Quote from: pancaketom on June 04, 2018, 19:45

I think Alamy said they were excited to open an office in the USA and would drop our percentage from 60 to 50% to pay for it (my earnings there have gone up quite a bit, so maybe that actually was exciting news).

My sales are up on Alamy also, but not my US sales, which isn't surprising given my extreme paucity of US content there.
So another example of how an Alamy 'exciting news' benefitted some at the expense of others. I have no more sales via the US office, but I lost money to fund the US office setup; and although they say results from opening the US office were better than anticipated, they show no signs of restoring the 60%.

From the reports on the Alamy forum, which is only a tip of the iceberg of sales, it seems that US content in general sell for a lot more $$ than 'the rest', but I still don't see why I should have had to help pay for that, and keep paying.
Robbing Sue to pay Tom (nothing personal!)

No problem. I was more trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in that the "exciting news" might have actually benefitted me. Lots of changes and decisions hurt some contributors and help others, you win some and you lose some. Sadly it seems most of the "exciting news" is of schemes to help the agency and hurt almost all contributors. I agree it would be more exciting if Alamy now that the US office was up and running and performing better than expected boosted our take back to 60%. That would be exciting.

You should see the printout of my exclusivity estimator from 2007.

I think my exclusivity estimator from 2007 had me raking it in by now, so I am sure yours was through the roof and made up from unicorns, rainbows, and hearts or whatever they were smoking at that time.

Better than average for these days, but not by a lot. (so down 30% from a few years ago). SS was a bit above average in both $ and DL although it has been over a year since any big sales there. 123RF (or perhaps more accurately 321RF was better than last month but my RC total still dropped by a substantial amount why they should get a larger percentage for failing at their job is beyond me. The real surprise was DT which had a completely pathetic first half of the month- only a few sub sales with an average RPD of .35 and then it came alive for the second half with subs and actual credit sales and posted the best month there in years - on really only 2 weeks of sales. I think it ended up as my 3rd best site for the month after SS and Alamy (just barely behind Alamy too).

As far as the long range picture - it is sort of bleak, but I hope it is a long slow glide path rather than a huge plummet to a crash and burn.

yes, I pay taxes on my income. I also deduct a fair bit of the expenses.

I know my stitched panoramas don't make any more than downsized APS-C images at most (or any?) sites. There are advantages to a full frame or medium format camera, but I don't think more sales from microstock is very high on the list.

Easier workflow and the ability to crop and downsize with impunity might be the biggest advantage.

I think there are a lot of other factors that go into the search "special sauce". For instance your location, the location of the buyer, zooms and views, previous search terms that were used for sales, sales, views with no sales, etc. Keywords, description, title... Previous purchases by that buyer (maybe they tend to buy high key stuff)... I think the searches are getting so complex that the programmers don't even know what exactly is always going on. Maybe in the short term of the A/B testing that yields more sales, but in the long run that might not actually be the case. I feel this is probably more likely at places like Getty and SS that think they are so clever...

Certainly on sites like SS I have a lot more mid aged image sales (2010-2015 or so than recent images or very old images). That is based on most the most popular in the last 3mo to 1 yr and also just what it looks like looking through the sales. Also the older images sell more than all but a very few recent ones. Compared to Adobe where new images seem to sell just as well (I have the same images, but they have all been uploaded in the last few years, so maybe if they were uploaded a long time ago they would be doing better).

On some sites like DT your overall portfolio and account is much more important (and thus contributor's work tends to clump in the results) not to mention there they seem to turn portfolios on and off.

I'd say somewhere in between what Getty charges and what they pay us. A whole lot closer to what Getty charges.

a little bit better than Feb and Mar, a little worse than Jan. SS is bad even for the new normal. DT, 123RF, and BS are bad too. Canva, Alamy, and Adobe kept it from being a horrible month. Surprisingly good but still small potatoes were Featurepics and P5.

Honestly I think the only reason that they would sell a whole lot better would be if the sites pushed them in the search. As far as I know none of the sites do that. There are other reasons that a new camera might get more saleable pics - not the least is if it motivates you to go out to get new pics. Also you can probably downsize the new camera images a whole lot if there is too much noise or the image is a little blurry.   I did notice switching to FF that some of my lenses are definitely better in the cropped area.

If the middlemen are taking too high a percentage or not providing a good service then they are ripe for replacement. If for example Google opened up a marketplace and only took 25% I bet they would own the market very quickly. I don't see it happening, but I do feel that this market is ripe for a shakeup.

SS has been pretty random with model releases for me for a while. My default with the rejection is that I forgot to attach the release so I try again and make sure the release is attached. If their rejection was "this release needs to be the same date as the photo shoot" instead of "this photo needs a release or the release is bad or any number of other problems for you to guess" it would be easier to tell what was wrong. Especially with their new and "improved" system. They accept just enough to keep me submitting model released photos although less recently. For sure they should accept a catch all for photos of the photographer. SS doesn't seem to be about reasonable or smart these days.

Also it is quite likely that those exclusives that are doing well stay exclusive and those that are doing poorly either quit exclusivity or lose interest and don't report in the poll.

I'm seriously tempted to file a whistleblower complaint against them. They are so full of @#&$%^