low sales, but moving up. pos 4950

today i had two ai videos reviewed after 30 days. one accepted, one declined for quality.

fair enough, both come from my first ai video batch in jan 2024. and a quality decline means i can reprocess, perhaps it would be enough to make it hd.

curious about the next ai videos and also camera videos now in the queue.

Then there is no money for advertising, a sales team, a legal team, an editor team. Running after customers costs a lot of money.

There are many platforms where you can pay to host your content. But then there is no quality moderation, nobody reads releases or checks for copyright problems.

Customers don't like to buy on these sites.

You can always try to run your own webshop from your website. Often in addition to agencies. It works for some, but many give up because dealing with all the questions customers have is a time waste.

There is a huge machine behind the shop window surface. Many creators underestimate how hard agencies have to work.

Customers follow the upload flows. That is how SS kept losing clients

They kept buying agencies but refused to heal their brutal break up with the creator community.

So creators who are often designers buy elsewhere.

Dreamstime has always been good to us, the only agency that paid out more to creators during the pandemic.

They also don�t randomly block accounts and their support always writes back quickly.

And now that Adobe is randomly declining content, Dreamstime has always been much better variety to offer especially for ai content.

I think many will replace buying from Adobe with a combo of istock and dreamstime.

istock has more model released people anyway and Dreamstime will have more ai selection.

Creators determine where customers buy or were they buy for their clients.

It will also affect Adobe subscriptions.

Why use the software of a company that gaskights creators and looks down on them?

Affinity photo is always there.

now down to 5000

pos 6680

There might be millions of files, but very few come from experienced producers that specialize in holiday content. That is why you keep reading of people saying they uploaded 800 holiday files and had zero sales or less than 5.

There is a lot to learn about various holidays and very different groups.

Country specific

for adults or for children

for corporate conservative events or for creative small business

modest background with lots of copy space or in your face loud and dramatic

for the season sales

for a specific business group - christmas for surfers, easter for hospitals, halloween for a bakery, thanksgiving for dog stylists...

etc...

There really are a lot of details, plus yearly new trends.

In the old days I used to go to a very large trade show in Frankfurt in Germany.  Called christmasworld, always in January.

Gigantic place where shops start ordering holiday decoration for the next year.

And there is always a yearly trend - rock gothic black xmas decor with shiny crystals, all natural minimalist cotton/hemp with rustic farmstyle elements, fairytale winter wonderland classic, current movie specials barbieland christmas, supermanchristmas, game of thrones christmas...

Obviously you cannot include superman or the mouse, but you can go for an overall vibe and feel that is trendy

Most people who do holidays, just sort the search by downloads and copy the first 3 pages

But there is so much more.

And every holiday event has gigantic subgenres you can explore.

Even easter is more than bunnies and eggs.

The regular greeting card buyers know these trends. And if they look at your port they immediately see if you specialize in holiday content or just do copies of copies...

The random reviews are affecting people with camera content and no ai as well.

Creators have long proposed that Adobe should add sensible upload limits, but instead they removed the 3k limit.

The situation is very demoralising.

If you do a search for any subject and look at newest you see all kinds of crap being accepted, including large batches with 50+ near identical files.

So why are our files declined as similar?

There is no improvement in the quality accepted and especially if I do a search for fresh people content, the quality and choice has gone down.

Nobody benefits from an algo roulette review. Least of all the customers.

I did a test with 3 boring files, one ai illustration that will never become a bestseller. Still cute and usable but a design that is hardly needed. A very simple ai photo with copy space that probably has lots of similars in the collection, but is a genre I usually don't have in my port. And one very simple camera food image.

All 3 were accepted over several days.

Will now again try with maybe 5 mixed files, including some camera stuff.

When I look at what is accepted, I would say there is a bit of a shift to the more boring B roll images with lower sales value.

Less content coming where I would say that might get bought 100 times in the first year.

Perhaps the algo prefers this content because creators usually produce files they hope will sell well. And thus declines files that are more useful.

But in the end I am just guessing.

The algo ai simply does not work and has zero intelligence in the choices it makes.

steady drip starting 6-9 months before.

you might get most of the actual downloads in the holiday season, but the decisions are often made several months in advance.

there are some last minute buyers, but anything you expect to have over 100 dl or over 1000 should be uploaded many, many months earlier

if you are new to holiday images, it can also take several seasons before you get regular buyers. there is a lot of competition and on some agencies it took me at least 3 seasons, before holiday images became regular and good sellers.

@halffull

I am asking because also the camera producers photo/video are reporting random declines of entire batches for similar or quality. They have been uploading for years with 90% acceptance rate. So now they have stopped uploading.

Somebody is suggesting to do editorial photos. Might try that.

But i am really worried about the rest of the year. If I don't get holiday christmas content into my port now the rest of the year will be a disaster.

I feel like I have been barred from uploading of any content type.

I will try editorial, but that is not a reliable market.

Have you tried uploading camera content? Or camera videos? Illustrative editorial?

I really need the money, but my business plan for 2025 did not include Adobe using a russian roulette ai for reviews.

Question is if AI takes over and artists, creatives, bloggers etc are no longer seeing financial reward, or very little reward why would anyone upload anything of value to the internet.  AI companies must have thought this one through, do they really think people are just going to work for free or something. 

Sorry to be harsh but they sound like a self entitled bunch, lobbying governments, at least here in Britain, to weaken copyright laws.  Our silly governments are swallowing the line.

people were saying the same when the free agencies came out...and here we are still making money.

we sell time more than actual files. that includes saving time on prompting.
spend an afternoon prompting or 20 min browsing thousands of files, then tweaking the ones you find in photoshop to perfection

Wasn't envato the favorite place for videos. And difficult to get into?

Like storyblocks?