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Adobe Stock / Re: when do the free photo collection nominations happen?
« on: May 22, 2024, 06:51 »
Nominations are up!
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Adobe Stock / Re: when do the free photo collection nominations happen?« on: May 22, 2024, 06:51 »
Nominations are up!
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General Stock Discussion / Re: SEE THIS! Apple confronts us with the vision of crushed future for photographers« on: May 16, 2024, 05:57 »I do high end motion graphics work and make fractal art and after 6 years of my previous Intel Mac I have updated earlier this year to an M2 Studio and it seriously rocks. I think that we have to keep in mind that ads, politicians, or sometimes what you call special interest groups mainly sell concepts or idea's. Not specifically a reality, or not a reality for everybody. Apple's ad might claim that they crushed the whole creative industry in one device, and this is true from a conceptual point of view, but not always a reality. Yes, I can play a bit of guitar or compose music on an iPad, but it doesn't come close to what a real guitar player or musician would do on real instruments. Yes, I can take quite satisfying pictures with that iPad, but it doesn't come close to what a skilled photographer would do with an high-end camera. Ads of laundry products are claiming new formulas and whiter than white results for as long as I live. Meanwhile, my plain white t-shirt isn't as white as it used to be a year ago. I never truly understood why we don't react more aggressively on false claims made in ads. For instance: even after diesel gate, fuel or battery consumption advertised by car brands is still way off, and does not reflect real consumption in a real traffic situation. 3
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment« on: May 14, 2024, 11:07 »note, though, you can't have them submit to any agency you've already submitted those images to And you don't always have control over that. If they onboard a new agency and it's one that you are already submitting to via a personal account, you might end up in a situation where they submit images that are already there... and get accepted. Easy to miss such notification from them because their mails tend to end up in a spam folder or you just might be on holiday and miss it. I have that with Getty (via iStock on my personal account, and via Wirestock). And they sell via both channels. I haven't seen any consequences of that, but I guess theoretically it can happen that one of the accounts get suspended. Anyhow, that's a situation you have with any distributor. Same with EyeEm in the past. 4
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment« on: May 04, 2024, 01:48 »I would be very careful with Wirestock. Yes, distributors in general can be risky business. All your stuff is in one basket without much control, and that's never a good idea imho. But not everyone takes it as seriously or professionally as you do. Some just want to dump their stuff and are happy with whatever it brings in while other have a very calculated approach with something that actually looks like a business plan. Some just don't have the time (or don't want to spend their time) to keyword, have way too many files sitting there doing nothing and I can understand why they dump them to a distributor. Plenty of examples from people that made quite some money that way that they wouldn't have made otherwise. That's the easy road yes, but not always sure it's lazy as they might be very busy or passionate outside microstock. Not up to me to judge any kind of approach, and it's each to their own preferences or needs. Whatever works. Microstock is probably a side hustle anways, and very few have or want to do what it takes to make a comfortable living from it. I think many of us are somewhere in the middle along that road, and in many cases it means that the distributor gets the leftovers or even crapstock. So if I were a distributor, I wouldn't want to be in that place either, I would still want that quality content that sells as I would have to make money too. So I don't understand Wirestock. If you have quality content it really pays off to keep control and do the effort of keywording and uploading to personal accounts. If you have leftovers or crapstock, rejections (Wirestock has their standards too and if they don't the receiving agency has), sloppy keywording (not very sure this is still the case) probably result in low sales and you might even lose money due to paying the subscription fee. So who are they targeting? I don't fully understand, but apparently it's working as they are still around. I agree that it's never too late to step in and that putting effort in it is the only way to success. But I feel like it became way more difficult, and success is way higher up the learning curve than it was in the past. A beginner or intermediate food photographer for example will have a hard time to break in, and might get discouraged pretty early in that process. I'm not very familiar with video, but I guess the same applies there. It's what competition does, and I think you have to ask yourself whether the hard work is worth the potential return, and whether equal hard work in other areas outside microstock woulnd't bring in more money :-) 5
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment« on: May 03, 2024, 01:35 »Just a quick and easy way to profit, from your backlog. I would be very careful with Wirestock. You also will need to take a monthly subscription in order to get your content distributed to agencies. $14.99 for 200 submissions per month. On top of the 15% commission they take. I tested them when it was still free, except for the 15% commission, and the keywording done by them was below par. That said, content uploaded through Wirestock gets sold on the agencies. I got increasingly more dissatisfied with them, as they just do what they like with your content without giving much transparency or control over it. They onboard new agencies as they like, and some of them are agencies you might not want to be affiliated with (bottom of the barrel stuff). Back then, their site was also full of bugs which took forever to fix. In the end, the monthly subscription killed it for me, and now I just take the money from what I uploaded back then. I would only use them for content you don't really care about, and never plan to upload. So if you have a few thousands of useful clips that are sitting there and you don't plan to upload it you might give it a try. In that case, I would contact them directly, and try to work out a deal. 200 assets/month upload limit is ridiculous and will take you forever. 6
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment« on: May 03, 2024, 01:11 »But if yours is already longer on the market, and sold quite a few times (due to lower competition at that time) then the newer one will generally end up lower in the rankings, get less views, and yours will have the advantage. Right? (Of course, all depending on competition and saturation, as the algorithm mixes new content with established content. Niche markets are easier to break into than highly saturated area's of the market) I must have been misunderstood or not have made myself fully clear. I'm with you regarding the size of a portfolio not influencing individual asset ranking. I don't believe that purely the number of assets you have influences the individual ranking of those assets. I mentioned the advantage an older asset can have because @Faustvasea also mentioned competing against well established assets, and up to a certain point he's right about that. And yes, new assets are mixed up in the search results of a customer, so if the new one matches the quality and content the customer is looking for, it will get sold and will keep on getting views to generate more sales. Until it is outcompeted again. Of course, competition is still increasing, and I have the feeling (no hard claim) that libraries are growing faster than customer demand which means it gets more difficult to break into certain niches. So I understand why some contributors start making weird assumptions about rankings. I think we're on the same page, but nobody really knows how the algorithms work. The only agency I know of giving some transparency about their algorithm was Indivstock, and they are very small and irrelevant. Yet they have a rather complex algorithm in place with a lot of bonus or punishment factors for content ranking. Portfolio size was not of any influence, but popularity in general was. (data from 2022) + 3.00% Artist bonus in general as well as keywords and titles of images predominantly without "spam" keywording, also title. + 2.00% Artist bonus in general as well as portfolio mostly popular. + 2.00% Artist bonus in general as well as portfolio mostly "outstanding". 7
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock is an embarassment« on: May 02, 2024, 11:57 »ut I have very small port of 800 clips. Obviously I wont compete with people that has 10k+, and being longer on the market. But if yours is already longer on the market, and sold quite a few times (due to lower competition at that time) then the newer one will generally end up lower in the rankings, get less views, and yours will have the advantage. Right? (Of course, all depending on competition and saturation, as the algorithm mixes new content with established content. Niche markets are easier to break into than highly saturated area's of the market) 8
Envato / Re: Envato acquired by Shutterstock« on: May 02, 2024, 11:50 »That report is blatantly honest - failure to grow the stock business. We will never know, and only thing we can do is speculate. An amusing but also irrelevant way of killing some time :-) All I know is that if they are treating their customers the way they treat their contributors, the outflux of customers is no surprise. Looking at trustpilot, they seem to have a very bad reputation, but on the other hand, same goes for Adobe and iStock/Getty. I can also hardly imagine that they bought Envato for their photo or video library, area's in which they already are a market leader. Envato is more than that, and Shutterstock might want to buy a more dominant position in other area's of the market (so they can screw that part up too ) 9
Shutterstock.com / Re: Contributor Fund Entry« on: March 28, 2024, 03:30 »Received $60.97 for the Contributor fund today. I get the point of wanting to be able to resubmit for the commercial catalog. Apparently, that's not how it works anymore nowadays. From their website: For those opted out of data licensing, the Data Catalog will not be visible, however any content that is not acceptable for the creative Marketplace but is acceptable for data licensing will be marked as such in the Review tab. Shutterstock will retain these review results and this content can be published for data licensing in the event that the contributor elects to opt in to future data deals. They seem to have some kind of shadow data licensing library for those who opted out. The way they describe how it works is very vague and not transparent. Or I'm too dumb to understand. Can I opt out of data licensing and having my content included in future datasets? Yes, in February 2023 we have added an option in the contributor account settings that allows you to opt out of having your content included in future datasets. The devil is in the details. "Future datasets". So one could understand that your content was in previous datasets, and if they are somehow still being used or sold, you probably also get compensated. Further reading: How are my individual earnings calculated? Contributors will receive a share of the entire contract value paid by customers licensing datasets. The share individual contributors receive will be proportionate to the volume of their content and metadata that is included in the purchased datasets. Although inclusion in datasets is not reflected as other individual downloads in the Earnings Summary, like earnings from other eCommerce products, Shutterstock maintains an internal database of all assets used in all datasets that have been created since the launch of this product, so we can compensate our contributors accordingly. Contributors whose content was used to train either model will be compensated for the role their IP played in the development of the original models, as well as through royalty payments tied to future generative licensing activity. If your content was used in both, you will receive a payment that compensates you for the inclusion of your content in both datasets, and you will have access to more future revenue opportunities because you will be eligible for compensation from our Contributor Fund for future licensing events of Generative content development from both of these models. Why cant I see the earnings and specific downloads from datasets in my Earnings Summary? Due to their highly customized nature and scope of use, datasets are not a product that can be purchased directly on our website. Since datasets are manually curated, the individual assets that are included in this product are not reflected in your contributor account download history and Earnings Summary. A lot of words to say: we sell something, we earn something and give you something, depending on variables. How it all sounds to me (but I'm not sure) is that your content was sold into datasets before you could opt-out, and those contracts are still running, so you are also still getting paid by the contributor fund. But that's freewheeling from my side, agencies are not transparent in how they deal with selling datasets and compensate contributors. 10
Shutterstock.com / Re: Contributor Fund Entry« on: March 27, 2024, 16:48 »Received $60.97 for the Contributor fund today. If the system works as I understand how it should work... you should have gotten nothing? So this means either the checkbox is doing nothing, and your content is used for AI training, or they have a serious issue in contributor fund distribution. Or maybe the checkbox only works for content uploaded after you changed the setting. (because before there was no choice) None of the above is good, there should be transparancy. 11
Shutterstock.com / Re: Contributor Fund Entry« on: March 27, 2024, 16:44 »
Fairly high amount compared to what I got last time. Makes this month rather decent in terms of earnings.
Not sure about conclusions though. Does it mean the use of AI is on the rise? Could explain my sharp decline in sales volume on Shutterstock lately (I know personal and anecdotal experience) 12
iStockPhoto.com / Re: February 2024 statements - how did you do?« on: March 27, 2024, 06:53 »Nobody can check the sales system. Yeah that's the thing. How do we know, how can anybody check that without direct involvement? We don't, and we can't. Not even speaking of something intentional. But on a technical level. Consider a database with hundreds of millions of records. All the programming and scripts that involve connecting all the commission variants from different kinds of subscriptions, direct sales, credit packs, premium access, Getty library, iStock library, Thinkstock library or any other weird thing they set up in the past.... Consider all those API's from partners or customers with direct access. There's a lot of it than can go technically wrong, from database corruptions over api's not working to misprogramming that nobody ever discovers and when they do can take weeks or months to fix... Consider all the internal teams and divisions having access and manipulation rights on the database intervening to their own needs creating side-effects for others... The way Getty or any other big agencies operates their data must be very complex. I'm not very technically involved, but from my work experience from more service managing related positions I can assure you that data or transactions in likewise constructions gets lost. And very often, when discovered, the consideration is made: what costs more? Accepting the data-loss, or trying to fix the issue and also restore data loss or perform corrections, wherever possible. There are cases where data loss is accepted as a more cost-efficient way to deal with the issue. There are a lot of cases too where the issue does gets fixed, but it can takes months to do that due to the complexity of the issue, and the complexity of the company itself (often dealing with off-shore programmers who might be competent people on a technical level, but have no clue at all about the system that they are trying to fix, they just write code) I'm pretty sure that in this whole mess, a unreported sales happen. And they can percentage-wise be considered as the exception, we're still talking about quite the volume. 13
iStockPhoto.com / Re: February 2024 statements - how did you do?« on: March 21, 2024, 12:29 »
I don't like complaining, but good riddance, has February been a bad month.
Even without the negative earnings it would have been on the low side. Adobe Stock aside, all agencies have performing below average for me in 2024, despite regular uploads. 14
Shutterstock.com / Re: Anybody getting reviews?« on: March 21, 2024, 08:44 »
No reviews here too. Slow sales here too. Shutterstock seems to be sinking into irrelevance.
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Shutterstock.com / Re: Yay my photo is used as a book cover« on: March 18, 2024, 08:44 »A STANDARD IMAGE LICENSE grants you the right to use Images: Alright, stupid question, but nevertheless, here I go.: what is considered as reproduction of an image. Less than 500.000 prints seems plausible. But what about views on webshops like Amazon? Every time someone sees your image (web page gets loaded) it's a reproduction? Every time a webshop adds the book it's a reproduction? More or less the same question for newspapers or magazines. Everytime someone reads the online article it's a "reproduction"? 16
Shutterstock.com / Re: nothing for contributer fund?« on: March 08, 2024, 14:38 »
I did get a small contributor fund fee last month if I recall correctly. Might also be January, don't remember exactly.
Reply to @Stockmaan: Yes, Shutterstock took a nosedive. Up to a point where I start to wonder: do they have an issue with reporting sales? For the very first time in years, I got a day without any download. That never happened in years. At least, not on weekdays. Weekends or holidays on exception, but even on bad weekdays I got a handful of downloads. 17
Dreamstime.com / Re: $100 payout minimum sucks!!!« on: March 08, 2024, 14:25 »It sucks on Dreamstime they have $100 payout minimum. I'm at $91 now, but what if they go out of business? They may just get away with not paying any contributors below $100 sales balance in a broad daylight. Sales revenue is rightfully ours. Any amount should be claimed by us. It would be a flat-out theft of our money if that happens.Probably they will do as CanStock did! So far, Dreamstime always has been one of the more respectable agencies. At least, that's how I experience them. Yes, the $100 payout limit is very high compared to other agencies, but on the other hand, I'm not worried too much about not getting paid. Either they pull the plug and cease operations, like canstock did. Clean closure, everyone gets paid. Or, in case of bankruptcy, there's always a fair chance that another company takes over and eventually pays the contributors. It's not a tiny nitwit agency, they do have quite a big and diverse library and still a fair customer base. Same happened with EyeEm by the way. A lot of struggles and a lot of uncertainty, but in the end, we all got our coffee money and some of us even more. Speaking of coffee money: most you can lose (or not being paid) is $ 99.99. And that's not the end of the world. I hope none of that happens, and Dreamstime stays around. 18
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 14:00 »Some will say that it's the same thing as in Leonardo's time, only a brush and a canvas was needed... Which is kinda true? Very talented painters, with a unique style, idea and persona will still make their money with painting. But of course, that takes way more than just a brush and a canvas. Just like it takes more than only a digital camera and a memory card ;-) 19
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 09:45 »Appreciate it is in grey zone but just because agencies adjust their terms of service if AI can't be copyrighted (ok debatable) why would people pay for AI images on the agencies they could just download and use for free. I agree with all of this, but some nuances. imho free libraries like Unsplash, Flickr, or others do take away volume from paid downloads. I see a lot of content in magazines or newspapers that is licensed via one of those channels. That would have been a paid license otherwise. We don't know how big that impact is, but I think it's fair to assume that free libraries do have an impact on our download volumes. AI is slightly different, because it's provided by the same agencies as the ones who offer non-ai content, and paid downloads, but it has an impact on the downloads for those who stick with uploading non-ai content. And I think that's OP's point. Are we doomed? Those who adapt probably not. Many who don't adapt probably yes, or at least severely impacted, and a minority probably also no because for other reasons. Anecdotal example. I recently came across a wedding photographer who still shoots weddings on film. Analog. He charges a few $1000's, way more than others who shoot digital, and his business is thriving. He didn't adapt and is doing well because he's very good, and he's selling his niche as an asset, a scarcity, or even a gimmick. Who knows. It works. Needlessly to say: he's the rare exception. Many others unwilling to adapt went out of business. 20
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 09:27 »
Hmm not sure? Look what the internet did to everyone's lives. Look at how social media impacted our society and politics. What companies like Uber or Airbnb did to regular taxi drivers or hotel owners. And whether it's social media, or crowd-sourced service companies... all of these developments had their times of operating in legal gray zones, and most of the successful companies in these areas blatantly crossed lines. Worst case they just came away with it because they could blame someone else, or best case they had to pay a fine, which they (years later) happily did because they already made a ton of money while operating in legal gray zones. You are right that AI is another technological development or causing a turning point, and difficult to predict how huge the impact will be, but it's not really different than other developments. It destroys previously established and seemingly robust companies, and creates new ones that might become even bigger. It takes away jobs from some people, and creates new opportunities for others. Only thing that's different is the speed, but also here: technology has always developed with increasing speed, as one tech helps out another one. We just came to a point where democratic policymaking is unable to keep up with the development, complexity and impact of new technology. 21
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 08:39 »Since people who upload AI-generated images don't own any copyright, why can these people sell these images and get royalties??? That also my feeling, AI is theoretically still operating in a legal gray zone? The reality however, is that a lot of tech companies are thriving on AI (looking at you NVIDIA) and it is already implemented and being used my others. Policymakers will create legal boundaries in favor of the industries, who already matured and implemented a technology which is used on a large scale by customers. They are not going to torpedo a whole industry to let them start from scratch, doing it the fair way. They are not going to shut down applications on customers side, even if it was developed in a legal gray zone. Agencies too will not just slaughter one of their cash cows by deleting AI content. They will adjust their TOS, and they will lobby policymakers in their favor if they can't adjust the TOS because of legal boundaries. The genie is out of the bottle, and it won't get back in. 22
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 08:29 »The easiest tool for copying is not ai but a normal camera. I'm not an experienced AI prompter, but I wonder whether that's really the case. I can imagine a lot of situations where AI prompting seems to be faster and cheaper than actually producing the image. Finding (and if needed, renting) a location, finding (and if needed hiring) the right models, propping a set, hiring a photographer (or investing your own time) and do post-production seems to be way more time-consuming and costly than paying a competent AI prompter to generate the AI image. Thinking of generic business settings here for example, or generic lifestyle situations. I agree that it's just an additional tool, and that there's no other way than embrace it. It won't go away, it's here to stay and to play a dominant role in certain market segments. But it also opens up the market to to a lot more people than only photo/videographers. I'm convinced that having photography skills can also improve your AI prompting quality, but it's no hard requirement. So this definitely brings in more competition (yes, just like what smartphones did to DSLR's and what DSLR's did to SLR's...) resulting in lower individual sales volumes for those who are competing in those very saturated segments. imho it all comes down to a very simple logic. The market might still be growing, the supply, driven by technology, is even growing stronger, and some segments are becoming even more saturated than they already are. This causes lower individual sales volumes, lower value for individual content. This is what we are seeing for quite some years now, and if you ask me AI will speed up that process. Maybe even up to a point where buyer experience is disturbed, because they will get the feeling to be looking for a needle in a haystack, but that's a different discussion :-). 23
General Stock Discussion / Re: As more people start generating own AI images, will our sales go down?« on: February 23, 2024, 06:57 »
It strongly depends on the content in your portfolio I would say. If you used to be strong on topics that can be generated by AI, then it's only logical that your sales decline due to increased competition from AI. the amount that gets uploaded every day is massive. And customers can create their own AI content if they have the knowledge to do so, they don't even need a stock library anymore.
Abstract backgrounds or generic images with a broad field of application (thinking generic food, ingredients, generic people doing generic things, standard landscapes for a background, ...) are subject to severely increased competition I would say. All of my images in this area which did well in the past are struggling nowadays. More specific content is, for the time being, on the safer side, as AI struggles to generate this or simply cannot do that. Thinking specific or lesser popular locations, editorials, events, certain products, newer developments or hypes... but all of that is often a niche market, and that's generally not where the big money is. Authenticity is something else many agencies claim to take seriously, and I personally believe it holds a lot of value. On the other side: Still seeing a lot of overly perfect people on ads, fake smiles, overly dramatic landscapes and sunsets on travel location ads... so the question is how much buyes (and in the end, all of us as a customer) is willing to buy the authenticity claim. 24
Adobe Stock / Re: Do you use the same keywords/description for similar sets?« on: February 11, 2024, 16:09 »
Anyhow, I learnt that having different images from the same subject can be useful, but only if the image is... well a different take on the same subject. So to me it also makes sense then to have the differences reflected in the title and keywords.
Not sure it's really crucial, because buyers will see the related images in the section 'more from this contributor'. 25
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock steals sales. Control purchase« on: February 11, 2024, 15:54 »
It's an interesting experiment, and I understand that the contributors want to stay anonymous, because buying your own images is against the TOS. But on the other hand, this leaves very little room for verification. Anyone can claim anything. Always be careful with 3rd party information like "heard it from a friend who has been told by a friend that another friend..." Information can get thickened or altered per hop :-).
Not saying it isn't true, but always be careful with jumping into conclusions. We don't know what happened afterwards, there might be a delay in reporting, and maybe the rest of the sales were reported later, after the story started to get around. Or the system flagged some sales as fraudulent, because, well, they were buying their own images, and however not directly, it still might have triggered some red flags in the system. That said. I wouldn't be too surprised either if it's true. There's also no way to know what has been sold to whom and how it is used. We just have to... trust the agencies. And in all fairness, that's a bit of a stretch for me. They might not hold back on reporting deliberately, but technical issues do occur, and what happens in case of database corruptions, interfacing issues, or anything else technical. I can imagine that in such case some sales went into the nirvana and never got reported. I don't have a personal experience with this. I use google alerts to see if one of my images pops up on the internet (if I'm credited) and in such cases there was always a matching sale reported at the agency. I know this covers only the tip of the iceberg, and impossible to track for images that sell daily or very regularly, but at least, it's that. Until now I could not catch one of the agencies on not reporting a sale. |
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