Quote from: cobalt on April 08, 2024, 13:03

by sharing rank changes we get an even better feeling for - is it me - or is it everyone?

and in my case i think it is motivating that it is possible to move up very swiftly if you have in demand content.

there is always the rumor that agencies somehow "lock you" into a rank and that you can never earn more than some imaginary limit.

my very wild swings show this is not true at all.

i must do even better research, find some more niches and targeted content and then i am sure i can reach my financial goals even faster.

Yes, it's entertaining, and the last part BOLD is what's more important.

The imaginary limits and locks are just people who are unhappy or losing sales and make up reasons to justify or rationalize. No proof needed to post on a forum how the agency is favoring someone else. It's always, someone else gets better placement, some favorite person has unfair higher rank and makes more, because of something the agency does. It's not because those people have better images, newer images, more images, the trending images, or like you do, the successful people search for needs of customers.

"by sharing rank changes we get an even better feeling for - is it me - or is it everyone?"
The number of people who participate is so small, the sample is not enough for any valid conclusions. If it's "me or everyone" then your rank will be the same if you sell 100 images and everyone sells 100 images, as if you sell 50 images and everyone sells 50 images. Your rank, can stay the same number, if you and everyone else, sell more or sell less, because it's just a rank, by position.

One week, you're on top, because you have a great week, the next, you feel like you're down, because either you went flat, or someone else had a good high sales week. The rank can be like the tide.

I admit my rank is a joke and irrelevant. If I go up or down 5,500 places that's nowhere near if you go up or down 100 places. I'm at 28,000 right now. Everyone in the world, with the same number of sales, is at 28,000. If you have 100 sales so far this week, everyone with 100 sales, is identical to you, and everyone with 99 sales, which could be any number of people, will be the next rank down. If you are 4,000 and 100 people have 100 sales, the person with 99 and everyone else with 99 will be 3,900 rank.

I think you can see how a small number of sales, even one, can make a big change in the individual rank we can see. But really, it's a cluster. Every single image you sell, makes a move in your rank. Potentially a large move for two or three sales. So what does that really mean? It's almost like, how did the wind blow and hour ago?

I still say, watching a clock doesn't change the time. Watching your rank, while in general is interesting, it won't change your rank?  There's much more value in what you say:  find some more niches and targeted content and I'll add, watch trends, the news and the time of year.

Quote from: Andrej.S. on April 08, 2024, 08:50

But it's exciting and depressing at the same time what users can create.
I'm happy I'm not working in the design industry, would be extremely upset seeing what nowday's people can create without any digital image processing skills.
If development continues at this rate hardly anyone will use Photoshop in 10 years.

I know someone who is a former, successful, graphic artist and she says, the business was ruined when they came out with Adobe Illustrator and people don't have to be artists anymore, they can do everything on a computer.  I wanted to say, join in and learn Adobe Illustrator? She's still got the skills, talent, experience and brain.

If I see her this Summer I'll ask what she thinks of AI? Now people don't need to be much of any kind of artist, they just type in a prompt and have an illustration. Or don't like that? Alter the prompt, styles, lab settings, and make four more new "original" images.

Tried it with my own files to check how my images are described and what those prompts then create. Thankfully the resulting files were very different. Same genre but not copies.

I also test my image descriptions and titles to see if they create duplicates then modify my titles to be more generic if the results are too close.

I keep browsing their public explore gallery for interesting prompts, then modify them for my own purposes. I never go for copies, I always want the style and vibe for something very different, often a different genre altogether.

But there is a lot to learn about lighting, mood, composition directions. The more specific, the better the results. My descriptions are becoming longer and longer.

eta

now dropped to 5180

that is a low I have not seen in a very long time

Quote from: Andrej.S. on April 05, 2024, 14:13

Quote from: Infinity on April 05, 2024, 13:04

Quote from: cobalt on April 05, 2024, 07:48

So, back down in the real world.

pos 3450, 4300 files

hi! If these are your numbers then how did you manage to make into Recent top sellers for this week in the Illustrations section?  I don't get it

On Adobe always the last week is shown and not the current one. Cobalt's last week was pretty good.
But yeah I wonder still also a little bit. Her position ranking was under 1000 if I'm not wrong.
So either almost everyone with a better ranking was a photo seller or Adobe does not show the real cash cows with rankings < 100.

Well going with Adobe's rules...

Quote

For each asset type we generate a list of 200 contributors who made the most sales in the previous week, only considering their uploads from the past six months. Then, we order the list based on each contributor�s uploads/sales ratio, and the top 10 contributors on this list are featured as �Recent top sellers�.

... I don't think it's possible to get into weekly top sellers being anywhere between position 1k-2k. something very strange here

Quote from: cobalt on April 05, 2024, 04:12

I am still in the early stages of learning about midjourney. While you cannot get a series with a specific model you can get a theme of files with similar vibe, colors, lighting.

Midjourney people files still need a lot processing, I get a lot of great looking files, then on close up discover all kinds of issues with broken teeth, weird fingers growing out of a neck, strange details on clothes. The experssions are better than on stable, but far from perfect.

But the biggest challenge is to get faces that not everybody has. It feels like Mj just has 10 faces to choose from for a given age and ethnic type.

I am also trying to do more with Adobe and next week I have my first real shooting with a camera again.

But like I said before, the main focus for this year will be ai illustrations and to learn what I can offer that people will then like to buy. Every illustration sale, is a sale I would not have had otherwise.

They are selling very, very slowly, even the holiday files sell slow. But I believe it will pay off eventually, once the initial files have laid their roots across the algos, which will probably take 3 years.

Regarding "number of faces", this is one thing I don't get. I have also seen on Firefly where faces get almost repeated. With all the vast quantity of images these tools are trained on, how is it that they get stuck with a limited number of "faces"? Is it some kind of "flaw in the logic" of how they work? Is it a bug? If you take human artist, say painter, they don't repeat faces in their work, yet AI seems to do that. Maybe it's some kind of short cut in the algorithms which leeds to this? Just curious.

Quote from: Wilm on April 04, 2024, 16:14

I have read several times here about "bestsellers". Now I'm curious as to what a "bestseller" at AS actually is.
500 downloads? 1,000 downloads? 2,500 downloads? 5,000 downloads? Or even more?

I have one file with over 10k lifetime sales.

But I would consider a file that sells at least 2-3 times a week to be a reliable bestseller, or around 100 sales a year.

The ideal bestsellers is something that gets sales nearly every day.

I do have seasonal bestsellers that can sell 5-10 a day in the season, but then die off quickly when the event is over. And that is usually just for 1-2 weeks very close to the holiday event.

But the most important - can the bestseller lead to more sales of the series? Then the file becomes really valuable.

It is the download of a complete series or at least 3 files at the same time that makes a real bestseller for me.

A lead file that can entice customers to look what else I have on the subject.

Quote from: Minsc on April 03, 2024, 09:55

Top 100 weekly, top 100 lifetime, less than 10k.

Congratulations on your hard work!!!

No need to share details, I think it is already very helpful to know that such a position can indeed be reached by a single artist.

I always thought the top 100 was for large studio/team producers only. The only person I know in that level started out as a single artist but had progressed to working more as an art director and has people working for him, some full time, some on work for hire basis.

I do believe in sharing helpful information with peers and it can be done without reveailing best selling content.

Plus the algos make copying sometimes harder than people think. I know many producers who did a ton of seasonal content with ai, but get few sales, while my christmas season was quite good. But I have really, really old files that have probably accumulated in many galeries over the 10 years I didn�t upload and these are the ones that started bringing in the money again. The ai stuff also sold, but less than old files revived.

For me I see it with my ai people, while they are slowly starting to sell, if I just do carrots on white background I will have better sales with that.

And if I do that with my camera, the carrots can go everywhere.

However, if I am consistent with my ai people uploads, then I am sure in 3-4 years they will also get good sales, like anything isolated or my greeting cards.

Same for illustrations. It is a new medium for me, there is ZERO algo track record. I have uploaded a lot of seasonal illustrations but sales are very, very slow. And sometimes very unexpected, I am actually having �artsy� files sell. Done in watercolor or oil painting style.

So my first 3000 illustrations will be test subjects, trying many different niches and many, many different art styles.

Then gradually the customers will tell me what they like and I will make more of that.

But if I ever wanted to got for the top 100, I would certainly need 30k plus files.

I do a lot of research, but wouldn�t know how to do that with less than 10k even if I could identify 10k top selling concepts. Gallery uptake by clients is a very slow process. Having instant best sellers is very rare for me.

There is also the time factor, I want to grow my income over the next 2-3 years, not over 20.

Roughly 60% of what i upload is still experimental, with ai even higher, because I am testing a lot of new things.

Thank you to anyone in top levels sharing ranks and port sizes.

For newbies it should help them understand that stock needs a ton of research and is not a slot machine where you throw random files in and money comes out.

The money is related to usefulness for clients not overall random content port size.

Broke top 500 lifetime rank 491 and holding steady around 200 weekly (189 at the moment).

Quote from: zeljkok on March 25, 2024, 14:58

Quote from: pancaketom on March 25, 2024, 11:21

The question I have for the people that got heaps of refunds, were your earnings for November oddly high (by about the same amount as the refunds)?

Pretty shoddy on the part of Getty all around.

That's really good question.   Went and checked: Nov '23 was my 3rd best month last year on iStock, but nothing out of proportion.

Accounting certainly appears shady, but I don't think it's deliberate - whole system is set up in such a bad way it is easy for all kinds of mistakes to creep in.  Biggest thorn to me is 15% royalty which is downright disrespectful.

Agreed

Pretty funny or odd, or I ask, how do people reason out the glaring contradiction, when SS pays us more and a higher percentage, with a higher minimum, but they can't stop shouting how bad SS is or what crooks they are? "I'd never upload anything to SS, paying 10 cents is an insult."

I won't dwell on Connect which is, fractions of cents, because no one really knows what or how those images are used. Maybe for mock-ups, or maybe not. Maybe on a website, or chat, or somewhere in Asia for some mystery use, and maybe not. We don't get anything detailed or specific. Oh but we do get hundredths of a cent royalty.

BUT... for iStock when we do get the details. How do we get downloads like this? 4 cents? 3 cents?

Type Regular
Month 2024-02
Sales date 2/5/2024
Uploaded 5/30/2013
Gross royalty $0.04762
License Fee $0.31745
Rate 15%

File Type Editorial Image
Type Regular
Month 2024-02
Sales date 2/6/2024
Uploaded 10/6/2011
Gross royalty $0.03150
License Fee $0.21000
Rate 15%

Please tell me how SS is nothing but despicable crooks, and then someone explain, how iStock isn't worse?  Oh IS is much better, they pay fractions of cents, and then 3 cents or 4 cents. Really? That's better than the terrible, insulting, demoralizing... 10�