They say never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. If the way they record sales is anything like how they improve the contributor experience then I have no confidence in them.

That said, I find it hard to believe they are regularly not reporting sales. If so, they are opening themselves up to serious consequences, it would be nice to see some good independent auditing though. I think they are taking such a large percentage of every sale legally according to their rules, it seems weird they would have to cheat when the setup is already so tilted in their favor.

Quote from: ShadySue on February 04, 2024, 19:53

They've been doiing it for a few years: there's a clause in our contract which can be interpreted to let them do it without an opt-out, though like so much in the contract - which is very wide in their favour - very narrow in ours, I for one didn't foresee this.

Only Exclusives? I get my DACS claimed through Alamy. They would be double dipping? I don't know, but it seems odd and confusing.

I'd certainly rather get 40% than 15% of my DACS

DT keywording is a little weird because they break multiple word keywords into single words, but I would say keyword for adobe with embedded keywords with the most important first and then send it to DT and anywhere else. Pics on DT seem to take ages to get any traction if they ever do. My sales are slow but fairly steady - and sadly almost all .35 subs there.

I still seem to do fairly well on DT compared to most - this January was my worst month there in at least a year and I was under 1/10 of Adobe with a larger DT port (less than 2x Adobe)  Usually I make quite a bit more than 1/10 of Adobe on DT. It certainly is not a great earner, but they haven't had any "exciting" news for a long while and they even boosted pay for a bit because of Covid.

SS was a great earner and a clear #1 for me until 2018 or so. I expect most who have been at this for a long time either has IS or SS as their #1 all time.

Maybe for Europeans the Fotolia / AS combo is higher.

I haven't looked at the fine print, but basically all images start at level 1, if there are no sales after a certain time (6 mo?) thye drop to level 0. For sub sales - which are 90+ percent of all sales at DT it makes no difference anyway, but for other sales the cost goes up with higher levels and more importantly the % that the artist gets from sales of higher level images goes up with higher levels. For a while higher level subs sales cost more sub credits and paid higher, that is no longer the case.

The reason that they say a variable number of credits is because the cost varies based on the size of the image they sell. Also the $ amount is highly variable because the cost of credits varies wildly based on how big of a credit pack is purchased - and if it is purchased with a discount.

The # of sales to go up a level has dropped a lot through the years, but any benefit from this has been more than offset by the change from 50% for the artist to much less - 25% to 45% now.

https://www.dreamstime.com/sell-stock-photos-images

There is some lag between files getting accepted and showing up in your portfolio and search. Also between sales and reporting. Give it a few days.

I would leave 123RF off any list of best agencies unless you are asking about 5 or more years ago.

Alamy still sells ok for me, although down last year, and what they have been doing isn't very encouraging.

DT remains steady, and they haven't screwed contributors in a long time, but they are also pretty small compared to AS, SS, and IS. Almost all sales there are .35 subs.

I haven't had a batch rejection in a while - but when I did it was for "quality" whatever that means, and the batch before and after with very similar if not exactly the same sort of images, camera, lighting, and processing was accepted.

Since my batches are small, I just shrugged it off, maybe I should make a folder of resubmit images like I did for SS - which got almost all accepted on round 2 with no changes. It just made more work for everyone. Back when SS had a forum I remember people would post rejected images and the forum members would attack like a pack of hyenas and rip them all apart. I think someone posted some best sellers as rejected images - they got ripped apart too.

I think it is clear that there is something wrong with the AI image acceptances - maybe it is better now, but the number of people with extra fingers and arms is a little alarming not to mention trademarked logos etc. Also when an entire batch of all sorts of images gets rejected for the same reason - unless it is something like sensor spots or a monitor that is not calibrated correctly it makes one highly suspicious, even more so when images from the same shoot get accepted in the batches earlier or later.

Sure it is possible for anyone to miss something in a pic - but for an experienced submitter to make the same mistake for an entire batch that includes images from multiple shoots processed over multiple days - that seems a little unlikely.

I bet it would be pretty interesting to run an AI analysis comparing the different reviewers and the submitters and acceptance ratios per batch plus sales numbers.

Me too, best SS November month ever, just sold a SO image this morning for $108, for example, a rare event. Strangely, even though I have images from many remote countries such as Namibia, Nepal, Burma, etc., my best-sellers are all from my hometown, Quebec City, or Montreal or the Quebec province.

Nice sale, I wonder if the majority of your sales are of localish things because SS search prioritizes local artists in the search. - good if you live near a large buying population and have local content. Not so good if most of your content is from somewhere else or you live in a fairly remote area. I did notice a drop when I changed my address from an urban area to a rural area.

It would be nice to think that buyers would value authenticity for at least some applications - but if past history is any guide then they won't really care. You would hope they at least want the correct number of arms and fingers or chair legs.

I figure by next year the AI will be able to more competently copy all of the sort of things it has been trained with - so generic stock sort of things will be saturated. Maybe buyers will be sick of the AI look, or maybe they will still be infatuated with it. At some point I think that unless you have reality to compare with the AI images you won't actually be able to tell which is real. It still might be easier to pick an AI image out of a stock library than create your own, but most uses will not require actual real photos - which even now aren't necessarily all that real anyway even if there is no AI involved in their creation.

The agencies will be happy to eliminate our part of the process if they can - even if that means no new images to train their AI with.

I haven't noticed it on Adobe, but on SS and IS a regular seller would suddenly stop when the search got changed.

I have always been annoyed and question what is going on when an entire batch gets rejected for the same reason. My batches are rarely all from the same photo shoot and are often quite different and when one batch is 100% accepted and the next is 100% rejected it does not inspire confidence in the review process, although it does suggest that it is a human reviewer and not a so called AI bot.

How all the AI dreck gets through is another question.