108 downloads in March 2024, 69,4 USD, RPD of 0.64

That means a decent month for me.

I got those refunds as well, many... (all for bigger sales). So yeah, totally disastrous month.

How can there be a refund for an image sale? You clearly see what you are buying. The asset can turn out to be misleading (location-wise etc.) then it is justified, but here it wasnt the case. Shall contributors suffer the consequences of someone changing their mind couple of months after they purchased the asset??

I'd say if someone chooses to do pictures/footage for any one of the fake narratives going on being pushed by the media tend to be popular, i.e., "climate change"/"sustainabilty/zero carbon" crap/garbage, "ai/security "threats"", "convid", the "gay/trans" agenda to try and discourage caucasian/western people from having children (have you watched any t.v. recently - is excessive on some channels), etc... if you want to see what narrative/storyline is being pushed - just read any of the stories published on the world economic forum "wef"/un/who/etc...

But aside from those narratives... I'd say it depends/goes in cycles, depends on the type of footage you have/etc...

Hehe, yeah... I am with you on this. I live in Amsterdam (while not being dutch), and seeing all those lgbt flags all over the city (and country) I realize that I could easily cash on it, but I am not doing it, because I couldnt look at myself in the mirror. I am willing to do many things (call electric car eco-friendly in the keywords, while knowing that it is pure bs), but I wont take photos of some rainbow flags or black lives matter, I hope I dont have to say why... there are enough people falling for this, but I am happy to say that winds are changing, and as someone else said "woke-ism" has peaked, and people have enough of that. It is a question of personal integrity. I guess it is already hypocritical enough of me, that I am documenting protests of climate activists, in a way giving them exposure and credibility, while being quite far from agreeing with them and their methods. Anyway, life is a shitshow, and giving too much attention to what is happening in The World detracts from more important things.

When it comes to stock photo/videography, I am a generalist, shooting little bit of everything. I have recently analyzed my top 20 best-sellers across top 3 agencies (AS, IS, SS), to see which topics sell the most. Here are the results, including some specific examples:

1. Environment - Solar panels, green walls, sustainable buildings, pollution, power plants, climate activists
2. Skylines/Cityscapes - interesting vantage points showing general view with good light (sunset)
3. Food - isolated, in hand, typical national dishes etc.
4. Vintage - may not sell that often, but is more likely to bring exceptionally big sale
5. Futuristic architecture, financial buildings, new, modern neighbourhoods

I hope you find this information valuable. Now, if there are other generalists out there, please feel free to share what sells for you (if you are comfortable with revealing it) I love the idea of discovering new topics I would be capable of covering (like when I attented protests the first time, struggled a lot with both the atmosphere and the settings of my camera, but eventually improved to the point that I sold couple of shots and even videos, and became much more confident in reportage subgenre)

All the best! Devotio

September 71 sales, 43 dollars.

positive: one video sale for 11 dollars for a really old and really boring file.

Didn�t upload anything, I hope I get a nice batch up this month.

We have very similar stats. I had 74 sales, but only 35.75 USD. Lack of big sales in September resulting in being around 25% down compared to August.

Good month for me, istock beating adobe, and my 3rd best month at istock in general.
I wanted to see the details of what sold and for how much (in a clear way), but todayis20 is down, which sucks...

I never really understood the site... Owned by shutterstock, smaller image database, and even seasoned contributors make only few bucks per month with them at best.
Why would any buyer go to bigstock instead of shutterstock? I assume that shutterstock must have some profit-oriented strategy to keep BS alive, which is beyond my understanding.

A decent month. I got RPD of 0.51 which is low, but at least I see a nice trend of istock keeping up with SS and AS whe it comes to earnings, which was not the case few months ago.

Quote from: Devotio777 on March 20, 2023, 08:34

I got the same email today as well. This agency has always been very low earner for me, so I am thinking about deleting my port.
Please let us now Firn if you got any response from them.

I got a reply. It just said "You were removed from the joining revenue share model". Nothing more. No explanation why I even ended up in this.

But by now I have deactivated all my files and I intend to keep them deactivated at least for now.

I don't like any of this. I don't like this joining revenue share model where Depositphotos always gets the same 60% of all earnings, but contributors have to share the remaining 40% with each file downloaded and the more customers download images the less we get while our images are on a "take all you can eat buffet" that encourages customers to download as many as possible, if not even all so we end up getting scraps. I strongly believe our share for each image downloaded will end up being something in the $0.000X range.
I don't like how I was just put into this model after making it clear I was not interested. I don't like how there is no explanation or apology.
Depositphotos just isn't eraning me enoughto put up with this.

Yeah, I completely understand you. Once you think it cant get much worse, they come up with some new method to screw contributors over even more.
I have just noticed that at my sellers menu at DP there is a Revenue Share column that I didnt notice before, but it still says: NO.
Maybe they didnt update it for me yet, and I am just about to leave for holiday, but I will keep an eye on it, and will probably follow your example - email them to be excluded from the program.

A decent month for me, RPD of 0.51 and this time IS brought in slightly more than AS and also more than SS, that doesnt happen often.

So I just joined discord to generate some images with midjourney bot for fun, and guess what! I typed: portrait of next president of united states realistic high resolutioin... and it generated photo of 4 guys, 3 of them resembling Ron De Santis A LOT!

Very interesting.

Thanks all for your input about taxes, it is indeed gonna be pain in the ass, as I expected. I am just afraid I will spend more for the consultation than what I earn in a month or two from stock, so I am determined to keep investigating online, or ask some dutch people in my surroundings.

Thanks also for encouraging me to take photos of the most touristy parts of Amsterdam which I was somehow overlooking, thinking that it would be too difficult to compete with what is already there. I am not thinking that anymore.

Here comes one fresh story (from today) that I would like to share. Full of determination and encouragement, and knowing that the weather will be good today, I set off
on my bike to the centrum of Amsterdam, to take photos around canals... after doing some pre-scanning before combined with online research on google maps and stock agencies, I found few good spots, took out my tripod, and started shooting the scenery with historical houses along the canal with houseboats in the foreground. In just a moment big group of tourists with a guide appeared meters away from me, where they all stopped, listening to the speech of their guide. I usually hate being seen, but I just ignored them, and kept shooting, trying different settings and slightly changing the composition. I had to interrupt my session to meet my gf for a coffee and cake in one of the nearby cafes, only to continue later, after susnet. So I started to unscrew my ND fliter from Irix that I purchased only recently, when the * thing fell on the ground, and then, to my horror, bounced to the side and slowly disappeared in the canal !!! I didnt even try to catch it, instead I was just staring at the spot where it fell as if frozen, and left the scene to have that coffee. I started by saying "if I tell you what just happened to me, you will think that I am joking"... then I told my gf what happened, and accused myself of extreme clumsiness in front of her. Together we revisited the spot, to measure the water level, only to find it deeper than expected. Then my gf walked away to the neaby big, old, docked boat, the one where people are actually living in it. She knocked on the door, and I sharply waved at her to stop it and come back. From whatever reason, I am the one who would never do that, expecting that I would get negative response, something like: what . do you want, dont disturb... but the doors opened, and my gf politely asked the older dutch man, whether he has some tool which we could use to try to retrieve the nd filter from the depth of the canal. To my surprise, in a short moment, he borrowed us 2 meter long stick with the net at the end, and we used it to comb the muddy bottom of the canal, in hopes to catch the filter in the net. I knew chances were super small, and unfortunately there is no happy ending here, but at least we tried. My gf left, I opened strong beer that I had ready in my backpack, visited few more places to take more photos, and returned home. At least I had some good sales today, to make that misery of losing 100+ euros nd filter less painful. So I hope next time I am less clumsy, and I hope some of the photos I took tonight will sell.

Quote from: Devotio777 on November 17, 2022, 06:56

Yeah, I dont have photos that are making 100s of sales, only two are just about to break first 100.
Only time will tell how much will that artificial intelligence change the industry, I hope the demand for
real photos of travel destination will still be there, because showing real photo of how certain place looks like and what you can expect as a tourist
is quite different than showcasing some AI-generated mishmash.
Hmm, but then nothing will prevent AI to mimick the drone perspective as well... but I see your point with drones, more original perspective and less saturated market.

If you are relatively new and have just over 1,000 images, to have a couple which are pushing 100 DLs, you are doing just fine.

Looking at your first uploads on SS, you have 42 windmills, the rest are mostly churches and castles. Diversity is a good thing after you have the local subjects covered. Of course the exception is, if you find a new one that's better than any windmill that you already have in your collection. More of the same isn't going to grow your demand or downloads as much as finding new subjects.

Niche is a good thing if you have the demand.

I have already move on from that windmill obsession, but at the same time, I photographed even some less-striking ones because many small dutch villages dont have any other eye-catching landmarks except for windmill or a church, so I thought it would be good to have them, just in case somone wanted a photo to represent that particular village or photo of that particular windmill.