@stock wife that's very comprehensive

I see these typos now.... And it seems that I've been making these all over the place.

Does a bad AR push you down in search rankings?

Hey everyone, I've been on DT for a year now with close to 260 images up. I've had images that have sold well on SS, iStock and even 123rf but are not moving on DT. I've earned just $20 till now on DT

Could it be my low acceptance rate? I started with sending them a huge chunk of my collection and most got rejected leaving me with a 40% acceptance rate. Although it's going up now, but could this be the reason for my low sales?

OP I'm sure you have some images up now. So how much are you earning with your current portfolio?

Had a good month in aug. Made about $50 with most of it coming from SS (85 files online) and iStock (480 files online).

Guess not all pics are created equal

Well if people really wanted a long term view we'd all be selling only at pond5, stocksy and 500px. But then we all want present day cash flow as well. so in comes shutterstock and istock and we settle for a low % of the price just to see a paycheck every month.

Its a costing game, As long as we don't have a way to judge what the product costs (our images) we will be ok with selling it at any cost as long as it sells.

It's also a perceived value game. If a buyer sees an image with perfect lighting, properly organized and doctored food, shot with a full frame with a great lens and treats it in the same way as an image that i snapped in a restaurant before my meal then its impossible to get the buyer to pay more for the quality shot

Then there is supply and demand. We all crib about how the agencies now have the highest no of images and more images get added everyday. We've created a panic amongst us that the industry is going down and the only way to sell is "be less greedy and settle for lower commission". I've hardly ever seen a post that talks about how much image useage has increased. How now even if my blog needs an image I'll hit SS or iStock. Like small farmers we know almost nothing about what our final customer is doing

And then there's the finance bit, if a company is taking 70% of the price then they have that much more money to spend on marketing, promotions, meetings with buyers etc. So its hard for a new company to retain less money and be more competitive unless we all realize that if we get more money we also have to shoulder some of the marketing responsibility (stocksy did this well, with all the contributors-owners sharing it heavily on social media) maybe we all can do the same for 500px or Pond5 or Canva or Alamy

Hope someone reads this long post

One strange thing. If your upload via FTP and then submit via the DT app, you don't have to fill in the categories (a little pointless in my opinion)  and just submit
So whats the catch? Is the companion app broken? Or will it take the categories later?

I dont know if this may help you with comparison. Im not a newbie in microstock, Ive been doing this for four years now but I avoided 123 for some time, then I decided to give it a try last month and created an account there. It took a few weeks to get my images submitted, reviewed and appear in searches.

Now I have 300 vectors online and they generated 80 sales so far in July, grand majority of them are subs. So this is my "newbie" experience so far at 123rf, the first month... Im curious how this will go on but I dont have high expectations.

That's pretty awesome, 80 sales in a couple of weeks. I've been here for months and have a port of about 500 images. Nowhere near that many sales yet

that would save a ton of time ... time that could go into making more and better images

Thanks for the info everyone. So i guess all the RF will have to be uploaded to Alamy as RF and all else (RM/editorial) will need to exclusive

But again is the RF price at Alamy same as the RF prices on SS, DT etc? Otherwise why would you buy an image at a more expensive rate from Alamy when the same is available at SS for subs price

Just wanted to understand what images go onto Alamy. Is it the ssme as the microstock sites, so same as SS and iStock? Or do i send a unique set of images? Like getty moments and all. Have just started uploading here and got my initial batch approved.

That's there...  Like that guy with the amazing lightening photo that got monsoon pic of the year and sold well. I'm sure there are others who have similar great images that are 0 earners

I think for fotolia that's 2.1 dollars only.