It was my best month this year - about on par with the average monthly income last year. SS sales were a bit lower in # but I actually had a good number of ODD compared to normal. The thing that made the difference was 2 good Alamy sales. April 2014 was my 3rd worst month that year though, so at least I beat that this year. None of the regular earning sites were particularly high or low compared to last years average - although especially Alamy was quite good for this year.

I think if you are taking the $/day average then the number of weekends and holidays per month will be a significant factor.

One of the first times this happened my uploads were indexed right before about a week of no new images indexed. Luckily for me I had just uploaded a pretty good image that was seasonally in demand. It was on the first line of the "newest first" search for that term. After that fortunate (for me) week it was on the first line of the default search for a year or more - in fact I think it was somewhere in  the first 3 lines for about 4 years until they changed the search which made it disappear for a few weeks and then it re-appeared on the second page which cut downloads to less than 1/2 of what they were.

We have no control over this sort of thing, but don't fool yourself into thinking that it doesn't make a difference in some instances.

what i see is $, and when i take a look on total $ - for me, it does not look promising at the moment.

just an illustration (GI downloads for one of my files from s+ collection):


Date (DD/MM/YYYY) Site Royalty
01/07/2014 12:00 AM MDT Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/08/2014 12:00 AM MDT Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/09/2014 12:00 AM MDT Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/10/2014 12:00 AM MDT Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/11/2014 12:00 AM MDT Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/12/2014 12:00 AM MST Getty Images $0.01 USD
01/01/2015 12:00 AM MST Getty Images $0.01 USD

I wonder if that is from the embedded viewer thing... Or just some other way to screw the artists.

Times are changing...pay attention to the apps in this infographs.

http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/

and this one

https://www.textmagic.com/blog/mobile-user-stats-every-successful-marketer-should-know/

:-)

It looks like lots of people look at Facebook, weather, news, video, and play games on mobile and even buy from i-tunes. I still doubt that microstock sales on mobile are a very big proportion. maybe someday when phones get to the size of a laptop screen, but none of those infographics convince me of that yet. I suppose the sites could tell us the real answer, but somehow I doubt they will. The fact that some of the sites have made their sites mobile friendly mean that they think it is important though (or else they bought the hype or think it is necessary to sell themselves as a technology company).

yes, me too... even love the stupid capcha with frigging pictures. as if the illegible words were not bad enough...whose twisted idea is this???

they (the captcha people) are trying to figure out how to determine if a user is a real person in new and sometimes annoying ways. One is to monitor how you move the mouse (notice that you can't tab to the "I am a real person" check box). I wonder if SS pays them to annoy us or if they pay SS for that honor.

re: SS and IS, it always seemed like IS and FT were leading the screw the contributor charge with <20% to the artists. SS was clever, stingy, greedy (you name it) enough to start out with about 30% to the artist when many other sites were at 50%. At least they haven't substantially reduced it (perhaps until now).

Quote from: Shelma1 on April 16, 2015, 15:07

Quote from: tickstock on April 16, 2015, 15:03

Quote from: Shelma1 on April 16, 2015, 15:01

What I don't get is the continued sarcasm directed at SS specifically. iS pays lowers royalties to independents. I only get 28� for subs sales at iS.

As I've pointed out before, most of us can't be represented by Getty, and microstock opened up new markets and broader representation. Why MACRO photographers come to MICROstock Group and continually post jabs at MICROstock�and specifically SS, which is the big earner for most people�is beyond me.

You don't see any sarcasm directed at iStock, you're one of the main purveyors of that sort of thing.  I think people can dislike both companies why does anyone have to like one or other?

Why are you here? Seriously. This is Microstock Group. And I'm sarcastic about iS because I wish they'd do better. When they screw up it costs me money. You?

I'm here because I do this for my living, it's important to me what happens not only on iStock but in the industry as a whole.

how can I make a living slagging SS on microstock group?

Their approvals/rejections seem pretty random to me too. I don't even bother to attempt to make sense of them anymore.

If they were a big earner I'd be more concerned.

not so great for me, only one worse month (last Nov) going back to 2011.  SS did ok, 123RF back on track after pathetic last month. P5 decent (for them), but overall rather disappointing.

I guess there will be a miniscule bump when I add in Istock and then the PP and whatever else shows up over the next month or so.

I have been having a lot of distribution subs this month, not just one day, but a few almost every day. Not that it is a lot in the grand scheme of things, but on the order of the same amount as the previous 4 months added up.

Anyone else - is there a new "partner"? someone selling them for big bucks and we get subs?

Long enough that I don't really know how long it is. I assume 3-4 weeks.

So far no details have been given, and the details are what will make the difference to us.

One of the great things about SS in the past was that any image could rise or fall on its merits and unlike many sites it wasn't based on how the artist did overall or subject to the whims of random search changes. That is somewhat no longer true. If this means that if you aren't in the club you get almost no big SODs, that will be unfortunate for everyone that doesn't make the club.

Quote from: Semmick Photo on March 18, 2015, 17:30

Quote from: noodle on March 18, 2015, 17:22

I think last year Alamy sold 300,000 licences

300,000 from a collection of 55 M!

SS sells 4 licences EVERY SECOND!!

So SS sells more licences in 1 day then A sells all year

correct but you need a lot of licences to compete with one alamy licence. My rpd was around 19 dollars

Don't get me wrong
I would love Alamy to be successful, as the rpd is definitely better, but sales are far and few between, at least for me
It seems that the sales are generated more toward the Euro based togs perhaps because their content is more suited toward A clients
I am in North America so my images may not be in as much demand, hence the fewer sales

I think the quotes above might not be attributed correctly, but wasn't the reason they cut us from 60% to 50% of a sale (or less for distributors) to open a N America office to increase sales there (not that I've seen that actually happen though).

I wish they actually put the info in some sort of useful format instead of the high glitz low info format they did. For instance. List the top 10 countries ordered by payouts and number of contributors - or list them all. Have a graph with number of items for sale compared to payouts. etc.

I can see why they might not want to reveal that data, but as it is they are only providing a few chosen points that don't really say much. For instance, they list countries 3 and 5, but not any of the other top ones. I was surprised how little they pay out to the US though.