"Average review time" info just jumped from 3 weeks to "OVER 2 months".

Well basically journalists whine about evil photographers that create unrealistic image, but the photographers create images that are in demand. Noone would ever create photos that need a lot of time to take if people wanted something different.

It's just so timeless - people were whining about corsets and how women "cheat" with them into making everyone believe they have slimmer waist.

I was sitting yesterday at work and while browsing internet I encountered the news again and again. Each time my first unconditional response was "wow, David Bowie, I wonder what he did now" and then each time the real news got to me.

Quote from: seawhisper on January 10, 2016, 15:45

Hehe how does it happen that always when you have a topic in forum it always wonders off some other sometimes very exotic subjects?

Very good point! Who knows why it happens, but it does.

Quote from: seawhisper on January 10, 2016, 15:45

I used stocks instead of stock as for one stock (website) - few stock websites = few stocks.

That was a reasonable assumption on your part. Unfortunately, a flawed one. 

Here in the US (the only version of English that I feel qualified to discuss), "stock" in this context is a shortcut for stock photography, whether it's available on a single website or many. One stock site, two stock sites, etc. (One might also refer to a family's stock of homemade jelly, for example, or to a good stock of paper towels found on a store's shelves.)

We use "stocks" to refer to the investments in corporations that someone can buy and hold or sell for profit (or loss). 

I just Googled "stocks" to find an example for you, and this popped up from just a few hours ago:  "U.S. stocks had their worst start to the year of all time, with all the major indexes posting ..."

Hope this helps!

True, thanks!

Quote from: seawhisper on January 10, 2016, 03:16

I always considered 500px more social website - something like deviantART. I have some photos there, but never made anything. Takes a lot of time to breakthrough. When commenting and liking while putting your work online you can easily get to popular but it doesn't seem to convert into revenue.

Here is the official answer related to how important "popularity" is:

Quote

It does play some part in it, but so do curations, relevancy, exact matching, etc.. We also have some other secret formulas but I will say that the community affection does play a part but it's only a part and not the entire formula.

I don't comment and almost never "like"

Love the "secret formulas" statement.

Just wondering. Recently woke up, drinking my coffee thinking about keywording my photos but it seems I'm not yet awaken.
As for me I'm a project manager in "real life" - it doesn't leave much time for stock photography or anything at all to be honest. But I started stocks when I was theatre photographer so they got a bit abandoned lately. Now I somehow went back but it doesn't look too bright.  Still almost all the time I had some other job beside stocks.
How about you guys? 

Hm I'm not sure. I have ONE sale on pond5 last year. Still my id is hanging there for months now awaiting verification.
This whole site is ridiculous...

Though I didn't get the reply from them. Few days after the mail to support all the photos were submitted. So it's worth to ask them.

I believe they got some sort of bug.
I wrote then an email. Didn't get the reply (or didn't find it anywhere) but next few days everything went straight to accepted.

When I read this topic I think it must be quite discouraging.
One might even think we would do that so we don't get a competition.
But I do believe many people put so much time and effort into building a portfolio so it's hard to get out.
And I do agree with most of opinions here.

The stock market is a hard one. It eats a LOT of time and builds frustration and disbelief in your own skills. I do believe it's much more profitable to became a wedding or any other kind of photographer. BUT you don't deal with customers you do as much as you want to, when you want to any way you want to. If you're smart and dedicated you probably might get some living out of it after a year or two.

The real question is if the stock sites will be able to support you after this year or two. I ask this because I see quite a worrying trend. More and more photos in the database, lowering the revenues and accepting lower quality photos.

I have a feeling in a time this market will have to change. I'm wondering what will come next.


But to sum up - if you still want to get in after reading all the advices. Focus on... focus and the noise. Low end cameras and lens tend to get highest rejection rate on these two aspects.
Do a lots of stats - how many photos you get accepted, what are main reasons for rejections, on which stock nad learn from it.

Predict on the data you have. You still need to work, you need to sleep, eat and have some family, maybe social, life. (Yup, that's also important. ) How much time does that leave on pushing photos into stock sites? How many photos do you already have and when do you find time to make new ones? How many photos are you able to put in one week, one month and so on? So how many photos accepted will you have in next three months, half of year, by the end of year?

Build your process - how do you keyword your photos, what software and what is the best way to automate it and do it faster.

Invest in learning digital photo enhancement - how to reduce noise, how to work on curves, how to best sharpen your pics. Learn much more about photoshop and lightroom then you already know.

Your time here is priceless, stock sites takes a lot of time so you need to maximize your results and minimize the time needed to do it.

We are very much still alive. Though all of our efforts now are put into our subscription website, yayimages.com. Today we announced that we are shutting down yaymicro for customer sales. You can still access it as a photographer, upload images and request payouts. We hope to refurnish the photographer pages and relaunch them at a later stage.

The subscription site is getting good traction now, and as a contributor you should see sales picking up over the next months.

Of course, we are still a rather small agency, compared to the top earners. But we are not giving up! With yayimages.com we're ahead of our competitors when it comes to user experience, search and features. We will continue to work on that and are confident that our good customer experience will lead to more customers, which again generates more earnings to our contributors.

Great to hear that! All the best for the new website.
I'm not sure if I'm fit for the new website business model. If I decided to close the account will I be able to withdraw my revenue even though I didn't get the min �30 amount?

Does anyone submitted this to 123RF support? I was wondering why my files wait for so long. Then I noticed they all seem "incomplete" even though they look like they have all the info they need... And then I found this post... -_-