Fewer but BETTER the competition has made things too easy for S Stock

Indeed! but judging by the stock climate right now, they are closing in on the big boy.

Quote from: weymouth on October 03, 2015, 03:20

Of course a lot depends on your content. You can have a port of 5K files just ordinary every day stuff and you be lucky to see one sale, you can also have a high commercial port of just 1K files and you get 50 sales per day.

On the whole, Adobe/FT and right now and given the fact of being a smaller agency, is outselling SS, their support and contributor communication is to be envied by other agencies and THIS is exactly where and why they score.

Honestly! if I was SS I would take off my suit and tie, get my hands dirty, dive down in the mud and grit and do something.

Not for me. I used to make a few hundred a month (up to 500) now I barely make 50, does that tell you enough? Their contributor support is not any better then all other agencies, on the contrary. Matt is a good guy though, well I hope he's not as sneaky as the rest anyway.

SS best september. I'm no fan of any agency because they are all doing their best to rip us off but if it wasn't for SS I would have been out of this business a long time ago. Despite showing some bad months SS can still deliver, something I cannot say about FT or any other agency, down and down they go.
FT is dead for me. I have already removed hundreds of files and will continue to do so. They once threatened me when I complained about their reviewers, I should have left them back then.
I am with 6 micro agencies and to be honest SS is the only one I still care about and upload to, the rest will vanish.
Good luck guys!

hey!  " rip-off"  welcome to the micro industry, do you think the car or fashion, restaurant, industrial businesses are any different?

I wouldn't be so sure about SS if I were you, the bigger they are the harder they fall and right now they are going through a shakey time thats for sure. I am earning a small fortune with SS so don't get me wrong but I still don't trust it. They could very well launch a royalty cut by Monday.

This business must be the biggest crackpot business in the world as far as managements and owners. They simply never learn from other agencies mistakes.
The truth is probably very simple, they are slowly losing it. Remember IS some years back. This is how the decline started, one cockup after another, nobody cared,  thought they were invincible. Then the hammer fell.

One would have thought they had some sort of an answer some response to the Adobe/FT move but they don't. Suits are just suits not thinkers and strategists.

Quote from: weymouth on October 02, 2015, 12:35

Whats next.

More royalty cuts if I had to guess.

sounds great, can't wait for that one.

Just one word regarding Adobe/FT:  excellent!

Its down out frightening to look back like that. I just did the same and also picked October 2010. I nearly fell off my chair: 5854 sales.

My God!  whatever happened

Quote from: weymouth on October 02, 2015, 01:57

...... This is not just an American thing but considering the US population is ten times bigger there are ten times more guns.

Okay another example. I get that you don't know the facts and that is fine, you don't have to especially if you live in the UK so aren't involved in the debate. But why do you feel the need to comment if you don't know what you are talking about? I guess that's just the internet for you.

There are somewhere around 2 million guns in the UK and around 300 million in the US, that's many times the number per capita. Pretty much more than any other country in the world. You are about 40x more likely to be shot to death in the US than in the UK.

It's fine to not know that and admit it. It's not fine to just keep spouting nonsense for the sake of it. It doesn't reflect well on you and it wastes everyone's time.

Amen to that.

Quote from: weymouth on October 01, 2015, 17:17

Yes and in many European countries, when a burglar comes through the window waving a gun,  you are supposed to use harsh language against his gun. God forbid if you should hit him over the head with something. He can then sue YOU for grevious bodily harm.

No matter how one twist and turn this question in the end nobody wins.

This is what I'm talking about. I live in the uk. Gun laws here are tight. Burglars here don't  have guns. Home owners don't have guns. In the US burglars and homeowners often do. You are far more likely to be shot by a burglar in the US with their gun or yours. You may be able to find a freak exception to this, just like you could find a freak instance of a mass shooting in Europe. There's a reason why these instances make global news. They are like zebras while American mass shootings are like horses. You are right that no one wins the overall  argument. Some people like having guns some don't.  Some people value the feeling of individual power enough to outweigh the extra actual deaths. That's up to you. But you can't just say random stuff like this without sounding odd to anyone not in the argument. You're  just  incorrect.

I live in London!  burglars don't have guns???  home owners don't have guns???  who are you kidding or do you live in a quiet suburb to London. I got my studio down in Chelsea just around from Cadogan-square and let me tell you I personally know four people down here who are gun-owners.
About a week back, two burglars were trying to rob a transport form some jewellry store, Police got a tip or something and they found two sawn-off shotguns and two 357 Magnums with pure factory-loads.

Thats just a taste of the REAL London for you, the centre of London. This is not just an American thing but considering the US population is ten times bigger there are ten times more guns.

Quote from: weymouth on October 01, 2015, 15:12

No but your point amalgamates to the same old philosophy " ban all firearms"  that argument have been beaten to death and it will never happen, simple as that.

Don't be so defeatist.
One day, enough Americans might come to their senses.

I'm not too sure about that and even if they did there will always be nutters.

I can understand the argument that people should have the freedom to bear arms for whatever principled reason but the idea that it wouldn't prevent shootings to ban people having guns is absolutely rediculous. There is so much evidence from all over the world that more stringent gun laws equals massively  less shooting deaths. There's  even a nice parallel in austrailia where they had liberal (small l) gun laws and tightened them up after shootings with the result of massively less gun deaths. Sadly it has become a tribal political issue in the US and can never be anything else with the massive arms industry involved.

The minute you ban something you create a black market and just imagine the giant size of a black market in the US. Look at countries where you even need a license for air-guns, type Scandinavia, look what happened in Norway.

Recently i strongly suscribe to the cap theory, not daily but in certain time lapse.

Now I have my doubts, and I think what we (some of us) interpret as a cap it is really some kind of algorithm that is trying to give an "equal" income to active uploader users...

When i say "equal" i dont mean the same earning for everyone of us, but a least divide total sales so everyone can get something according (maybe) to your country.

They can control sales restructuring the search algorithm, because top pages means sales...

I develop this new theory because:

1- It is not possilbe to sell any new pic without something like this. Without this just old top pics will be on top searches,new pics have no chance to compete against pics that was downloaded thousands of times (if downloads is the main search criteria).

2- It is not good for the business that the same pic (or just best 100 pics) is sold then advertising campaigns have no variety (asuming that the use microstock pics).

3- Somehow contributors are so important for the business, some people in the forum think that those who are not able to upload top pics about a concept are a waste of time for the business but buyers are not looking only for top pics about a concept, variety is important, hi quality pics, medium quality pics and low quality pics are very important for the business (not talking about resolution when i talk about quality). It is also important to increase the whole number of images in the database because if somebody will buy a suscription to a microstock page, it will be better to buy in this one with  greatest number of images.

So if a new contributor just upload a few images and he have no sell in the first week... he will get out of this business, the system must show him some kind of constant income. So, for that they must see the way to restructure the search engine to warranty him good exposure of his images...

4- My last point is something that for any reason no body talk about in this "CAP Conspirancy" thread and is the fact that when you stop uploading, for some reason your sales drop dramatically. If i dont i can see a good selling rate of my last week uploaded images (for example) but if i stop my last week images just stop sales... is this a way to keep us uploading without think??

New, old?  it still don't add up. So how come then that Adobe/FT can do this?  instantly mix old with new. There must be thousands of times, 24 hours after acceptance I have seen some of my new files mixed with old on the front or second page and whats more: they hav sold instantly.

I mean dont get me wrong, it doesn't bother me, cap or not as long as good money is coming in, which it is. Would just be fun to find out.

Yes ^^ and thats the only way to do it. I do a lot of freelance shoots for advertising-agencies and designers and the ideas one gets when working with these people are quite incredible. Very often I rearrange and re-shoot the entire concept, at my own expense and its just perfect for the rights-managed industry.

I got curious so I looked at some of the stocksy content and as I thought it promotes hip and trendy material, well I went through all that back in the early 2000 just to find out that the buying novelty only last for a couple of years. Lots of time and effort involved, gone to waste.

Anyway I wish some people here good luck with their applications.