yep, SS has been really fast with footage reviews lately, and their editorial policy is much more reasonable than for images.  sales have been ok - with pond65 still outperforming

pond5 reviews have always been slow - 2 wks or more

i sent some to 123 and fotolia, but no sales at all there

and what about IS ? Review time and sales? anybody starting somewhere as video exclusive ? i have not dared yet to submit my initial videos to IS...
ps- i never wanted to start my video selling with subscription site (i am opt in for subs in ss) but m loosing my patience with p5.. 1 month.... its too long to wait. But hope SS will do better with my video files as well. Atleast wont test my patience. and bit more bulks too

Cant believe it. I have been waiting my initial footage waiting to be reviewed in Pond5 for last 1 month. So i thought to try SS meanwhile and amazingly they approved my footages within 5 mins lol
I think this quality also makes SS different from others.
How are you guys selling video in SS ?

i had same problem last night but i was operating through my phone. While i was able to open the site from my pc. I just cleared the cookies in my cel and typed the site address in stead of using the bookmark. No problem today. But it seems no updates are done in  alamy on Friday nowadays.

yes ruchos. I do the later option you mentioned. As i am mainly into photography and starting video so waiting period for footage seems to be too long. Is pond5 still best earner for most (re footage) ?

Thank you all.

It is still possible to make a living from micro although the wall is getting taller as each day passes.

I can perfectly understand the reserve and suspicion that many macro shooters had and still have against micro. When you see it from outside it seems absurd to sell images for such low amounts and I would agree with them if I had not seen the volumes you can sell at this price points.

Micro and macro professional photographers are really not that different, both want to make the most revenue from their agencies and their effort. Different strategies to arrive to the same point. We have examples at both fences and I guess that some of you that posted here are in the same range of earnings than many macro photographers. At a time were agencies were closed to new talent it was quite logic that new opportunities would appear and many would embrace them. The digital revolution did the rest. It is what it is, and no fence could have stopped it.

But I can perfectly understand too that for many photographers this business does not work and personally I would never recommend some type of photographers to try micro and at the same time I would encourage some micro to try macro or at least send some type of images to the macro distributors. There are still buyers out there that for exclusivity or because they don't find that kind of images or simply have the budget are willing to pay top dollars for them. It's all a personal decision and a very difficult one because sometimes weird sales happen. I still get sales in Getty for very simple images,also available in the micros, were I get paid thousands of dollars for their use. In some ways that is part of the magic of this profession, you are always playing, guessing, getting surprised at what sells, sometimes enjoying a shooting session and sometimes getting bored as hell.

At the end of the day I try not to be too serious about it.  When the time comes were I can no longer bear it for whatever reason be it financially o creatively I will move on. Until that day I will enjoy all the good things this work is giving me back.

Cristian

Interesting and true. I liked your interview and open thoughts Christian. I think you should write your thoughts in a blog. Guys like me will love to read your views. Pardon me if you already write and i dunno.

DT worries me.  If/when I decide to get out, they have my images in a 6-month lock-in.

in fact 1 year for new images. 6 months for deletion and next 6 months they store them for their reference (as their contributor support says)

Quote from: gemmy12 on August 23, 2012, 04:29

stopped uploading to all micro. Withdrawing images from all. Now i see that sometimes smaller/low earner (etc) agencies are creating much problem in the process. I have mailed to photokore quite many times to different addresses given in their site to close my account but not a single response back to me.

Yeah mate, I had a few issues myself, with Yay still selling my work at their partner site, after 6 months. Was very close to hiring a lawyer to straighten it out but in the end their partner site, which I contacted personally and was a lot more helpful, resolved it. Did I receive any money for sales that had been made within all these months? nope.
So keep that in mind guys.

Thats not good. I personally dont like the sites/agency that dont give me a delete button for control over my own port. Though i am not with CS but i do appreciate their approach and helps. I had no problem at all to withdraw my port from CS

even their contributor support is not responding to any of the mails

I'm getting an increasing number of totally incomprehensible, scrambled 'captchas'.  I just had to hit the 'new image' button 3 times before getting something I could read, and be able to log in.


I complained to SS. 

same here. It has decreased my longin frequency to almost 1/10 th. I really cant get the words. So annoying.

Thanks for sharing it Bob.

I frequently get such weird things now a days in my alamy. zoom ('your zoom') but no view ('your view'). sometime there is my view but not a single total view. and some time a search shows a term for my alamy but that search term does not come in "All of Alamy" for that period. lol

You can definitely edit image info. I'm not sure about pseudonym though.

More great news, after Alamy support told me I can't remove images from partner sites I asked them if they'll remove it if I close my acc. Here's the reply:"If you terminate your contract your images will be removed from the site within 45 days.  We also inform the distributors that the images will not be available for licensing once the account has been cancelled. Please note that sales can occur after this as a result of customers downloading the images before the termination completed."

So in the worst case scenario there's the 5,5 month wait because of DT.

Okay you meant changing/deleting the info of image. I thought you are talking related to something like pseudo what i dunno. But i guess we cant even clear all the keywords because DT or any other micro agency probably wont allow to save such images (w/o keywords) but alamy certainly allows to do so. If i am not wrong the admin guys (perhaps few of them) of DT and featurepics are same ones and their policies/agreements are also similar AFA removal of image is concerned. I am seriously considering to delete my DT account not because of my sales but for their waiting period to remove images.

i am selling images of people and isolated objects (conceptual) there equally. Though not as good as in SS but still...