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Messages - pancaketom
Pages: 1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 [8] 9 10 11 12 13 ... 91
176
« on: June 22, 2023, 18:39 »
They sent the notice to me in German so clearly they have some issues.
I suspect that they will try to push rejections into this new category to sell it to suckers to train their pet AI on.
177
« on: June 18, 2023, 17:18 »
Assuming things are correctly labeled - which is a huge assumption when it comes to stock libraries.
178
« on: June 09, 2023, 12:54 »
If the affiliates or distributors are doing the agencies job, then the cut should come from the agency. If they are doing the contributors job, then the cut can come from the contributor. I don't see any affiliates or distributors making images and keywording them and putting them in my port, so I don't think I should have to pay their cut of the pie. They are however doing Alamy's job - finding buyers, so the cut should come from Alamy. Yes, these are sales that Alamy wouldn't make without finding buyers, so they should appreciate say 25% from each sale, and we should get at least 40%, although really 50% seems more fair.
Don't even get me started on the sales for a few cents for which I get between 0 and 2 cents. If that is what the local market is, I don't want to be in that market.
179
« on: June 07, 2023, 18:12 »
Probably the only good thing about the publicly traded companies is that we can see that they whine to the contributors how things are unsustainable and they have to pay us less and then they turn around and tell the shareholders how great everything is going and how wonderful the future is looking. It doesn't actually do us any good, but at least we have proof that they are bald faced liars.
180
« on: May 25, 2023, 12:35 »
There was some discussion of Adobe sales in another thread, so I thought I'd update my tracking of the change in the mix of custom versus subscription sales and falling RPD (I only have photos and a few illustrations; no video).
Both downloads and $$ at Adobe Stock continue to beat last year's numbers, which is obviously good. May isn't over yet and already the numbers are 15% higher in $$ and 33% in DLs over all of May in 2022 (and May 2022 was 25% higher than 2021, so it's not just a rebound situation).
Revenue per download continues its decline and the proportion of "custom" downloads (versus "subscription") grows. There isn't a drop at the bottom end of royalties, which is good news. I still very occasionally see a 33 download although none this month. Otherwise it's 38 and up for everything. This week I saw a custom royalty for $16.50 which I assume is a very discounted extended license (that'd be a $26.40 royalty at list price for an EL). If I exclude that one license, May 2023 has an overall RPD of 64 versus May 2022 at 78
In May 2022, subscriptions were just over twice the number of custom downloads; subs RPD was 74 and custom RPD 87
In May 2023, custom were just about equal with subscriptions (6 more custom); subs RPD was 66 and custom RPD 63
If you go back to May 2021, subs were 7x custom and the overall RPD was 80
Looking at the year to date, the RPD is 70 - in 2020, the overall RPD was 95. I guess the question is whether the volume of downloads can rise enough to offset the reduced royalties, assuming these trends continue.
Thanks for the interesting analysis. One question - has the increase in total DL outpaced the increase in size of your port - either in comparison to previous port size or compared to Adobe as a whole? In any case - total revenue going up is good. Prices dropping not so much. I am also glad to see the bottom isn't dropping as it is at many other sites.
181
« on: May 22, 2023, 14:26 »
I wonder how many of those sales were actually at those price ranges or if the actual sales price for many of the sales is something much less thanks to some non transparent discounting by P5.
In general I am guessing that for many clip sales the price is a very small part of the overall project cost so is not a huge factor deciding which clip gets used - but the buyers using subs do try to use subs.
182
« on: May 19, 2023, 15:15 »
My largest one-off sale on Alamy was $113 net
Is net what Alamy paid you?
The green is what the buyer paid Alamy, the 2 red numbers are what Alamy got and what the distributor got, leaving 57.69 I have always maintained that the distributors are doing Alamy's job, so their take should come out of Alamy's cut. If they made assets and keyworded and uploaded them to my account, their take should come out of my cut. Sadly Alamy doesn't see it my way.
183
« on: May 16, 2023, 16:31 »
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.
184
« on: May 06, 2023, 20:41 »
Remember pond 5 is now owned by shutterstock, but they haven't gotten around to ruining it for contributors yet. I would be very wary of putting all my eggs in a basket controlled by Oringer.
185
« on: May 02, 2023, 18:15 »
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.
186
« on: April 26, 2023, 16:16 »
That is better than I would have expected - Yay for book covers. I guess you also need to take the cost of the drone into account and so on, but there is a value to learning new skills and so on too. For the last 10 years or more I don't think this has been a particularly wise way to make money - it can be done, but probably there are easier ways.
187
« on: April 26, 2023, 11:11 »
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.
188
« on: April 25, 2023, 14:54 »
you forgot a few...
new submitters get a bump in search
sales stop right before I get to payout
posts in the site forum boost sales
reviewers reject images that will compete with their own images
I too used to have a SS resubmit folder - I think almost all of the resubmitted images were accepted. I haven't bothered renaming it AS resubmit.
189
« on: April 24, 2023, 14:14 »
I do get a small perccentage of seemingly random rejections for "image quality" that I just shrug and move on (and some image quality rejections for high iso or otherwise marginal images). Also a few rejections for copyright that aren't crazy. Otherwise I haven't noticed any pattern or trend for image rejections at Adobe.
190
« on: April 19, 2023, 10:57 »
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.
192
« on: April 05, 2023, 11:04 »
If I were cynical and I thought that SS was greedy and evil I would suspect that they are trying to get everyone to cash out a few months before they stop operations so that they can keep all the new sales that don't add up to the cashout amount. That would be exciting news indeed.
193
« on: April 03, 2023, 10:55 »
Wow. March was the worst month on Shutterstock since the very first month I started, Jan 2014.
So I dont 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 solutioncut 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.
194
« on: April 01, 2023, 13:03 »
good reminder.
At a minimum I would suggest opting out of China Distribution sales - you know the ones you get nothing for because out of a 3 cent sale the distributor gets 2 cents and Alamy gets one cent (or maybe it is the other way around).
195
« on: March 29, 2023, 13:13 »
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.
196
« on: March 29, 2023, 11:07 »
I do remember scheming to sign up while on an overseas trip to get a Fotolia account with GBP (at the time I think that was the most beneficial) or Euros - still better than the $ pay at the time. I never put it into practice though. It was a little shady that people got paid more or less depending on where they were located. I also remember a few people in Europe that somehow were signed up with US$ accounts and had a very hard time trying to change them.
It sucks that you now have to pay excessive currency exchange fees, but it is perfectly reasonable that everyone gets paid the same for each type of sale - or at least has access to getting paid the same if they make enough sales.
197
« on: March 22, 2023, 19:22 »
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.
199
« on: March 19, 2023, 17:27 »
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.
200
« on: March 15, 2023, 00:45 »
I think the last real improvement to the contributor experience there was about 2008.
Since then it has been nothing but exciting news.
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