Quote from: Microstockphoto on June 22, 2017, 17:58

i am back to 8 dollar days

Your lucky try $6.82 days

Whatever they did I wish they would stop

I'm in the same boat.  Something changed that had a big impact on my sales.  If this keeps up June will be the worst month I've had at SS for years.  About half of last month, or a �$600 shortfall.

Quote from: PixelBytes on June 23, 2017, 00:55

Quote from: derek on June 23, 2017, 00:46

Yep!  I had counted them out and left them for dead and then I recieve one of the largest payouts in 12 years time! into a 5-figure amount. Guess I start uploading again there.
Could it be that they somehow are staggering back and its weakening SS who according to lots of fairly big contributors in their own forum is just terrible. I dont know but something is cooking.

Five figures? Meaning $10,000.00 or more???!!!!  For May.  From Getty/Istock.  Seriously???

yes but I guess I had a bit of luck its obvious the same buyer downloaded 11 ELs etc and two huge  GI Rm sales. I helps.

That's awesome. Congrats.

I don't know the details, like where they take the content from, selling price and so on.
But personally I would not hold my breath: I have the feeling that all the microstock minnows are on the way out.
I believe only the big 3-4 will stay, or else some sort of macrostock

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People have been making this statement for years and it never seems to happen.

Quote from: Mantis on June 17, 2017, 08:35

Quote from: Microstockphoto on June 17, 2017, 00:41

awesome.

 i dont think people are rewarded or punished though , but i do think tge search is tweaked all the time. i had a blasting 2 weeks. and in the last 5 days i made 30 dollar. go figure

I think this is a good assessment.  Currently, I am on the receiving end of poor sales.  Just two weeks ago I was in the $40-$60 per day range and now I am consistently in the $12 per day range on stills and video is half or a third of what it is when I am doing well.  I am sure their tweaks are meant to either cut costs or try new things that align to higher sales (algorithm pilot tests of sorts).  One thing is for certain, I went into video to complement my still collection and sales have not grown one iota.  I still make the same amount I did with stills.  Perhaps I mitigated a drop in sales by adding video, who knows, but it is awful coincidental in such a short time that my sales would not jump with the addition of a new asset type.  That is the anecdotal evidence I use to claim that revenue is generally fixed, but I have no proof other than the behavior of my portfolio.

I am very interested on this, would you mind to develop (portfolio size, etc.)?
I only did video until a couple of months ago and SS is my best selling agency by a country mile. In the last couple of months I have uploaded 600 pics.
So far I have not noticed any decrease on video sale, but of course it is too soon to tell.
I have heard other people saying that sale in pics make sales of footage go down and of course if that is true I would immediately erase all the pics uploaded

I have about 3500 images and 1200 videos. Videos make up about 20% of the revenue.  To be fair, I haven't produced traditional stock themes in a while because I am tired of working my butt off and not seeing any return on my investment.  I have been submitting travel shots, which generally don't sell in the volume of classic stock (isolations, people-business, etc.). All of my SOD's (big sales) are of traditional, boring (more or less) stock images.

awesome.

 i dont think people are rewarded or punished though , but i do think tge search is tweaked all the time. i had a blasting 2 weeks. and in the last 5 days i made 30 dollar. go figure

I think this is a good assessment.  Currently, I am on the receiving end of poor sales.  Just two weeks ago I was in the $40-$60 per day range and now I am consistently in the $12 per day range on stills and video is half or a third of what it is when I am doing well.  I am sure their tweaks are meant to either cut costs or try new things that align to higher sales (algorithm pilot tests of sorts).  One thing is for certain, I went into video to complement my still collection and sales have not grown one iota.  I still make the same amount I did with stills.  Perhaps I mitigated a drop in sales by adding video, who knows, but it is awful coincidental in such a short time that my sales would not jump with the addition of a new asset type.  That is the anecdotal evidence I use to claim that revenue is generally fixed, but I have no proof other than the behavior of my portfolio.

Current photo licensing terms appear to be unlimited everything forever.  That seems to include print on demand merchandise items.  Hopefully they will add or clarify extended license terms soon.

This is the real point in my mind. An EL can be totally in favor of buyer and yield the seller very little in return.....just depends on the terms of the license.  I saw one of my pics in a craft store being sold as a print and post card.  I had no energy to track it down, but the moral of the story is someone else is using my image to resell, ill be it pod.

Quote from: Mantis on June 13, 2017, 13:11

Well, for all of you worried about Microstock income and believing in near miracles, i just got an email from a nigerian prince who needs someone in the usa to send $20 million to and i was selected to be that person. I am DONE WITH MICROSTOCK now.

i got the same mail.the dif is he wants to send the 20 million dollars someone to europe.and i was the best candidate for the job. i wonder how did he knew who i was i never send an email to him..xmmmm weird
oh who care 20 millions bucks here i come YAY

Easy. They chose suffering micro stock peeps.

Not many buyers use a full 10 seconds of a hyperlapse. In fact, 2 seconds is more normal.

10 seconds is often not even practically possible, and adds so much time, but I would aim for 6 seconds at 24 fps = 144 images at least. Most agencies require a minimum of 5 seconds.

I usually do at least 160 images so I have some room to edit. Of course, if the situation lends itself to longer sequences with not much extra hassle, I do that.

I would rather give them 10 seconds so they have a "menu" to choose from...picking a part of that clip that best fits their needs.  I've been getting more into time lapse and all the workshops I take the instructors want only short clips...5-10 seconds.  It's hard to break my rules of uploading 20 second clips. A 20 second time lapse can take 30 minutes to 5 hours depending on what time of day you shoot.  Anyhow, just my 2 cents on duration.  Interestingly, if you walk into Costco to the TV section, most of the flagship TV's are playing time laps clips, and most are doing 3-5 second clips them move on to a new clip.  Basically a big B-roll kind of thing with 3-5 sec clips.

I've been looking for a good backup solution to use without a laptop and came across this one a few days ago:  https://www.gnarbox.com/
Looks good and has great reviews.

I need something bigger. I saw that and it looked reasonable. I tried to find a larger storage version but couldn't find one. 

Hi everyone,

I will be doing some remote shooting later this year for 7 days without my laptop and very limited power.  I will be shooting 3-5 thousand RAW Nikon D810 images per day (time lapse) and am looking for a portable, self powered CF card back up device. 

I have found a few, some pretty pricy and others more reasonable.  Aside from Flash Porter (a Kickstarter project) and Nexto I have been reading about this one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1191268-REG/sanho_shdcsudma32tb_2tb_colorspace_udma_3.html

There is also this one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1277930-REG/nexto_di_nesv_nvs28012th_nvs2801_video_storage_doc.html

I had a question about FAT 32 only back up.  Since I have a 32 GIG max partition how would a device like this manage a data dump of 128 gigs from my card? Odds are I will fill up or closely fill up a card each shoot, especially my holy grail shooting. 

If anyone can educate me on the limitations of a FAT 32 system I would appreciate it. Also, if you have any other ideas for LARGE file back-up in remote areas that would also be welcome. I've done quite a bit of searching and the IPAD/Android route that is discussed just isn't the right way for the amount of stills and video I will be shooting.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Quote from: lopolo on June 02, 2017, 11:42

...anybody have the may total amont $ taked by shutterstock to payout ? Mine is not taked yet

Mine is not yet reset - either on the web site or the iPhone app. I don't know why this isn't automated (or perhaps it's supposed to be, but it's broken in some way). This should be a pretty simple month by month activity...

regarding your large sale, I understand your wish for the sale to be real, but I've never heard of anything of that order of magnitude for a SS royalty. The largest I've personally seen was just over $120. Given all the software glitches they've had of late, the odds are high that they've just effed up but don't realize it yet (or they realize it, but they don't yet know what the right amount is). They know they're not in any hurry as nothing can get paid out until July for a June 1st sale.

That was my thought. Remember a while back when we all had that huge amount in our revenue bucket? They, of course corrected that.  My guess is it ends up being a decimal issue.  But if it is legit, I would as a contributor want to know more about this kinds of licenses.

Why would anyone want to join the bridgeclub when Bigstock is as good as dead?? It seems some people will contribute anywhere regardless of returns.

The bridge was years ago when Bigstock wasn't so bad.  They have since closed the program but those who were in it 4-5 years ago continue to get the benefit of auto transfer of images to Bigstock.  I would say that is a good strategy to keep images up there if uploads take zero minutes to upload.