Quote from: cobalt on May 14, 2025, 01:20

All my plans for the year are broken.

I did not imagine that Adobe would abruptly break their relationship with creators and implement a random upload algo.

I am switching to video for Adobe, but it takes a long time for video to start selling.

The year started very well, January - April I had increases of 60-84% compared to the year before.
 
But my plan rests on files reinforcing each other. I upload small volumes, but it usually sells.

Now I have to deal with an algo roulette, which is beyond frustrating.

Nobody wins at this, but Adobe is doubling down that the creators are at fault.

Whoever is resposible for the random review mess is more important than the relationship with the creative community.

That is the most depressing part.

Will try to make an effort at istock and overall video, inclufing BB.

I guess this year is the Make istock great again year.

Wishing you good luck with your changed plans, but I'm afraid not much can be done by now. You are trying to win in a dying market and you build your business plan trusting in agencies you've got no control over. Sure there are some topics where lots of content is still missing, but these topics don't decide content pricing. It is the generic content, which sells well on microstock and which faces the most competition from free AI - thus I think inevitably leading to price drops for all microstock content in future.

There are other and probably better possibilities for content creators to earn, be it selling stuff on Etsy or starting a Youtube channel. Maybe look into some of these to not depend on stock too much?

Ai is useless for specifics.

It creates all kind of fantasy flowers, hybrid animals, strange underwater wildlife, a cactus from mexico growing in the sahara desert etc...

Same for locations, nothing is real.

So especially for high quality localized content, with or without people, also for food etc..nothing beats real photography.

The ai world is a fantasy world.

There is an endless amount of genuine, local content you can create and if possible add more latin names to flora and fauna, add "authentic" and more locally specific keywords and point out as much as you can that what you are shooting is real.

CHatGpt, please create me portfolios at major image banks, use my artist name "IAmAnArtist". Create in a neverseenbefore way, index and submit 1,000 images a day, for the best-selling and most topical subjects. Don't forget to put "real photography" in descriptions. Connect to my neighbor's wi-fi to save my bandwidth to submit 1,000 images a day, in the best-selling and most topical subjects. Put a copy in my cloud. In a monthly basis, collect my earnings at microstockstock sites and do a transfert to my paypal account. Log on to forums and post miles of text to steal as much time as possible from competing readers. Don't forget to turn off the light after you've done all this.

Would your ChatGPT dog obey to that? or should we wait until it's better trained?