I wonder if those data earnins are a once per year earnings or an every month thing?

or maybe just once, and it already happened.

Quote from: NobleSavage on April 30, 2023, 13:59

Not a chance.  Ended years ago When Getty Images launched Premium Access.  Since then it's been a race to the bottom.

Actually it started long before that. It started when Istock created Istock and a ton of cool newbie hipsters swarmed to the celebration of selling their work at low prices -but in volume. It was at this time "editors" got replaced with "inspectors". It was at this time the race to the bottom started more or less. The whole crowd sourcing model was great for a few for a few years but that particular model destroyed the industry for all of us.

And to answer the original post - not a chance.

no, it was the invention of royalty free

no it was the invention of stock photography instead of custom

no, it was the invention of photography

no, it was the invention of the printing press


As far as the original question, it is possible for an individual to do well and make money, but it will require a lot of work or originality or research or better access or something. Gone are the days of just shooting a bunch of pics and making good money for it. Even if what we get per sale doesn't continue to go down, inflation will erode our take, and the competition will continue to grow. 

Invested in a drone. Letting the machine do the legwork for me!

What do you think your return on investiment on the drone is? $/ hour spent with it? (not so much the learning to fly, but actual set up, flight, processing time). You got some good stuff - but I don't know if the return is there anymore.

I have played a bit with a little drone, but haven't really tried much stock stuff - mostly because I am lazy and also they are not allowed at a lot of the most scenic places I'd like to use for stock (national parks / wilderness). It also doesn't help that I live very close to a small airport so there are some restrictions within walking distance.

Probably the best return for me is keeping my eyes and mind open for "plop and shoot" opportunities - especially things that aren't all that common but might be sellers as well as backgrounds - stuff I can just shoot, minimally process and keyword and upload. Sure, most are very poor sellers, but they don't take much work compared to my other minimal sellers, and a few sell ok over time. - so take your camera with you and keep an open mind to photo ops. - you can't make a living doing that, but I am dubious about making a living these days without more work than it would take to make a living doing lots of other things.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One�s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."

�Theodore Dalrymple

This goes for the US culture wars, racial division, age divides, and political extremes. Those who only watch Fox and the others who only believe NPR are destined to become single minded with dehumanized closed minded values. Easy to control by the ones in power of their group.

I would say equating Fox and NPR would be one of these lies.

It seems like there should be a way to demand the sales of illegally uploaded images along with the DMCA notice, but we all know that not only does SS not really care, they actively are annoyed at people that point out stolen ports.

I think a lot of the work of troll farms is to just amplify the conflict in other countries. Often they push both sides of an argument, and even have tried to foment physical conflict such as planning rallies pro or con something and then whipping up outrage on both sides. Of course this effort is aided by the social media algorithms that push controversy and engagement at all cost.

I think the final result of Russia's push to punish and control Europe with energy policy might be to hasten energy autonomy and the greener energy revolution.


Of course they can also push a specific agenda too.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on April 02, 2023, 16:34

Wow.  March was the worst month on Shutterstock since the very first month I started, Jan 2014.

So I don�t have to feel bad they kicked me out�

They are dropping for many people. Perhaps keeping a forum, positively interacting with producers and sensible royalties would have been better for their business.

Which producer is going to recommend clients to them?

But I am sure somebody brilliant will have the perfect solution�cut the royalties even more. 5 cents instead of 10 cents. Or 1 cent??

I suspect the next exciting news will be some sort of less than transparent revenue share scheme where SS gets more and we get less.

I expect the erosion of sales and the erosion of pay to continue. Depending on what sort of content you sell this might speed up or not. I suspect at some point the AI will use people to continue to refine - for example it produces a number of images based on the request - then based on what the requester picks, it decides that is what it should produce. Also at some point those images will be available for licensing.

So far so called AI still needs something to start with - at the moment that is whatever is available - with a huge keyworded stock library especially valuable - If the stock libraries fill up with AI generated and keyworded content, the AI will train off of that and drift in whatever way that stuff goes. Probably towards whatever was popular recently and whatever is being bought. When something new comes along it can be wildly popular for a while, until people get sick of it - for example HDR images or video with very shallow depth of field or right now AI generated stuff. Except the AI stuff doesn't have to have a particular AI look.

In general good enough is good enough for customers, and even though the chance of your image making it in the wildly over-represented categories for many of them there are still a lot of sales, the pie is just sliced too thin to make it worthwhile for most artists to add more. It remains to be seen if AI images based on reality are good enough or if people actually want reality for things like landscapes and city scapes and will people even be able to tell the difference. Maybe google street view images are good enough or the AI can use them as a starting point to produce much prettier images that are close enough to replace actual images. Also if the sites decide that they want to push AI down in the search it would severely limit its effect on sales on that platform - until the sales go elsewhere or AI images that aren't labeled as such take over.

It will be interesting to see where this goes - I certainly don't predict anything good for photographers although as usual it is probably possible to use this at least in the short term for some gain. I doubt the stock photo business will be anywhere near dead in a year or less, but I also very seriously doubt it will be the same or better for photographers. My prediction for the future remains about the same - long term this is a losing proposition and it will get worse before it gets worse but it won't just stop immediately, just a long descent.

In my experience uploading to IS was much more of a pain than DT but IS sold more than DT. You only get 15% of each sale at IS. 

I still upload to DT, but not IS.

the contributor side dashboard has been off and on for me today - on now - 15:27 west coast USA. I haven't tried anything else.

It looks like Feb earnings are posted, and although applies were up 24% and exports were up 18% actual $ earnings were only up .57% and total $ earnings actually went down because I had more individual sales in January (which gives you an idea of how small the Elements earning increase was since individual sales are in the single digits these months.)

So, an awful lot of sales for not much $ for us and basically earnings continue to fall despite the customers getting fat at the all you can eat buffet.

Does anyone know what "applies" and "exports" really mean? Danny?

I got a bunch of top up payments from 12 of the wrong in multiple ways sales from last year. I guess it is the thought that counts, since the total is for less than 25 cents.

I don't know if more are coming. Hopefully Alamy has learned not to allow this sort of sale, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.