Quote from: Dumc on October 11, 2017, 10:46

Well, I think they totally neglected EU buyers. I used to get a lot of credit sales XL, L, M, now, very rarely. EL sales were more frequent year ago also. Also, most of my 0.99 sales are coming from US, and those sales are my mostly main income + subs. So, I think US sales increased, but EU sales dropped significally.

How you figure out the buyers location on Adobe?

I was going to ask the same thing.
You saved me the effort to type :-)

I don't think anyone will be making many photo sales here unless they change their search to include marketplace images by default.

You probably have a good point.
Still it is surprising that nobody is reporting any sales. After all there should be a very limited amount of pics compared to the catalog of other agencies, so more sales per individual artist

Quote from: Brightontl on October 03, 2017, 14:23

But this is not all. Even more than this is the pattern within the month that made me think about a cap at first: as an example, three days ago, the last day of September, I was way below my allocated monthly income and quite surprised about it, but I knew something would happen. In fact that day I had my BDE with a deluge of high priced sales and I finished the month exactly where I expected.

I'm not sure if you're joking... but just in case. Any cap would serve one of three purposes. To make you more money than you would if there was no cap. To make you the same money as you would if there was no cap. Or or make you less money than you would if there was no cap.

If it's to make you the same money, then there's no point in having a cap... so we'll say it's not that. If it;s to make you more money than you would if there wasn't a cap, then that means SS are paying out more money than they are bringing in. The odds of them wanting to do that are minimal... so we'll say it's not that.

What we're left with, is a cap that makes you less money than you would if there wasn't one. If so, why would you be miraculously pushed a bunch of 'fake sales' on the last day of the month to increase your current earnings? A cap that means you earn a certain amount every month isn't really a 'cap', it's more of a base amount or a minimal earnings amount. And if they're not fake sales then they're probably real sales... sales that you would have got whether there was a cap or not.

But still, I'm very curious... taking into account what your sales look like now, with the cap, what would your sales look like if there wasn't a cap? Do all sites have this cap? If not, how do your sales figures look at other sites compared to SS? Is there some kind of visual indicator when looking at your sales figures that makes it clear there is a cap at SS and not elsewhere?

I said that a better word instead of "cap" is "monthly allotted income".
I am not talking about fakes sales at SS, rather about a sort of tap that is turned sometimes on and sometimes off. Bear in mind that this may also be beneficial for me: when my tap is on and I get plenty of sales it is also because someone else's is turned off at the moment.

The behaviour of Fotolia is very similar to SS: I get the same income at the end of each month for 5-6 months in a raw, then I go a step up in earnings (5-10% more) and then again 5-6 months at the same levels.
SS and Fotolia are certainly the most sophisticated search engines.

P5 sales are much more erratic (loads of up and down from month to month), sales are not concentrated in a few files (like SS and FT), but much more spread around. Files start to sell after a very long time (at least one year) and the files that are sold are generally ones that I consider good ones. In other words P5 behavior seems to be the most "natural" one.

VB (now SB): I had 4 sales the first month I joined (welcome aboard package), with about 50 files, then for 2 years I had 2 sales per month, every single month (with a portfolio growing to almost 3,000 files). Never sold the same file twice there and the quality of files selling there are the bottom of the barrel: if I uploaded a totally black clip it would probably sell there. This September sales went totally crazy and I sold a huge amount, but I fear that it is another welcome aboard after re branding.

The reasons beyond sales control are very widely used on the web and are extremely important in SEO (notably Google and YT search engine) and they have been endlessly discussed by SEO specialists.
Two of the main point in agencies search engines are: 1) avoiding to present constantly the same content to customers - 2) having as many contributors happy (so that they keep bringing fresh content).

Finally, the last thing in the world I am interested in is that you or anybody else in this forum believe in what I am saying. Really I could not care less.
The only reason why I am discussing this kind of thing is because I want to detect patterns in the search engine in order to organise my work accordingly. Already in this thread I have detected a couple of interesting patterns.

Trying to win endless arguments or personal fights in this forum does not bring me any money, so I leave it to others

I pulled all my photos from Pond5 a few months ago and video sales went up.  Video sales were already going up but I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on!  My advice, everyone should delete all there photos immediately.

Actually, I had even forgot that I do have a few photos at Pond 5.
I will do a bonfire tonight :-)

I really don't believe in this cap thing people are going on about. I think if portfolios aren't up to date and experimental and you don't add new and exciting material then sales will become stagnant.

My own personal Experience:
Started on Shutterstock in 2011 with 40 highly niche clips. These 40 would make a minimum of $300 a month. Highest was $900.

In 2015 I uploaded 6000 clips and obviously my income went up. Not to the same ratio as the niche clips as these were fairly ordinary. - I saw no caps at all (in fact if there were a cap I think I should have been making a lot more when I uploaded the 6000 as my port grew highly overnight) but I saw the growth as expected.

A few months ago I started to upload some images (first time ever) They are basically stills from my 4K videos. I'm really amazed on how well they sell. From 30 images I'm making $30 a month or so. I wish I'd done this sooner really and I'm thinking of adding a lot more as I've already put the work into editing them from my clips. If anything I've seen my clip sales grow.

Looking at my graph it's an upwards trend - this is not due to upload amounts (10 clips a week BTW) but from trying to focus on modern niche content done to the best of my abilities.

I honestly think content is King. That old nutshell I know but it's true...

Well actually your graph looks a lot like mine.
For you, if you take away December, which was particularly bad (while for me dec is always good, the bad ones for me are january, april, because of Easter and august), income in each month from October to august are very, very similar, probably less than 10% variance. Then in September you had an upgrade of rank with a good 10-15% increase.

For me (taking away the 3 bad months every year) I get the following pattern: 4 months with very close sales than 3 times a year I get an upgrade with an increase of about 10% (the famous "dynamic cap"), then again 4 months with very close earning.
Please note that I am very happy about it and I wish it to keep going this way: the cap works not only on the upside, but also on the downside.

But this is not all. Even more than this is the pattern within the month that made me think about a cap at first: as an example, three days ago, the last day of September, I was way below my allocated monthly income and quite surprised about it, but I knew something would happen. In fact that day I had my BDE with a deluge of high priced sales and I finished the month exactly where I expected.
Almost every month I have twp types of patterns: sometimes I start the month very well and after 3 weeks I am almost at my MAI, then inevitably I do not get one single sale for 10 days.
Other times the month starts in a horrible way, but then a deluge of high priced sales occurs and again I finish at the same level

As a friend of mine would say: "much ado about nothing"
:-)

Thanks, makes more sense, and more like my stats.

I find that views are generally very low on Pond5, but sales to views higher than some other places.

Yes, sales/view ratio on P5 is much higher than in FT (and anyway views in FT don't include people logging on from Adobe, so are very erratic).
But they are the only two agencies publishing views. IMO it would be very interesting to know about view in SS

Brightontl, you are not the only one noticing caps on Shutterstock while uploading images. We noticed too after 5 months of uploading a hundred images.... but the worst thing is, that after deleting the images, caps lowered even worse than before starting uploading images. The September is the first month after the deleting since we are seeing our video clips shine like they used to. It was a nightmare year.

Thank you for your input, very useful.
Actually I do not think I will be deleting my image portfolio, as I believe that deleting anything would certainly have a negative effect on the algorithm (as it would be stop uploading altogether). I will probably be going on with my experiment until the end of the year, after that I believe I will stop uploading photos.

So far my findings are as follows: if we call my allotted monthly sales just with video AMS(v), and my allotted monthly sales adding photos to video AMS(v+p), and v= $ monthly income from video, and p=$ monthly income from photo, we have the following equation:

AMS(v) = v
AMS(v+p) = (v-p)+p

Therefore AMS(v) = AMS(v+p)

So, uploading photos to your video portfolio, all other things equal is a waste of time.

Of course this pattern can only be experienced by people who started uploading only video, then after a while decided to add photos.
And again, these are early findings, not yet confirm by enough data, I will come back to it at the end of my test, in three months

I have read several members saying that when starting adding photos to their catalog of video, they have noticed a decrease in income, sales in photos taking the place of part of the sales in video, but obviously at a much lower price.

Here is my experience: I have a bit less than 3,000 video clips in the main agencies and about 4 months ago I started to upload a few photos to several agencies (about 800 pics).
I dropped all the dead ones and I kept uploading photos only to SS, FT, Alamy and the new SB.
No sales so far in Alamy and SB, but that seems normal: they all say that start selling at Alamy takes forever and SB only started with photos last week.

In SS I have noticed that my cap remained the same in spite of adding photos. As an example, if I was making $1,000 before, selling just video, I am still getting $1,000 now, but $70 comes from photos and $930 from video. In reality it is slightly different, because the cap is dynamic and in my case it goes slightly up every month. But the bottom line is the same: I get the same total revenue as before adding the photos, as if my previous video cap includes now video and photos. More or less the same is true for Fotolia, although with lower sales.
In other words, adding photo to my catalog is not useful and is not harmful, it is just a waste of time. I do get sales, and they tend to increase every month, but they are balanced by an equal loss of revenue in video.
My idea is to continue uploading until the end of the year and see if Alamy and SB wake up to life, than decide what to do; but almost certainly I will stop uploading photos to SS and FT.
Basically I have the feeling that if you do mainly video, adding photos to the same agencies is not useful at all.

I would be interested in other people experiences about it. After all understanding how the algorithm works is the single most important thing for this work and the only way to understand is to compare our experiences.

People who believe there is no cap, no manipulation and that sales happen just by accident, please note that I do not complain at all about conspiracy. I find that the main agencies (especially SS) obviously have an extremely complex algorithm that control our sales and I am think it is a very good thing

This is an extremely interesting topic, probably the most interesting to be discussed in a microstock forum, because if you understand how the algorithms work, you can organise your activity to maximise your efforts.
Strangely many people in this forum dismiss these discussions as conspiracies, as if agencies where totally neutral in the way they present their catalogs to customers.
By far the most important factor in the success of an agencies is how they propose their images to customers, in fact SS has a very sophisticated algorithm and is by far the best seller in microstock.

Personally I have detected some very evident patterns of behavior (especially in SS). Their priorities seem to be:
- Do not present to customers the same items over time (that is why SS switches between two different modes two-three times per month)
- Try to make as many contributors happy as possible
- Punish contributors that stop uploading
- Punish contributor that spam. I believe that the ratio files in portfolio/sales is extremely important, so people who upload tonnes of repeated material are lowered in rankings

Forget about istock for video, just a waste of time

Quote from: kirill4mula on September 21, 2017, 11:29

Quote from: Artist on September 20, 2017, 00:23

From where do we see portfolio? I cannot find any of my images in search.

Uncheck the "Member Library" box in search filters (next to infinity symbol).

Yes, I do find it now. It working good.

But I don't understand the point of that symbol. Its by default turned on and giving very limited result, when turned off it shows full search.
Whats the point of it when by default contributors portfolio is not even shown in search.?

Well somehow they have to try to sell the ***ppy images in their membership area

From a purely financial point of view, this doesn't make sense, but as I'm getting tired of reading about new revolutionary cameras that I "must" have to stay competitive, I went back to my Nikon F6 and Fuji GX680 to shoot a few rolls of film, mostly Portra 160 and 400. When I received the results back from the lab, I was struck by the quality of the output and the fact that at 6-10MP, they looked as good as or better than any digital file, but with the big difference that colours, contrast etc. look great straight out of the box.

So I would like to shoot some film for stock too, just for the satisfaction of doing it, and because there is actually something called "film look". Yes, I know there are plugins available for this, and yes, I know that would be cheaper, but it's not nearly as fun.

Has anybody submitted film shots to microstock lately and had it accepted?

You must have a lot of time at hand...