those will get me 20% less soon.

542
Shutterstock.com / Re: no sell in USA
« on: February 01, 2019, 12:07 »
I think there is some component of artist location in the search algorithm. If they boost that it would tend to increase local sales and decrease sales from farther away. This might be good if you live near a lot of buyers, not so great if you don't.

I am in the US and just looking at my map maybe a few more from the Americas, but there are a few from Europe and one from Japan in the last 10. I haven't seen anything obvious other than frozen pipe sales in the Midwest and east coast of the US.

543
Seems like ice has shifted, just noticed that my images submitted three days ago has been approved already.

It is only a matter of time before the .15 and .21 sales start trickling in.

544
Canva / Re: Canva "Good News"
« on: January 29, 2019, 19:21 »
Has Canva ever has an explanation for how 35% of $1.40 equals 35 cents?  I've had a few of those lately and am not thrilled to see a 35-cent commission on a $1.40 sale.  Maybe they explained that somewhere but I can't find it.  New math is one thing but I'm pretty sure they never changed the rules of multiplication.

Someone else said it was for currencies other than the USD, I can't remember where that was posted though. I have also heard of .90 sales that also netted .35

545
Off Topic / Re: Global Warming is causing the Polar Vortex ???
« on: January 29, 2019, 18:18 »
As a geologist and someone who has spent a fair amount of time in places that have glaciers or used to have glaciers it is pretty obvious that they are melting away much faster than they have in the recent past. Just looking at the before and after photos of some places is astounding. Many of the glaciers in the lower 48 US states will probably be gone in my lifetime.

My take on global warming is that it is real and at least some of it is caused by human actions, it will have drastic effects on humans no matter what we do (too late to completely stop the effects now), we could make it so things won't be all that bad, but we won't until it gets a lot worse. In general wet places will get wetter , dry places will get dryer (warm air can carry more moisture than cool air), and things will be less steady - so for instance in the dry parts of the SW USA it will be dryer most of the time with a few bigger storm events which will lead to flooding and other problems. Mostly climate change will be a problem for people, who like things to stay more or less the way they are used to. Some places will be better off, some not much change, and some will be completely screwed - like Miami or Bangladesh. As people try to leave places that are less habitable all sorts of unpleasantness will erupt.

Will things always exactly follow the broad predictions? of course not. Weather does what it does on a shorter time scale than climate. Over a longer time scale we will see the changes in climate. I hope that my take is too pessimistic, but I worry it might be too optimistic.

546
Adobe Stock / Re: Increase in EU sales
« on: January 25, 2019, 12:22 »
How do you tell where a sale is from?

I have noticed more .36 and .66 sales compared to .99 sales. Other values are very rare.

547
Where the h3II do I find latest download, for example.

go to "insights" then select "my statistics" then select data type "activity" then hit the blue "display statistics" button

certainly not how I'd set it up, but at least you can find the information somewhere.

548
Thanks, a nice feature. It would be nice if it also said how many times they had been sold next to the $ amount.

549
Shutterstock.com / Re: "It's not stock, it's Shutterstock"
« on: January 10, 2019, 20:16 »
I guess it is good to know that even though "creative professionals are busy, but they never let their standards slip."

I'm not sure what SS's excuse is.

I guess I'd rather buyers go there than IS.

550
By the time I got 200 images up (in 2007) I was making (for me) good money (at the time I was homeless and unemployed so it was a low bar) and I had all sorts of fun with extrapolating out into the future. As the years passed I made more $, but $/image went down. After about 2012 $/image started dropping faster.  On some sites I made less in December 2018 than I did back when I had about 300 images.

At some point you will hit a wall unless you can keep reinventing your work or seriously up the production rate without compromising salability. After that even with more production you will make less. Other than a few sudden drops when a site totally messes with the search this will probably be a long slow decline. Cheery huh?

If I was starting now I doubt I'd stick with it.


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