speaking of ai, i haven't had a "contributor fund" payment in ages.  have others been getting anything?  ss has been terrible for me for 3 months now.

Didn't they offer the exciting news of only paying 15% for AI data training? Maybe 0% is even more exciting.

I looked through my rejects. I found 7 listed as removed for similar. Of those I was able to find 2 that were still in my portfolia with a different # and thus I think the correct removal of a duplicate. 2 were images that had quite similar images still in my port. The rest I couldn't find anything particularly similar - unless you consider something like one mountain in Colorado similar to another - which I guess is possible.

so out of 7,
2 completely correct
2 reasonably correct
1 could be argued ok
2 not even close

Other things I found while looking through the rejects - 5 rejected for "non compliant" with mention of " - Non compliant use of another artist�s name.- Undeclared Generative AI Content. or- Content not compliant with overall guidelines" most of these are from before AI images were a possibility and I have never submitted AI images. I don't know if these were previously accepted and then pulled later or never got accepted. Some could have possible IP problems (like a close up of Washington from a dollar bill with bandages on him), but others I just don't know.

The really big takeaway is how arbitrary the rejections are - usually a string in a row for the same reason - focus, quality issues, artifacts, exposure, or aesthetic or commercial appeal of image. With the last reason occasionally given for images that sold well on other sites. Sure, their sandbox, their rules, but looking at the AI dreck they accepted it does make one wonder what they are thinking, or if it is just some algorithm or inspector just clicking a reject reason.

What really matters in the end is the bottom line.

RPD is one way of understanding changes to the bottom line - double your images and double your sales but bottom line is unchanged - it probably is because the RPD has dropped. If you double your images and sales number doesn't change but RPD is the same - it is probably due to falling sales per image and not RPD.

Of course, in reality sales per image are dropping along with RPD for most contributors.

RPE - Return Per Effort would be a better metric, but also a lot harder to see and chart.

I haven't bothered to add up my totals yet (another result of the lack of excitement from all the exciting news we have had over the years - but I can tell it won't be very good already) From what is posted it is pretty amazing how much lower income we now make from honestly mostly much better content. I remember starting out on SS and in the first month that I had over 100 images up I made 100$ - and I had to upsize because my 4mp point and shoot really only took 3.9 mp pictures.

Contrast that with increasing your port 40% and making essentially no more or even less $ now or having 3000+ images and making 15$.

Of course there was a lot less competition - I think there were under 1 million images at SS then and we made .25 per download.

I tried to find the photos that were offensive (to see if somehow they actually were) but I couldn't find them on my Canva account - so maybe they aren't showing them to educational users because they removed them from the database completely.

Are other people able to see the images that were mentioned in these e-mails in their Canva accounts?

Personally, I'd prefer AI to be off by default and I wish there was a way to turn off AI for social media,  news, etc.

Maybe Adobe (and SS?) are hoping that at some point they can use AI to clean up the horrible AI images that completely litter the library. Or more likely it will be like spam keywords where a few of the most egregious get a little slap and the rest just sit there polluting everything. How can you expect them to fix AI when they can't even fix images that are labeled as multiple sites (like listing 10 national parks when it clearly can't be more than 1).

I do wonder about the drift when AI is used to train AI. Careful AI producers look at the images at full resolution and fix all sorts of things, others just post anything that looks good at thumbnail (or worse) scale.

iStock is paying 15% flat commissions to photo contributors. SS currently is paying 15% to 40%. My gut feeling says there's a huge screaming "cost optimization" opportunity for managers after this merger. 

Just think about how more motivated we will be with the exciting news of no reset every January. Instead it will just stay at a flat 15% forever (until daddy needs a stock bump and they drop it again).

SS is one of the leaders in the price race to the bottom, Getty is one of the leaders in the percentage paid to the artist race to the bottom. Together they will deliver really exciting news.

While there may be vastly more images made available for sale via AI, where will the demand for all those extra images come from?.....

Companies training AI models?

Probably it will be like it has been in the past - modest increase in demand spread out among more and more assets. Whatever the algorithm pushes and the buyers want will sell. Everything else, not so much. At some point much of the "AI" stuff will be indistinguishable from normal photos so the flood will impact other assets more and more until the sites create their own "AI" images based on the best sellers and what people search on and then it will be game over for everyone else. How long that takes is an unknown, but probably shorter than a lot of people think.

The agencies rely on a lot of people chasing the dream of a decent stable income as well as hobbyists who are glad to get pennies to keep their supply of images high and the prices they have to pay to get them low. They have no real interest in discouraging people from submitting - unless they are only submitting junk, then they should be discouraged, but even a complete hack gets lucky every once in a while and can producer a modest seller.

If you have drive and talent there are definitely better ways to make money. If you don't have drive and talent there are also better ways to make money.

Quote from: pancaketom on November 26, 2024, 20:35

I have had numerous instances of image sales on Alamy that are refunded and rebought. Usually the new sale is for a small bit less $ - often just cents. The most frustrating was when they cut our take 20% from 50 to 40% and a big sale from before the slash was refunded and repurchased after the slash (months later) for maybe a dollar less, but I got a lot less because of the percentage cut.

Do you have any theory / explanation as to why refund / repurchase, for slightly lower amount,  happens?  I presume this has nothing to do with Alamy accounting, but end customer?

I always assumed it was mostly from the customer - maybe they realized they needed a slightly different usage or time frame and then contacted Alamy who said refund and purchase this slightly different deal. I don't actually know though.

that kangaroo is actually pretty good compared to the bats with bird wings and other freaks of nature. I particularly like that SS allowed this real world photo in. Imagine the ivory you could get off that.


https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/ice-age-mammoth-majestic-prehistoric-creature-2499441933

Last few hundred on adobe average 0.84 
probably propped up a bit by a surprisingly high sub sale last week.

Not sure if I calculated right for Alamy, but this year ~14 something. It would probably be a lot lower if I didn't turn off sales to most of SE Asia after the 0 to a few cents sales they had there.

Quarter 3 on DT 0.56 Q2 = .57 Q1 = .42

I have no way to calculate on canva, but I strongly suspect it is well under 1 cent