Therefore, what I can do is to make more money by producing a large number of pictures before the business completely disappears and before customers completely abandon the stock images industry. Maybe you will say that there will be high-end customers who choose high-end contributors, but why don't high-end customers pay for commercial customization services? Who of us can say that we are high-end enough to avoid being eliminated?

At this point I am not worried about being eliminated. On the contrary, I feel set free to experiement with any genre I am interested in.

In my case especially to experiment with illustrations, without having to learn illustrator, oil paintings or ink drawings.

You keep saying that customers don't care about quality, but 20 years experience with photos shows me that customers only really buy the absolute best files. And these then outsell all the mediocre ones by the thousands.

While customers often only have a vague idea what are looking for, if you browse thousands of files on an agency, you can quickly detect quality content.

Otherwise customers would source all their images from the free sites or use the creative common license on flickr.

There are already billions of files you can use commercially for free.

Customers pay agencies to save time.

And so far working with ai costs a lot more time, than just browsing millions of files on Adobe.

I sincerly wish you all the best. Please kepp us updated how it goes.

You will probably have a million files in 5 years.

Everybody has their own process.

For me a 90% acceptance rate is perfectly normal and usually doesn't require any dramatic work. You just need to learn carefully from the declines. Then I don't have to waste the time of the editors.

Also my uploads are designed to support each other. If I lose half, I will get a lot less serial downloads. And the series download client is my favorite

With ai I had to adapt my workflow several times as Adobe evolves their system and suddenly I get mass rejections.

Now I am back to around 80-90%, even on illustrations.

What takes the most work is not file production, whether it is ai or normal photos videos, it is the research that takes up  biggest the bulk of my time. Including learning more about ai.

Although with ai, I still need to produce a large volume of files to get what I want.

Even with Midjourney, I find it really hard to generate the people images I want to produce.

That is where photography has the real advantage. Getting exactly what you want is very, very easy.

But what works for me, does not have to work for others.

I am also curious if uploading 100k files was a group or family effort?

Again nothing wrong with that. Many families who do stock full time as a family business are doing a great job integrating their normal production with ai.

Whatever you do, it has to make money.

Because I can see people who are new to stock, pushing high volume uploads but cannot reach a payout every week.

I guess the market will solve it in the end. They will move on to another online business if it does not work out.

fwiw i made it to 4890. i think june will be better and in the end may24 will be double of may23.

Congrats to all that are doing well!

I am currently in the dog house with a ranking around 5800. It is offset a bit by 26 dollar special licenses and some video sales. So May 24 is already 70% more than May 23 and we still have a week. I suppose I should not complain, but I preferred the times with higher ranks.

Summer is always bad for me and while I did upload summer themed subjects I think I did it much too late. And I did not research teh summer market well enough. I have too much of what everybody else has.

However, nearly every day I sell a christmas themed image and I am slowly beginning to sell winter and even easter images...

Now trying very hard to create people images with a personal style. But it is very difficult. I keep getting the same people/faces everybody else has. Also not yet able to create groups or several people in the style that I want.

My illustrations are very  slowly picking up, it took them over a year to get their first sales. It will probably be several years before I get my money invested in illu ai art back.

i will continue doing illustrations, but I don't recommend it for money. Still have to test transforming my own sketches into ai. That is my ultimate goal, avoud learning illustrator properly, just do my own drawings then let ai do the rest.

For absolute money it seems to be the best to do is people stock.

But this is has always been true.

eta

I have around 700 people files on adobe...so a long, long way to go. Plus it will take them a while to start selling.

Currently have a round 4600 files on Adobe, more than  half are winter/spring themes. Only 600 dedicated summer files.

And over 1000 illustrations, which are slow sellers.

The non seasonal images are a small group in my port.

I am sharing this, because we all benefit from honest information.

But I love my job, just need to focus more and:...finally start uploading all my normal videos!! I have such a huge backlog and videos get much better prices.

I have moved up a bit, now at pos 4890 weekly ranking.

Hope it picks up after the 20th. FWIW I am seeing an interesting mix of sales. A lot of files that I uploaded last year that didn't take for the summer season are beginning to get sales now.

The queue is still very slow, but sometimes I have files accepted within a day, while the rest of the batch needs 30 days (photo ai). Illustrations move quickly, video takes 2-3 days which is perfect.

I am trying to balance the long queue by mixing content and already uploading some winter themes.

Today I got a 5 dollar sale for an image, that brings some balance

All libraries are full of duplicates. And duplicates of duplicates of duplicates�

Ai just makes it a lot easier to copy and faster.

One thing we can do, is not use the actual prompt as the title or description.

Won�t stop img2img copy, but at least makes it a little less easy.

But also with normal cameras there is absolutely massive copying happening every day.

I dropped down to a weekly rank of 6340, it was many, many months ago that my rank was this low.

A lot of the content I was hoping would sell now is still in the queue, over 30 days now

That is a great and very detailed response, thank you.

But they can just literally cut all royalties paid out in half, couldn�t they? Over all plans over all their agencies, including the 60% payout for exclusive p5 content.

I hope they don�t, but there is always the incentive for quick money.

"At this point they have no more contributor royalties to loot and had better hope one of these other bets pays off
"

I wouldn't be so sure of that, royalties can always go lower and the minimum payout can go down to 5 cent or even 1 cent.

Congrats on those excellent results Zero with talents!!

Hard work and persistence is bringing you well deserved results!

all the best milo!

That report is blatantly honest - failure to grow the stock business.

Compare with Adobe is enjoying stable growth, no drama, great support, free photoshop/ creative suite for producers, great producer support team.

producers are customers, the old Shutterstock team knew that having thousands of graphic designers who are happy and keep recommending you, is a huge plus.

Would it not have been a lot cheaper, to keep the forums open, to keep a support team going and to keep growing organically instead of wasting money on buying pond5 and envato?

How many years will it take for those investments to pay themselves??

eta:

they spent 240 million on pond5, lets say another 150mio for envato, so there could be around 400mio in aquisition costs.

And so far their deal with pond5 did not bring them any growth, inspite of owning it for 3 years, they are losing customers.

Imagine they had just kept Shutterstock the way it was, used those 400mio to focus on organic growth and add their ai project...where would they be now?