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Messages - Mantis
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726
« on: August 09, 2017, 07:54 »
Important insider news from an insider in inside of SS:
Sells will start on August 29th.
And it will be GREAT month!
FOR SURE BME !
As I already mentioned, VERY important news!
LOL....
727
« on: August 09, 2017, 07:53 »
Well, here we are in August and my downloads are still completely horrible. I'm talking single dollars a day with almost 5,000 assets. Yesterday: $7. Nothing for me is recovering, so whatever they did to the search seems to be permanent. Third straight month of significant loss with SS.
728
« on: August 07, 2017, 18:59 »
Although to be fair, the more money they make 'on the back of photographers', the more money they have to pay out to those photographers.
Your answers about Envato look more and more like answers of somebody paid by them to do it
That would be great... maybe you could put a good word in for me and they'll think about doing so? My comment applies to every stock agency though. Unless the commission rates change, then any initiative by an agency that makes them more money, will mean they'll have to pay out more money to contributors.
If an initiative results in them paying out less money to contributors... then that means that the agency is also earning less money. If it looks like that's not going to change, then they'll change their approach.
That's the contributor base as a whole though... I think we've all been around long enough to know that there's no mystical agency where sales always increase for every contributor, no matter how many new people join, and how many new items are uploaded.
The thing is, I've seen people on Photodune (before 'the great cull') who may have been making reasonable dollar amounts every month, and they may have had top seller badges and the like... but with tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of images, they were making like 10 cents per image per year. Yes, Photodune are far from one of the big boys, so you wouldn't expect them to be making masses of money per image, but by the time you've included storage costs, reviewers and general marketing and maintenance of the site... 10 cents a year is hardly worth it.
So something had to be done. People always say that something has to be done, but when it comes to their perfect portfolio of immense brilliance... then they don't want anything to be done. But if somebody can suggest a something that Photodune, or any other stock agency, can do to make more money for the agency and more money for every individual contributor then I'm sure they'd all like to hear it.
Not in all cases. Istock sells video for the basic same price and only pays out junk. Their 4K? even worse. Base customer rate is very much the same, but royalties much lower. They keep a higher share of what the customer pays. 123 stole the IS model of pay based on sales volume so they could pay less royalties because its based on a merit system of sales and keep more for themselves. That cut a lot of people's pay while 123 gained. The inventor of this was Istock who also introduced this pay incentive for more downloads, effectively giving them more of the pie. And there is DP whose API's were selling our work for big bucks and giving us sub commissions. That was not a cut for them only the contributor. It's infectious for agencies to try and find ways to cut COGS to enhance revenue and margins. So your hypothesis is not totally correct.
729
« on: August 07, 2017, 07:59 »
Looking at StockFresh for the first time, I like the fact that they accept PayPal. I won't buy from sites which don't accept PayPal. But like most of the microstock sites they seem to have a big problem with keyword spam.
It's getting more and more difficult to find the right content to buy at any of the microstock sites. I've spent most of today looking for a handful of images of 'brunch' in a certain style. Should be easy - in my head I can picture the sort of stuff I am looking for. But far too many contributors just add all food related terms to any image of food. Brussel sprouts, a glass of wine, Christmas party, birthday outing etc. It's very annoying. When narrowing down a search, it would be great to be able to hover over an image and select to exclude all results from that contributor. When you end up looking at thousands of results there needs to be a way to quickly exclude spammy contributors. Gets quite depressing.
Since the sites don't seem to want to do that I see a business opportunity - open an API site and remove the spammy contributors from it. I'm sure for most searches there are plenty of decently keyworded images available. Just search on the top few hundred search terms and then remove the ports of the spammy images that show up in the first few pages. I bet it would clean things up a lot. I am sort of amazed that some sites haven't done this (or at least pushed those ports to the back of the line). They could request a readmission after cleaning up their act.
Search Brunch at Stockfresh and you could see the frustration, the five Christmas presents, the girl with balloons, the plants, I guess the best is the cartoon bear on a branch, although the vector Hawk is a close second in the nonsense category.
It's their new controlled vocabulary: 1. Brunch = Branch 2. brunch = Bunch 
730
« on: August 05, 2017, 10:26 »
I always try to make my titles keyword meaningful regardless of who I submit to, along with the descriptions. It's just good business practice.
731
« on: August 05, 2017, 10:23 »
Revenue per download increased for them. It doesn't necessarily mean it increased for us. As someone pointed out earlier, pushing new contributors with lower royalties to the top of the popular search could increase their RPD because they keep more of the moolah.
Could, but there's no proof or evidence that they do. They could have purple cows that give green milk. Show Me?
I liked your other idea better. Competition up 57% will hurt sales. 
Well, i will gbe you one data pount. In a matter of a day, my income was cut in half....about a grand a mont to less than $500. Now on my third month of this. It was a search change. Search changes happen over night. This was not a slow, gradual, incremental change. So the question is why would they do that? My very logical hypothesis is that they are pushing lower royalty content to the top because it costsbthem less. It shows in their financial. Pretty easy to assess. Can i prove it? No but i sure can make a reasonable argument that its not easy to defelect by using a purple cow analogy. 
Its possible but I doubt it as I think the risk of losing customers who can't find the best images offsets it I think. I just think as they have said they are always tweaking the algorithm to maximise sales and sometimes this has unfortunate consequences for some contributors. If they are doing it maybe it does explain some of the drop in downloads and its not a smart move.
I been with them since the start Offset that is and they certainly have some top notch content but for buyers first searching 0.25c images at SS and then go over to offset searching images for sometimes hundreds of dollars?? thats a big step! too much! these kind of buyers probably go straight to these macro agencies prepared to pay decent money.
not what I meant ;-). The money saved by prioritising lower cost images is not as much as the cost of losing customers.
You're assuming that the new content is lower quality or less commercial. I am assuming that, as a whole, much of the new content is every bit as good as old, and it doesn't matter to the customer...it's seamless. And I think that there is a probability in play here. A certain percent of buyers just search and buy. Others use the search by age, popularity, etc. filters to find additional content if they can't find what they want in a basic default search.
To some extent but if the most saleable images by whoever are pushed back "artificially" then this will reduce the overall quality of the search.
Yes and no. How does new content become 'most sellable' if it is buried the moment it is submitted?
I do think this is a problem...again whether old or new contributor there's just so much new stuff much of which of dubious quality that it must be almost impossible to sift out the good stuff which is maybe why new content is struggling.
Yea totally agree with that.
732
« on: August 05, 2017, 09:18 »
Hi Everyone, thanks for on this. I'd like to address some of the concerns voiced in the comments.
First of all, there will not be less content for customers just because we plan to be stricter with certain types of images, often the very types you have also been complaining about in the MSG forums. Remember those ridiculous, spammy portfolios from one of the leading agencies with tens of thousands of almost identical, useless images? Who needs those? Nobody. I'm sure inflated numbers sound really good at shareholder meetings, but we operate at a very different scale, and what works for the big guys doesn't necessarily work for us.
As for being arrogant by curating content and being more selective, we really don't mean to be. But I'm sure you are all well aware of the fact how saturated the market has become with images, if not from the growing number of topics here about earning mere cents per download. I'm not saying there isn't an element of greediness on certain agencies' part, but the fact of the matter is that billions of photos are taken and shared every single day (some big agencies claim to add over a million files a week) and there's so much competition -- even when it comes to sites offering free content -- that some of the images submitted to these agencies have almost zero value. I understand this thought upsets many people, but it's not like what it used to be ten years ago. Certain types of images are still very valuable of course and I believe customers should and will pay good money for them, but there are some that at this point people don't even want for free.
As a small agency with limited resources, we obviously need to operate very efficiently. On one hand it costs a lot of money to review incoming content and if we know from experience that certain types of images don't sell well, we need to stop those at the gates. This does not automatically mean that the content is bad, some just don't sell well here. This also protects contributors from wasting their time on things that don't work. On the other hand we also need to help top selling artists get their content online as easily and quickly as possible, and we're always coming up with new ideas to make their lives easier. Although we try to be as contributor friendly as possible, it's not possible to make everyone happy. In the end there has to be some level of curation, there's just no other way. It doesn't make sense to let everything online just because someone decided to upload it. Of course volume is important and I understand why people think it's the only thing that matters, but at this scale it's more like a balancing game where you need to take all sorts of issues into consideration.
I don't monitor this forum often, so if you have any questions about anything, feel free to send a message through our contact form and I'll be happy to answer it. Thanks!
Peter, Thanks for chiming in and being forthright on your position. I no longer contribute to SF because sales were so sparse. In my opinion I don't think contributors would be so opposed to tighter curation if they made money. To me, the gap is tighter standards (higher rejections) with no pathway to better sales. So the recipe comes across as continued low sales but even tighter acceptance. So you are addressing the content side but not the lack of sales side, hence some of the "arrogance" comments. Would be nice to see you chime in on how you intend (or not) to grow sales. You have a fair royalty model and many of us would love to be strong supporters of SF if there was something in it for us other than tighter standards (I'm speaking for me only regarding sales, other mileage may vary). Best of luck.
733
« on: August 05, 2017, 08:18 »
Revenue per download increased for them. It doesn't necessarily mean it increased for us. As someone pointed out earlier, pushing new contributors with lower royalties to the top of the popular search could increase their RPD because they keep more of the moolah.
Could, but there's no proof or evidence that they do. They could have purple cows that give green milk. Show Me?
I liked your other idea better. Competition up 57% will hurt sales.
Well, i will gbe you one data pount. In a matter of a day, my income was cut in half....about a grand a mont to less than $500. Now on my third month of this. It was a search change. Search changes happen over night. This was not a slow, gradual, incremental change. So the question is why would they do that? My very logical hypothesis is that they are pushing lower royalty content to the top because it costsbthem less. It shows in their financial. Pretty easy to assess. Can i prove it? No but i sure can make a reasonable argument that its not easy to defelect by using a purple cow analogy.
Its possible but I doubt it as I think the risk of losing customers who can't find the best images offsets it I think. I just think as they have said they are always tweaking the algorithm to maximise sales and sometimes this has unfortunate consequences for some contributors. If they are doing it maybe it does explain some of the drop in downloads and its not a smart move.
I been with them since the start Offset that is and they certainly have some top notch content but for buyers first searching 0.25c images at SS and then go over to offset searching images for sometimes hundreds of dollars?? thats a big step! too much! these kind of buyers probably go straight to these macro agencies prepared to pay decent money.
not what I meant ;-). The money saved by prioritising lower cost images is not as much as the cost of losing customers.
You're assuming that the new content is lower quality or less commercial. I am assuming that, as a whole, much of the new content is every bit as good as old, and it doesn't matter to the customer...it's seamless. And I think that there is a probability in play here. A certain percent of buyers just search and buy. Others use the search by age, popularity, etc. filters to find additional content if they can't find what they want in a basic default search.
To some extent but if the most saleable images by whoever are pushed back "artificially" then this will reduce the overall quality of the search.
Yes and no. How does new content become 'most sellable' if it is buried the moment it is submitted?
734
« on: August 04, 2017, 08:09 »
I got the email as well, and really don't intend to give DP any further means to abuse my content. They HAVE and WILL continue to abuse the supplier if you open up those affiliate floodgates.
735
« on: August 04, 2017, 08:05 »
Revenue per download increased for them. It doesn't necessarily mean it increased for us. As someone pointed out earlier, pushing new contributors with lower royalties to the top of the popular search could increase their RPD because they keep more of the moolah.
Could, but there's no proof or evidence that they do. They could have purple cows that give green milk. Show Me?
I liked your other idea better. Competition up 57% will hurt sales.
Well, i will gbe you one data pount. In a matter of a day, my income was cut in half....about a grand a mont to less than $500. Now on my third month of this. It was a search change. Search changes happen over night. This was not a slow, gradual, incremental change. So the question is why would they do that? My very logical hypothesis is that they are pushing lower royalty content to the top because it costsbthem less. It shows in their financial. Pretty easy to assess. Can i prove it? No but i sure can make a reasonable argument that its not easy to defelect by using a purple cow analogy.
Its possible but I doubt it as I think the risk of losing customers who can't find the best images offsets it I think. I just think as they have said they are always tweaking the algorithm to maximise sales and sometimes this has unfortunate consequences for some contributors. If they are doing it maybe it does explain some of the drop in downloads and its not a smart move.
I been with them since the start Offset that is and they certainly have some top notch content but for buyers first searching 0.25c images at SS and then go over to offset searching images for sometimes hundreds of dollars?? thats a big step! too much! these kind of buyers probably go straight to these macro agencies prepared to pay decent money.
not what I meant ;-). The money saved by prioritising lower cost images is not as much as the cost of losing customers.
You're assuming that the new content is lower quality or less commercial. I am assuming that, as a whole, much of the new content is every bit as good as old, and it doesn't matter to the customer...it's seamless. And I think that there is a probability in play here. A certain percent of buyers just search and buy. Others use the search by age, popularity, etc. filters to find additional content if they can't find what they want in a basic default search.
736
« on: August 03, 2017, 20:28 »
OK the subscription is not the Market Place! On EL's you will never make less then $3.50 the drawing card is the site as it is for now. You will never make less then $3.50, if you were on VideoBlocks you might understand the model better sorry if I am not clear on explaining. I will be happy to take a 75cent increase over SS any day. Buyers can DL all they want from the subscription side as that is the perk for subscribing now they will get a chance at the Market Place as well for a reduced cost per image. I Subscribe to VB and search through their sub. first too see if they have a clip that will work if not I go to the Market and Buy a clip for $49.00 of which the artist gets 100% It has been a huge value for me in my business! It is also great that VideoBlocks earned more then SS/Pond5/iStock/Adobe/Dissolve in July now of course not combined but they earned in the hundreds more over each of those!
Okay that's good intel. Their work was pretty good on the purchased collection. I assume that GS is invite only.
737
« on: August 03, 2017, 19:59 »
Revenue per download increased for them. It doesn't necessarily mean it increased for us. As someone pointed out earlier, pushing new contributors with lower royalties to the top of the popular search could increase their RPD because they keep more of the moolah.
Could, but there's no proof or evidence that they do. They could have purple cows that give green milk. Show Me?
I liked your other idea better. Competition up 57% will hurt sales.
Well, i will gbe you one data pount. In a matter of a day, my income was cut in half....about a grand a mont to less than $500. Now on my third month of this. It was a search change. Search changes happen over night. This was not a slow, gradual, incremental change. So the question is why would they do that? My very logical hypothesis is that they are pushing lower royalty content to the top because it costsbthem less. It shows in their financial. Pretty easy to assess. Can i prove it? No but i sure can make a reasonable argument that its not easy to defelect by using a purple cow analogy.
738
« on: August 03, 2017, 18:53 »
I don't get how this isn't just another site looking to take good content and give it away with this kind of pricing. Impossible to get any better returns than other micros even if they gave you 100 percent.
739
« on: August 03, 2017, 08:06 »
...and according to this phone conference, the number of subscription dls per buyer dropped and dls are down.
Isn't it better for them when the buyers take fewer dls from their subs, as they haven't had to pay out to contributors.
Unless they don't renew.
But I see they're going to start smaller packages, presumably charging more per dl. Are they going to share that with the contributors?
They're already offering smaller subs packs, which is what led to fewer dls per buyer. Whatever changes they're making aren't having positive results for anyone, it seems...not even them.
The drop in royalties would explain a lot via shifting the search to those with lower share (38 cents vs. newbies making 28 cents or whatever). In fact based on the numbers presented here it makes the picture of "overnight" drop in sales much clearer as to what happened.
741
« on: August 01, 2017, 08:42 »
If something new sells, it sells for a couple of times and then usually disappears; never to sell again. That's not the reason I'm in microstock so I''ve stopped uploading as it seems pointless. I have sales of 2,000+ of a couple of images I uploaded in 2012 and around 30 images that sold 100+ all of which were uploaded years ago. I don't think I have anything uploaded in the past 2 years that managed above 25 sales so why bother.
My philosophy is that sometime down the road my new images will be old (by whatever definition SS uses to define old) and I will make sales. I still upload but I have only just recently started back up in the studio and really have no motivation. Incentive to shoot is tied to outcome and with MS going into the toilet I'm really focusing elsewhere, video and POD.
742
« on: August 01, 2017, 08:39 »
I thought I'd never say this but I am hoping that IStock bails out my huge drop from Shutterstock.
743
« on: August 01, 2017, 08:32 »
Uploaded yesterday and sold today, but generally it's slow going at first
One datapoint does not constitute the whole. If we look at the population (all contributors' new uploaded content), that content does not sell "as a whole" , but there are always outliers, or exceptions. I don't think anyone in here is saying that not a single new images sells, what we are saying is that as a whole new images do not sell.
744
« on: August 01, 2017, 08:27 »
We closed our account there several months ago! I can only recommend you do the same ;-)
As I understand it you don't actually close your account, rather your images are deactivated, but always in their possession. Is this your recollection?
745
« on: August 01, 2017, 08:25 »
Not for me. Then again, nothing is selling for me. I'm quite disgusted with Shutterstock. I suspect their search is shifted to new contributors to lower payouts and increase profits (earnings). That's what happens when you have shareholders to answer to.
746
« on: July 29, 2017, 09:08 »
I have seen no big EL for months. All now just a few bucks. So I believe that SS has moved their model down into the price war basement and we are seeing it in our total revenues. Over the last three months alone I have gone from over $1200 then to mid $800's and now to mid $400's (July). Thanks SS.
747
« on: July 29, 2017, 09:03 »
Are you asking for "Asian Inspired" motion graphics? I ask with all sincerity because regular video sales for me are almost non-existent. Could that be because my work is not "Asian Inspired"? If my work isn't selling because it is not "Asian Inspired" then everyone be forewarned that the effort you make with motion graphics that is not aligned with the strategic content ME is looking for, your efforts will be for nothing. You will spend a lot of wasted time uploading with probably very little in return. If ME has expanded beyond "Asian Inspired" then sales are still non-existent. You are asking people to upload more complex content than regular video with a pattern of no sales (at least for me). Tough sell.
748
« on: July 26, 2017, 07:47 »
Good work everyone.
749
« on: July 25, 2017, 08:41 »
So DREAMSTIME got back to me and said that he is "LICENSED TO RESELL IT" and NOT in violation of copyright. what? I fired back a nasty response and we shall see. But according to DREAMSTIME, this is allowed.
Knowing Dreamstime they will probably close your account for complaining 
They have always been reasonable and acheilles is also a very reasonable person. When someone blatantly and obviously steals your work and uploads it as their own you would thnk that dt and acheilles would be on that if someone files a legit dmca, which I did. But to get that kind of response is unacceptable and dt knows it.
750
« on: July 25, 2017, 08:14 »
UPDATE...
Although the thief was reported to Shutterstock, After I mention the THIEF's portfolio, he/she somehow open another account
www.shutterstock.com/g/Leinson with the same portfolio.
What's going on Shutterstock 
The is illegal based on the terms of SS. You cannot have two accounts. That should be reported, too. I encourage anyone who sees their images or knows who might be the copyright holder of those images to file a DMCA. The arrogance of Achielles at DREAMSTIME and their support team is astonishing. Acheilles of all people (being a photographer himself) should not stand for this. I am going to start a new DT thread so that DT is exposed for the copyright thief supporters they are.
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