In case anyone is looking for the way to close your account, it's this:
In esp go to Account Management and select the "contact us" tab.
When it asks you to select category. choose Agreement. Click on "next" and select close account.

Can someone give me some more info about this australian refund? Why is it?

According to another thread Getty negotiated a new (worse for us) deal with Canva and then agreed to have it backdated for years, so sales that had been the right price when they were made suddenly became overpriced months or years later and Canva got a refund.
I don't know what the source of that information is, though - so I can't guarantee that it's right. It does sound crazy enough to be a Getty deal, though (and personally, I wouldn't trust them not to dump the entire cost of the refund on contributors through some shady but technically legal loophole).

There's an official explanation now involving a history of accounting errors.

I've done it. After 15 years and six months I finally gave them the boot.

 I hung in there so long because they were my first agency and taught me a lot, so I didn't like to part from them. Also, I felt that having put the effort into uploading the files, I might as well let them earn as much as possible. However, all the bizarre deals they have that seem to let my files go for fractions of a cent etc etc, and now the backdated refunds, leave me wondering whether I'm not giving away some stuff that people would pay for at other sites. Some of my work is sufficiently different for it not to be easily substituted by somebody else's - not a lot of it, maybe, but some.

With the latest earnings down to less than $30 this month (for about 6,000 files, I made more than $10 in my first month with just a few dozen shots) it's not a major loss. Maybe it will lead to an uptick in sales as Shutterstock to compensate.

For those wondering what happens to the balance of earnings that iStock holds, it seems they will be paid eventually. The form for terminating the agreement states:
I confirm that I want to have any outstanding royalties issued on the time specified by my Agreement (most standard agreements specify any outstanding balance is to be issued within 90 days of your request to close your account)

I can't see the states from DM. ?

But can you see Russia from your house?

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on September 17, 2019, 04:53

What percentage of the portfolio do you class as "old"? If 90% of it is old and new photos only account for 20% of sales, then new files would still be outselling old ones by 2:1 even though 80% of sales are of old stock.
This is a rather obvious factor that needs taking into account, but I can't recall seeing anybody mention it in the "only old files sell" threads (which, curiously, have been appearing for many, many years now ... I wonder if the new files that didn't sell five years ago have now become old files that do sell)

That is an excellent point. My experience with SS though seems to be similar to the OP's in that it does seem to take a lot longer for files to gain traction there compared to AS or IS. As for the rest it really is only old files that sell for me - meaning that they take even longer to rise through the ranks?

Of course, if you have loads of time to waste and want to be really accurate you could divide your images into six month upload blocks, see how many sales each of those blocks gets in a given period and create a chart of sales per image put online for each time period.

What percentage of the portfolio do you class as "old"? If 90% of it is old and new photos only account for 20% of sales, then new files would still be outselling old ones by 2:1 even though 80% of sales are of old stock.
This is a rather obvious factor that needs taking into account, but I can't recall seeing anybody mention it in the "only old files sell" threads (which, curiously, have been appearing for many, many years now ... I wonder if the new files that didn't sell five years ago have now become old files that do sell)

It says:  Hi,

If you are  going to be at Xposure in Sharjah from Thursday the 19th of September to Sunday the 22nd of September please do come and see us at Nikon stand.

Here is the link to the event. https://xposure.ae/

Jacqueline Bourke our Senior Manager of Visual Insights will be taking us through how to shoot on trend and monetise your work. Details and the schedule of times is below.


If you can�t make the talk, please come by anyway and chat with Jacqui.

I guess they're also assuming that there wont be a US/UAE/Saudi vs Iran war in progress at that time

Quote

Back to the OP question though - is Alamy worth it? Of course we would say yes, but it works better for some than for others. We'll offer you 50% commission for images exclusive to us and 40% for non-exclusive. Our average licence price is $35, although as others have mentioned, it's not uncommon to get much higher and sometimes lower.

Sometimes? try most of the times, sometimes higher and rarely much higher.

My last 3 sales were $3.72, $3.53 and $5.09 and that's without their cut (so at least half of these figures)
If you ask me Alamy isn't worth it, they are no better and most of the times even worse then Microstock.

My 2c

Since the figure cited is an average, it stands to reason that amounts above that are matched by amounts below that. A single $600 sale needs to be followed by 20 $5 sales to produce an average of about $35. The larger a big sale is the more small sales will be needed to balance it, that's just elementary maths. And, of course, Alamy quotes the overall sales figure, not the photographer's commission, which could be 50%, 40% or for partner sales 30%.  For the photographer 40% of a $35 sale translates into $14 commission. Unfortunately, that average sale price seems to have declined considerably - presumably as a result of pressure from the micros (yes, we are all to blame, but the micros were a juggernaut that could not be stopped, try though the Alamy crowd did back 15 years ago). The other unfortunate thing is that while the sales price average seems to have declined to within spitting distance of the micros, the sales volume has not risen accordingly. My sales volume has remained roughly static for six or seven years but my sales value has halved and the commission cut has, of course, added to the pain.
That said, the earnings plunge is nothing like as bad as I've seen on the micros where my peak-to-current-trough earnings have dropped by about 90%. I'm not sure that any of the micros are worth the effort any longer, but if they are then so is Alamy.

If you've sold RF licenses for pictures of a person then there is no way you can prevent those pictures being used again by the people who bought the license, so the question of whether or not to continue offering to license them becomes a bit irrelevant.
I don't see why it would be seen as tasteless to keep the images on sale. The works of dead artists, film stars and authors continue to be sold and nobody thinks twice about it. And photography is all about capturing the present so people in the future can see and appreciate the past. Why wouldn't a model have wanted to continue being appreciated after death? I wish I'd got more pictures of family members who have died.

wish i didnt look...

Yeah, it's just getting silly. Down 75% on the feeble earnings two years earlier.

Yup, the  colour space changes fix the problem. https://www.dreamstime.com/earning_det.php?imageid=146285897   Hopefully I've managed to set the default now after some more fiddling with the controls.
I much preferred the old stand-alone versions of PS, where there weren't the "updates" that mess with established settings

I uploaded some files to DT for the first time in a while yesterday and they appear in revolting dull flat colours - most unappetising for food. Is there an issue with the colour space on DT, it reminds me of the complaints when Alamy were using Adobe RGB as the space, which doesn't look good on screens with a limited gamut.  Here's one of the files on DT https://www.dreamstime.com/earning_det.php?imageid=146243515
The original looks fine on my screen and on Shutterstock (unfortunately, its not gone live there yet so I can't show that) but it looks bad on DT and, I now notice, on Deposit Photos as well.
Can anybody tell me what's happening and what I can do to solve the problem?