I agree to a point, although my "bottom" is $30. Which a lot of the more successful, fellow P5 contributors would still consider too low. I think less than that is detrimental to the future hopes of keeping this income respectable and "sustainable". But that's a never ending debate...

47 of my last 50 sales have all been $0.35 subscriptions.

Highest number of DL's last month ever, but 3rd lowest month in total dollars earned over the last 13 months. Their handy stats page helped illustrate that with graphs. Depressing.

Knowing the image levels are going up despite the poor sub prices is less of a comfort these days when the direct sales are all but becoming extinct anyways. Probably going to stop new uploads until if and when things start looking less bleak there.

Quote from: ShadySue on September 28, 2014, 08:25

Quote from: Daryl Ray on September 28, 2014, 08:00

My numbers: $0, $0 and $0.
Portfolio consists of 200 top sellers (elsewhere) to test the waters, model shots, objects, locations, lots of variety. Been contributing since January 2014. Not a single sale. Only 4 "zooms".

Alamy has said more than once that typical micro shots tend not to sell well on Alamy, as buyers know they can get a huge choice of that sort of image on the micros.
OTOH, if your top sellers are selling well elsewhere on Macro sites, why not just stick with these, as you have found your market?

Plus 200 pictures is not enough no matter how good.  On Alamy it is a tiny drop in a large sea.

Not that I was expecting earth shattering numbers of sales, but with 200 solid shots in a variety of concepts, ONE sale over 9 months isn't a lot to ask. How many images should be uploaded and for how long should they sit there, just to GAUGE a site's worthiness of ones time?

With a little over twice that amount I easily average a dozen or more sales a DAY in microstock. On Alamy, zero sales in 300 days.

Mop and bucket eh? So that's an example of the "not typical micro" selling macro shot on Alamy? Again, that just further confirms that there really is no difference in a micro and a macro shot, just how a contributor chooses to classify it. I don't have a personal issue with Alamy, as a matter of fact if they showed an inkling of promise I'd drop most micro sites in a heartbeat and sing their praises happily. 50% is as good as we can hope for. But there's nothing there anymore. No sales, and a terribly lazy review system that is causing a bloated search to drown anything new in that "sea".

I'm not over thinking it, but when there's a lot of vague misinformation going around and repeated non-specific claims that get shown to be BS with a minimal amount of scrutiny, I get it, it's not for me, probably not for most people getting into this now or in the recent past. Maybe 5-10 years ago, but it's just not worth the time in 2014.

About the video being more profitable, I totally agree, I'm a video guy originally in stock and 80% of my income is video sales. Alamy reps have sent a few direct messages asking me to add my videos. And if they got out of the 1990's and accepted uploads via FTP, I'd give that a try too.

I've seen that written over and over again. "typical micro shots tend not to sell well on Alamy".

What I have not seen is anyone offering a single example of a what a typical "microstock" shot is compared to "what sells" on Alamy or other macros for that matter. Not asking for someone to give away their personal trade secrets, but any sort of comparison or example would be incredibly helpful. Been selling stock for five years and this has never been clear to me. Honestly just sounds like a nicer way to say, "Your shots must suck.". That's just not really a "tip on getting sales".

I don't sell on any macro sites yet, Alamy was my experiment in that world. And so far it's failing. And even if I was already selling elsewhere in macro, like most savvy contributors would probably agree, it's never smart to hold all your eggs in a single basket.

I like the idea of upping the game and selling where they treat us right, but zero is zero.

About 500 images on DT, nearly the same on SS where I get 4-15+ sales a day.

Zero sales in the past 12 days on DT.

Last 16 sales have all been $0.35 sub sales.

Dreamstime is becoming dead weight.

When I don't agree with that I just upload the images again or, if I have some real doubt, I ask to their contributor service what is the real problem.
Most of the time the images get accepted if they are good (or not so bad).

Careful, I was doing this for about the last year, ever since the obvious change in the way they approve images began. And even though I get a 60-80% acceptance rate on my resubmitted images, I recently received an email from SS threatening to "suspend" my account because of "excessive" duplicate uploads. They had no interest in discussing this with me further, and they no longer get the benefit of my resubmissions, falsely rejected images go to their competitors only now. Their call.

"Upload good work and you will not have any issues.  I have not had a single image rejected in over a year."

Not by any means claiming my images are perfect, but they were certainly "good" enough to be accepted and make sales in multiple other places. While I do understand that they have a different kind of standard, and I admit I'm not quite clear on what that is exactly, I can't for the life of me figure out which image they deemed unworthy from a given group, or why. "Throwing out the baby with the bath water", as they say. Definitely doesn't make figuring out what they want any clearer either.

It can't be good for the collection as a whole and the search results to have a system that might allow what could be hundreds of poor quality images to "sneak" through in a batch because the reviewer just looked at one and found it "good enough". Quality control isn't just for children.

This is the epitome of the backwards thinking companies like iStock/Getty and Shutterstock (to a slightly lesser extent) have been attempting to brainwash into some of the more impressionable, less confident contributors. To the point where they have even somewhat successfully changed the meaning of the word "commission" to mean OUR percentage. Sure sounds more reasonable that we make 15% "commission" on sales, rather than the historically TRUE meaning of the term, as "remuneration for services rendered or products sold as a common way to reward sales people". The stock companies would obviously be the sales people in this relationship, and letting them take a 70-85% commission to sell OUR work is really disgusting if you think about it objectively. Any company that claims they can't stay afloat and profitable while offering a 50% split is based on lies, greed and the fact that many folks buy into it, even to the point of defending it.

The attitude of this topic creator reminds me of when I had terrible warehouse jobs as a youth, and the bosses would respond to our valid complaints with, "Well, I hear McDonalds is hiring." Many employees accepted this sort of moral beat-down, and the ones I still know lead pretty * miserable lives these days.

I won't criticize the posters portfolio, other than saying with the quality and quantity of the work, it's a shame his/her self-confidence and self-worth are this low. Place like MSG help promote a solidarity and any sort of power and unity we can wield is in ALL content creators best interests, given the lack of a union or something similar. Call it whining, but it's really more about checks and balances. That would be like calling the free press in the USA "whiners", when even the drafters of the Constitution understood the need for such checks and balances.