Dreamstime
    Sales 25 / 398
    Uploads 28 / 398
iStockPhoto
    Sales 53 / 456
    Uploads 38 / 456

Suprised sales is better than uploads at DS - I'm not doing so well there lately compared to other sites.

+ 1015
=
40748

I'm always amazed when reading these fotolia-rejection posts, since my acceptance ratio there is (and has always been) 90%.  Do I have a secret?  May-be, but I don't know which one it would be.  So here's my uploading "technique" :  my uploads are 20 to 25 images per week, uploaded during the weekend, and ALWAYS in a complete variety of subjects.  NEVER more than 2 images of the same shoot.  About 15% has people in it, not because FT doesn't like people, but because I don't have that many people shots.
I don't read my rejection reasons, but after a look at my collection of FT rejects, I can say that they're mainly :  backgrounds, graphics, infrared images, landscapes and flowers, and darker images.  In all other cases, the images were also rejected by other sites, so they must've been really bad.  Oh, and one other thing :  Fotolia does not like sad or distressing images (about war, death, suicide ... unless it's a halloween picture).
Also :  all images are keyworded the Fotolia-way, so with the 7 main keywords at front.
Last remark :  my absolute rank = 138, my relative rank = 99.
Now you tell me :  where's the secret?  Certainly NOT the image quality, which is definitely not superior to the forum members with lots of rejects.  Subject matter?  I live in Europe, which influences subject matter of course and Fotolia's origin is European. 
Also :  Fotolia is my second best seller.  I have sent requests to FT about changing the EL value of ALL my images (I did that twice in a year), and they reacted positively whithin 4 days.  So Fotolia likes me, and I like Fotolia. 
Do I have a secret?  Tell me which one!

Hi there  - with very tight editing of my portfolio, my CTR averages over 2.5. This helped lead to $600+ sales last month - best for a while. Without the editing, I'd have been sunk.

Alamy results do seem similar to the rest of the maco world - my own agency included.

Rgds

Oldhand

2,5 CTR .... WOW !!!!   Congratulations!!
What do you mean with "editing" :  cleaning up keywords?  

Great month.  Fotolia broke all records and pushed IS off its 2nd place.  Now it's Shutterstock, Fotolia, Istock, and Dreamstime slowing down more and more. 

No idea what's wrong with Dreamstime.  I started with Fotolia and Dreamstime on the same day, and after 2,5 years I have the same number of images with both sites.  Fotolia however beats Dreamstime's sales with more than 50% every month.

Shutterstock wasn't bad, but it stopped growing.  If the On Demands really stop in November, Fotolia can try and grab first place! 
Bigstock did so bad, it's not even worth talking about.

I never had a problem with the low earnings at SS, simply because I always believed that their buyers buy more images than they really need.  Suppose you are an image buyer, and you can download 25 images per day, but you only need 15 per day.  What do you do?  You download more than you need, so you can choose afterwards which image looks better on your magazine/site.  Or you download the 15 you need, and you download 10 other ones for personal use at home ...
What I'm trying to say is that every 25ct at SS gets more money because of extra images that would not have been downloaded at agencies without subscriptions.

What I DO have a problem with at SS is the long period between approval and "publication on the site".  Last week, I uploaded and submitted 20 images on Thursday morning.  They were approved on Saturday morning.  Sunday, Monday and Tuesday there did not appear at searches ("newest first" order).  On Wednesday, all images from the last 4 or 5 days were put on the site in ONE BIG BATCH, and mine were buried on page 8.  Result :  no sales of newest images.

I use CS4 until Lightroom makes a new version that does NOT put my keywords in alfabetical order.  Lightroom is perfect for caption and description, but Fotolia (and Alamy in a certain way too) wants the first 7 keywords to be the most significant ones.

I think stolen images is not the only situation where one would use fake MR's.

Suppose you are shooting nature shots and there's this guy walking his dog and you take a shot that turns out great.  The guy is hardly (or not) recognizable, but afterwards, the photo turns out to be really good stock material. 

I have such a picture.  It was refused by half of the sites because I don't have a signed release.  Blur the face?  That would ruin de shot.  Fake an MR ? 

Before you start thinking I did that :  no, my man-with-dog shot was not good enough to do all the trouble of faking an MR (and beside that, I'm too chicken to do it).  But isn't this a situation where one could be tempted ?

One more "Other"
I wish every member was required to have at least one link to a site they have a port on, so we could tell who is full of crap and just ruining their mouth off and which ones know what they are talking about.
-Larry

Absolutely!  That would be great (why didn't I think of that?).
I often wonder about people's portfolios.  Or I ask myself "is he a vector or a photo guy?"  or : "a landscape type or succesful stock-on-white-background type?"

so how many sales per how many images are people getting here?

For the months of March-April-May-June I had an average of 140 euros with 1900 photos, which is about 1,2 dollars per image/year, and almost the figure that Juha predicted.  However, I don't know how many of these 1900 were accepted and added to the collection, so it might be more than 1,2 per image/year.

Same here!

I finally sent e-mails to the 3 people I know at Rodeo, and this was Juha's reply today :
(I did check my spam folder daily though).

Hi Anyka,
Have you checked you spam folder? Reports should be sent thru June. July reports isnt sent yet. Some photographers have been found the reports in Spam folder since it is html mail with a lots of small thumbnail photos which might be caught by even easier set filter.  You should add my email ([email protected]) to safe senders list.

As summer is very challenging time for us as we're shooting a lot of new photos ourselves too are reports delayed a great time. Also summer months commissions are paid later September/October as July/August is national holiday season here in Finland and sales are very slow.

All emails what I receive will certainly get answer usually in 1-2 weeks. Summer season is exception as I might be out of office several days at time. Daily requests and questions I get thru out the year is like I earlier mentioned very challenging as I write around 300-400 emails every month plus all other work. As I always tell to everyone we only have two full time employees (me and Tero Sivula) and Ossi is doing reviewing as part time. Til we get more employees there is usually holiday seasons a great delays in replies since we have to keep up all the customer inquiries the minimum delay.

Hopefully this cleared up things how things work here and everything is going great here!
Best regards,
Juha Tuomi