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Messages - CSImages

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1
Shutterstock.com / Re: Selling photos to russia
« on: September 04, 2022, 15:01 »
I think it should at least be an optout for selling images to russia when shutterstock dont seem to have any problens selling.

Or maybe all images bought in russia going directly to aid Ukraine.

They are getting money out of Russia, not a bad thing for Ukraine.. As long as they don't sell Russian's imagery.

2
Off Topic / Re: Message to all Russians in these forums
« on: March 04, 2022, 04:26 »
We don't trust videos (from whatever sources), too easy to manipulate... give us historic links (in english, and not from russia) if you want us to believe something..

Check out this video, it'll explain everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtOx6dW_0vU

3
Off Topic / Re: Message to all Russians in these forums
« on: March 02, 2022, 18:38 »
Even Switzerland is taking position against them, a country that was always neutral in every conflict since 1815.

4
I had to erase some pictures in front of a security guard one time.... they were not very good, I would have erased them anyway...

5
General Stock Discussion / Re: This month's sales
« on: November 18, 2021, 05:09 »


Thank you very much for taking all this effort. I am not taking it as being negative. I always welcome advice when it's constructive and actually gives me an idea of what to improve.
I  have another one with that costume that should have more than enough copy space, as it's isolated:
https://www.shutterstock.com/de/image-photo/french-buldog-dog-red-devil-halloween-1792920889
But I could not say one sells more than the other. But maybe isolated images is a whole other topic altogether. I don't know.

I just wanted to write how my best selling dog photo on SS and Adobe (two completely dfferent photos) don't have proper copy space at all and still sell well, but actually I was wrong. I looked through my folders where I collect screenshot of all online uses I can find and even though these images don't have much copy space in many cases the people buying them still added text to the empty areas, even though there was't much space available. You are definitly right with the copy space being something that buyers are looking for. As said, I thought I often tried to implement copy space, but it looks like I have to pay more attention to this. Thank you very much.

Look what I saw on Pinterest, Firn - another one to add to your online uses!

https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/623748617151939273/

Funny Stuff !!  :D

6
Is there a market for drains at fall images ?  :-\

7
I know I'm making myself unpopular here, but I am getting a little bored with these 10 cent discussions.

Nobody wants to get only cents for their images, that's why I left for example iStock. It just didn't fit, but I'm not making a big deal out of it.

If I had only 10 cent sales at Shutter, I would say goodbye and that's it.

But there are still some who earn good money with Shutter. I myself see sales in the double digits every day, which compensate for these stupid cent sales.
Except for Alamy, I don't have those sales anywhere, not even Adobe. That still makes Shutter my best agency.

The annoying review is another story.

And as Thijs rightly says, what are the alternatives? Exclusively 25 cent sales at Deposit?

So now you can jump all over me  ;)

I'm not about to jump all over you for writing the truth.
People should do what suits them best but it makes no sense to me to desert the market leader.

Right. It's an inconvenient truth. No matter how much I dislike some of the practices of Shutterstock, and how much I want to like some other agencies, the hard fact is that Shutterstock is consistently my top performer. Every month. Half of my microstock income of 2021 comes from evil Shutterstock. When I leave out emotions about how I feel about being a contributor to their wealth and thus agreeing with how they treat contributors, it would be a foolish idea to ditch them.

So yeah, I leave my emotions out, accept that I have to struggle myself through their crazy review process and I gruntingly collect the money which is a frustrating journey due to cheapasscrappy 10 cent trains rolling by day after day. But every now and then a nicely decorated luxury wagon is hidden in the train, as if they forgot to take it out, and a lot of my earnings at Shutterstock can be accounted those bigger commissions, which mainly float between 20 and 60 dollar for me. I don't see those coming in at Adobe at all, and at 15% commissions they are very scarce at iStock/Getty. In the end, I just booked myself a nice getaway trip in December from the money I earned on Shutterstock this year (to recover from the psychological trauma caused by dealing with them. ;-) ) And I reward myself with some extra gear (thinking about a decent macro lens because I didn't explore that part yet) with the earnings from the rest. Without Shutterstock I would have to choose.

After Shutterstock announced the change in earnings, I disabled my portfolio for a while. Joined the protest. At the same time, I dramatically increased my portfolio's on other agencies, and also included a few new opportunities by using Wirestock, Eyeem, Zoonar, you name it. While they surely bring in some extra cash, none of them come close to what Shutterstock brought in when I enabled my portfolio again. For most agencies, Shutterstock earnings are a tiny dot in the far distance, almost out of sight completely unreachable.

Now, this is my current situation, and it might differ from others. My earnings increased, a lot of others saw a decrease. So I fully understand and sympathize with the ones who ditched them. From what I read, they have a very fair reason to do so: if it doesn't feel right to stay, then leaving is certainly the right decision. No discussion. I just think most of them are still, despite decrease in earnings, throwing away one of the bigger pieces of their microstock earnings cake. And that's fine. Dignity has a price. But for me, right now, it's just too expensive.

I created my own site to sell my best images, and the ordinary ones are sold elsewhere... but not on shutterstock, not worth the efforts. You might think 10c and image is reasonable, but it will go down to 1c sooner or later, unless you do something...

8
25 out of 25 editorials approved yesterday. 9 out of 10 commercial rejected today for focus. The funny part that only approved photo is the photo with focus issues from my point of view.

As for 10 cents. I have the great run with one photo. ~50 downloads in 1 months, and I earn whopping $8.79 !

At 10 cents an image, if you want to buy a 1000$ lens, you will have to sell 10000 images.. At 120 images a month, that's about 7 years.  Ouch !!

9
Shutterstock.com / Re: Murdered Shutterstock Forum Refugee Thread
« on: November 13, 2021, 20:16 »
Very late to the party here but please count me in as another refugee. SS is a shell of what it once was. Long, long ago I was actually proud to be associated with them. I haven't felt that way in years. They foist more and more nonsense on us and continuously insult our intelligence. The forum announcement is just one prime example.

In any case, stay strong and best wishes to all.

Yep.  Sstock could run a master class in how to alienate your suppliers.

They've managed to alienate a great many participants on this forum, some of us a lot earlier than others.

Inevitably, it seems to happen except perhaps to the factory-production outfits who get most-favored-contributor treatment.

They will also get hit, factories need more money to run than most of people... Revenues are going down for them too.

10
Shutterstock.com / Re: How does this stuff get through?
« on: November 12, 2021, 03:52 »
I guess agencies don't bother selling images that are free somewhere else (public domain)..
Blueprints are drawings, a big no-no to use if you don't have a signed authorization.

11
General Stock Discussion / Re: This month's sales
« on: November 11, 2021, 22:55 »
Today sums up my whole month on SS pretty accurately: Had 50 sales today and still only a single digit earning amount.  ::)

Single digit from 50 sales. I don't understand. What single digit? Like under $10 you mean? WOW
Yes, under $10 for 50 sales was what I meant. Sorry, English isn't my first language, maybe you don't say it like this in English.

In September I had 89 sales in a day on Shutterstock, but only made $9.12, they were all download from the same location and were all of the same subject.

This is why I don't upload to them anymore.

Same here, 14 cents for the majority of sales.. I just flushed them completely !!

12
New Sites - General / Re: Stockerwill new site
« on: November 11, 2021, 13:25 »
As the website was not available for a couple of days, I made a quick research and found following:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/stockerwill-com.1250525/

So I guess it's one of the sites dissapear superfast :)

I wonder if folks build up a quick site and then try to sell it to make a quick buck!

They probably tried something that failed and made no money..

13
General Stock Discussion / Re: VECPHO - anyone heard of them?
« on: November 06, 2021, 17:35 »
Hi! I am Alvaro, Director of Vecpho.

Vecpho is an agency of Microstock representation. We are not fraude or scam.

We are open to work with you if you are interested!

Visit our website: vecpho.com

The english on your site is terrible... the percentages and the money involved are hidden. Your business location is not visible, but I guess it's from spain. I would surely not get involved with you, there's too many undisclosed stuff.

14
Shutterstock.com / Re: Focus Pocus?!
« on: November 06, 2021, 17:00 »
Certainly a few months ago and last year it was an issue.
Theory is the initial AI screening works out a "sharpness" score with a threshold and foliage,leaves confuses it.
Similar issue with video as well.

Their AI screening ask for too much sharpness...  I once sent a perfectly sharp and well focused image and it was rejected. Had to overprocess the sharpening to get accepted.

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