At Graphic Stock the buyer will pay $4.00 for an image if they are a subscriber etc

Another one which doesn't accept Paypal. It's as if they don't want to sell your stuff.

There are very few sites which I am going to allow to use my credit card number.

Also - subscription is a no no.

Is this conversation about stock photos, or is it people pedantically arguing about oil reserves? No wonder there is such a problem with keyword spam.

Search Brunch at Stockfresh and you could see the frustration, the five Christmas presents, the girl with balloons, the plants, I guess the best is the cartoon bear on a branch, although the vector Hawk is a close second in the nonsense category.

I have ended up finding exactly the sort of 'brunch' content I was looking for at Stocksy. I am still making my selection and I have something else I have to attend to over the past few days. Instead of struggling to find stuff which would be adequate it has become a case of narrowing it down from a good selection of great content. Beginning specifically with the keyword 'brunch' but also looking at a few likely related words.

And none of it is stuff which I feel that I could do better or as well myself - either stylistically or with respect to the food, locations etc. It's certainly one of those areas which they have covered better than anywhere else I have looked. Less is also definitely more. It's great not being faced with thousands of results.

I agree. I think the word copyright is essential on the ADP.

I don't see � at Alamy.

This is why I don't get sales I believe because their algorythm fails.

I can see many specific examples of where you seem to be missing search opportunities. For example:

I see you have some pictures of second-hand and vintage stuff at a market. But the market isn't named - that pertinent information is missing. So anyone looking for pictures of that market isn't going to find your pictures. I have a two sets of pictures of similar stuff at a particular market which do quite well. And I see from the stats that my pictures of that market are invariably found as a result of specific searches for the name of the market.

Or here is another example: I am looking at your pictures of canal boats. But you haven't included the name of the canal in the caption or the keywords. That's going to be the most important metadata. Otherwise it's just a pretty picture of random boats.

Or your fresly dug potatoes. That's a very useable picture. But those are "new potatoes" in any search. You want those two words next to each other.

In your vintage railway pictures - the railway isn't named.

etc. I don't think you are keywording for editorial.

Looking at your Alamy portfolio - you've currently got 1213 pictures under your name. Perhaps you have more under a different alias. Much of that is wild flowers, trees, abstract bits of wall etc. I doubt that sort of stuff is particularly worth bothering with in an editorial context. It may actually be working against you given how the CTR works. I think that for editorial you are better looking at specifics - the who, what, how, when and why of life, economics etc

ETA: Your pictures are often very nice. But they need to be about useful nouns and adjectives.

I don't think there's that much free content out there. It's just, that people think, that they can use it for free, or sites with "free content" which was actually stolen from agencies.

One of the disadvantages of established microstock is that often there are too many search results to wade through. The thing you might want to use might be there but can be impossible to find. And the styles are all jumbled up because the work is not curated.

There is some very good content available free today (properly legal). One free site where our much-hipper-than-us client chose images from is really very cool. Much of the work has a similar feel to it. One of the advantages of that site is that it has relatively little content.

What does ESP mean in this context?

Quote from: bunhill on October 29, 2016, 12:40

Quote from: sharpshot on October 29, 2016, 11:25

Every time they pay us less, they lose lots of images that might be just what their buyers want

Looking for images to buy, one of the biggest problems with the microstocks in general is that there are too many images. Nearly all of them irrelevantly keyworded.

The small curated collections are a relief by comparison. Though lately some have too much content which only really works in a vertical orientation (I suspect because people are misunderstanding how responsive design tends to be typically approached in practice) .

I believe that the outfit that comes up with a more intelligent search that meets the specific needs of the individual   buyer will have a huge advantage....unfortunately I'm not clever enough to do that.

I think the solution is to employ people to curate smaller trend based collections. Quality and relevance trumps quantity.

(I am fully aware that my own legacy microstock content would not meet my own standards today btw )

"Exclusives" selling work elsewhere is a real sore point here, whether you take advantage of it or not. Even your fellow exclusives sound surprised about that

I doubt anyone is particularly surprised if they follow the logic of a contract. IIRC the contract is between the agency and the entity owning the copyright. For example - if you work for a business you can also potentially do separate work as an individual. Equally one could presumably buy the copyright to work from an indie and sell it exclusively. It's about who the contract is with - suppose you are the director of more than one business.

This has all been discussed many times over the past decade. The issue people get annoyed about is when the same entity is both 'exclusive' and 'non-exclusive'. Or when the same images and / or similars are sold both as exclusive and non-exclusive - apparently by different entities.

Hobbyists buy their equipment for hobby purposes, so basicaly they dont have to get "their costs back". Every $ they earn is basically plus form them, since they didn't buy equipment for selling photos but for themselves.

Exactly. And therefore I doubt they will care that much. Many would probably carry on contributing even for badges and likes. And it will probably come to that.

My income is still increasing year on year. My returns from most sites per download have increased not decreased

If your profit is not growing proportionate to the total size of your collection then you are running to stand still. Most microstockers are struggling to keep up.  Well done if you have been in this for more than a few years and are ahead of the trend - when you take into account your hourly rate vs minimum wage and the cost of your investment.

Traditionally, photographers' back catalogues also represented a passive income, an investment. That is less and less the case for microstockers.

I guess that could explain your pessimism

I'm not pessimistic. I think that constant change is a fantastic thing. And I really admire the direction taken by sites such as Stocksy - both the work which they represent and the seemingly more sustainable and positive approach to the changing market. I also very much admire much of the work which Getty represents.

I don't get why people are still contributing to microstock at all at the moment. The only thing which is growing is the total number of images. And that means, inevitably, that the prices are only going down. Ever closer to zero. The size of the market was vastly over-estimated. That boom era is never coming back. Is everyone just hoping that everyone else will give up first? Otherwise it seems like a rather costly hobby.

And if you are really into pictures as a hobby then why not give up taking pictures which you think might sell and start taking pictures you like or which interest you instead? That's the thing about the best of the stuff in the non-microstock and more bespoke collections like Stocksy - that, at best, the pictures seem much more real. They seem like pictures made by people who love pictures.