I understand that some low earners are not worth the time to upload to, but as long as they aren't shady or openly cheating us, I would let the images you have worked to upload ride. The sites that are seriously undercutting prices and commissions - drop them.

I even managed payout on SF this year, although it took long enough.

I was going to add to this post on the DT board; but thought it might be better here.

Quote from: Mantis on December 09, 2014, 19:58

Since May DT has gone south. HUGE drops in Nov and this month.  I think they are losing customers or changed the search and I m on the sh!t end of the stick.

I don't believe you can judge reality with just a few months totals - especially when we all clearly have different experiences - , but DT has been seriously sinking for me over the past half year. Still, I was stunned when I added up totals as of today (Dec. 19) only since the beginning of the month. The context for you all is that I have only about 300 images uploaded, and only to the "Big 4".

SS has accepted the fewest images; DT the most.

 Also, I've only been doing this for a couple of years; but at this point I am getting a payout from one or more every month. (my min. for all sites is set for over $100).

So, with that in mind, here are my percentage of sales (in income) for the past 19 days:

BS:    10%
DT:    0.9%   
FT:    44%
SS:    45%

Maybe this means something....maybe nothing. Just thought I'd toss it out.

Wow, those are impressively high numbers for BS and FT (or poor ones at the other 2). For me DT is over 4X BS. Maybe SS is managing to shift serious sales to their screw the contributor more experiment site.

Quote from: stockastic on December 16, 2014, 18:14

By interposing a bogus currency called 'credits', with no fixed exchange rate, DT and others have created a system where they can sell our images for whatever they want. The published price or royalty schedules really don't mean anything anymore.  We don't know what a buyer paid for an image, and we get whatever token payment the agency chooses to make.

Instead of openly discounting images, they can simply discount 'credits'.   It's probably more complicated than they like, but it gives them total freedom to compete on price without technically violating any contributor agreements.   

It's only for those 'big important customers' of course.  And we'll make it up on volume.

I have to admit, while it is nice to talk about high royalty rates, you are right that it doesn't mean much when the dollar value to you is calculated.  While I have little idea what specific royalty Shutterstock pays me, at least I know how much I will get per sale.  Dreamstime (and others) are all about posting maximum payout rates to contributors, and then selling customers on how low prices are!  On their payout page, DT list the contributor royalty as $1.02 for this example of a level 1 credit sale, with a little * at the top and a note about these being maximums.  I'd at least like to see them post minimums!  Essentially they'd be within their legal rights to put on a penny sale and pay us nothing!

They really should post the range or the minimums. In fact I am pretty sure I suggested they post the minimums - which they probably don't want to do - since they can be down near single digit cents per credit - not at the .08 or .07 bottom that IS has, but still pretty low. 

Any time I get under .25 per credit I am annoyed and under .20 I feel cheated. I'd still rather credit sales though. Maybe the level 0 sales can stay subs...

Sept. 23, 2007

That theory can't work, because in US you have to pay taxes, which are huge on $ 6.5 millions.
Anyway, I'm more and more disgust towards human beings behaviour and humans in general. Nothing is good for us. Nobody is good for us. We critic and spit on the best among us. I'm just recalling all the crap we said about Yuri Arcus here. And now Lik. Can't we just respect somoones success, qualities and skills?

I think you could probably write it off as a business expense if you bought your own work...

Interesting since the reviews are by order of submission. Something happens after acceptance and is changing during indexing? That might be interesting to watch.

I'll assume you are using file numbers for the determination of what's submitted after yours, but appearing first. Also should be same file type, meaning there are four file types: photo, video, editorial and illustration. Those are not the same and have different review orders.

Quote from: pancaketom on December 03, 2014, 16:39

I have images accepted yesterday morning - like 6 am eastern time - that still aren't visible in search either newest, most popular (very specific keywords) etc. or in my port. Others (submitted later) accepted at the same time are visible in both now. I presume that by the time they are indexed they will be at least somewhat buried.

update - one more just showed up, at least it is obscure enough that it will show up if ever searched for.

I think it was a glitch in indexing. I am basing this only on my own images (except for the ones doing the burying). The last 2 images that were missing are there this morning, but were not visible late last night. Images I submitted after them showed up in my port 2 full days before they did (all reviewed at the same time though). I have never seen this before, although I have seen periods of time where there was an extended delay in indexing.

Less Flash. less dropdown menus. In fact none might be nice.

Since I haven't seen one of these yet and I have added up my totals I thought I'd start one...

November was the worst month for me since Jan 2011.  That is the big picture.

Basically the all of the sites that tend to be very up and down were down (Alamy, Veer, etc.) in fact not a sale on Alamy - although a nice one Dec 1 sort of helps. Then the bigger earners were all so-so months. Not the worst, but not enough to make up for the others. Some of the lower earning sites did quite well, but are such small potatoes that they don't really make much difference. As usual SS is the big kahuna and I had one good week there and the rest were so-so to lousy adding up to being the second worst month of the year there - and since they are around 50% of my totals, that makes a big difference, especially when no other site steps up.

Hopefully December can keep the momentum going before it screeches to a halt for the holidays.

certainly more images - no thumbs yet, but when they show up I can see - I might have repeated a batch when nothing happened after a few days...

IS could have ruled the microstock kingdom but they sure didn't and then once they sold out and then through greed and incompetence (or perhaps a desire to kill microstock?) they have been severely degraded.

Imagine what would have happened had they paid more for image exclusivity and not broken all their promises. sure, they might have had to pay out 30 to 40% average to contributors, but with far less competition they would still be doing better.

Sales $ totals at DT the last 5 months have been pretty steady (at the monthly level) where the previous 8 months or more they were bouncing around all over the place (factor of 4 between the lowest and highest months).  While the last few months have been steady and on a slight rising trend, they are also about level of 2009/2010sales - when I had less than half as many images.

I also see blocks of subs and the occasional but very important blocks of credit sales. ELs were never very common for me there, but I can't remember the last one - it has been a while.

Selling videos at 15 cents each how much do contributors get. Maybe 6 or 7 cents a sale. Clearly you don't think BigStock is going to give contributors all of the big money.

I am curious what contributors are getting for a sale - probably more than .15 since as we all know the number of subs actually downloaded is quite a bit less than the maximum allowed.

BS - that is total BS. you aren't trying to sell only to youtube people, you are playing in your sandbox to see if you can make more $ with rock bottom offerings - similar to what you do with stills too - undercutting SS.

does anyone know how many RC one gets for an LEL? or if it is variable is there any way to determine how many one gets for each one.