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Messages - Minsc
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101
« on: March 13, 2019, 14:46 »
With video, it's incredibly tough. Too much production time and content gets outdated too quickly. A few years ago, people were happy with 1080p and now everyone is downloading 4K. It's not that sustainable in the long run so you constantly have to upload.
With images, you have a better chance, but like many have said...you need time to build a portfolio and establish your position in the search rankings. You have to be among the best at what you do and you have be willing to spend thousands of hours on your work. It gets harder everyday with so much content in the market, but it's not impossible. Just don't expect immediate results and don't get discouraged.
I have a mixed portfolio with a strong focus on design. I'm not close to $150k, but it's a reachable goal provided the market doesn't change too much in the next 5-10 years.
102
« on: March 11, 2019, 01:13 »
They've been almost too consistent for me. Barely any ups or downs month after month.
They can't take on the big guys, so I don't see much upside with with 123RF. I think they've been cutting review staff which is probably why images don't get reviewed for months. I just hope they continue to remain consistent.
103
« on: March 05, 2019, 12:17 »
I saw a pretty big decline.
I've been tracking my overall ranking and it hasn't changed much. The search results have not changed.
How do you track your overall ranking on SS?
Looks like sales are back to normal again.
If you have a partial or complete vector portfolio, you can use m-rank.net to track your position.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
104
« on: March 04, 2019, 18:44 »
Anyone else seeing their sales take a dive since SS introduced the buyer's page with the not so obvious filter buttons which appeared last week?
How come mine shows more images, is the filter doing that? Do you have a small monitor?
It's based on monitor size. I have 3 images (with sidebar) on the first row in my standard 15 inch laptop.
105
« on: March 04, 2019, 12:30 »
I saw a pretty big decline.
I've been tracking my overall ranking and it hasn't changed much. The search results have not changed.
I think the biggest culprit is that stupid giant sidebar that took up the valuable search result space. This created more scrolling and buyers are scrolling less often to the bottom, and download less images that appear at the bottom of each page. If they scroll less to the bottom, they're also less likely to go to page 2.
This is a user experience problem. I hope SS revert it and they will if they see a decline in OD, SOD and Enhanced sales.
106
« on: February 17, 2019, 15:28 »
in addiction payment are on hold but deduction are already active....what a great company.....really sometimes i hope we will be back to communism.......workers contributor are crap...while most of these companies pour money down the trash for ads and testimonials forgetting the importance of us. as i said we deserved all of this for accepting 10 years ago to sell photos for penny...luckily thing s will change soon cause free photos will destroy completely this business
Please don't. The last thing you want is the equally-shared miseries of communism. If Adobe made a mistake, they have the right to correct it. For that whole week, my earnings were abnormally high. I'm sure everyone was happy to see nice sales days, but it was too good to be true. That doesn't mean Adobe should pay the price for it. I can understand why people are upset, but principal is principal.
107
« on: February 15, 2019, 20:45 »
Logged into the Fotolia website and I finally saw what I owe Adobe. Looks like I have a bit of catching up to do.
What looks like a new BME turned out to be a disappointment.
108
« on: February 15, 2019, 03:50 »
I don't even see a balance anymore. I hope they get things back in order before the end of the day.
I don't mind them taking back some money if it's fraud related, but they need to be more transparent about it and let us know which sales are affected.
109
« on: February 14, 2019, 14:56 »
This February is looking really good so far. Haven't checked my account in over a week and I was pleasantly surprised when I did yesterday.
110
« on: February 01, 2019, 16:46 »
January was rainy, but sales are good. A 28% increase from the same time last year.
111
« on: February 01, 2019, 15:08 »
I think you underestimate the amount of effort the U.S. put into clean renewable energy compared to other countries.
The US has certainly done some, but it is a fact that Trump and Reagan before him are rolling back mileage requirements for vehicles. The US would have lead the world in this after Jimmy Carter was president - he even had solar panels installed on the White House - but those were all dismantled by Reagan solely to benefit energy companies. The use of solar and wind power in the US has occurred mostly in spite of the government rather than being aided by it, although there have been some tax credits passed that do help a lot (currently being phased out). It is a shame that our efforts are thwarted by companies protecting their own profits at the expense of the planet.
Solar is not nearly as efficient and it takes up land. Wind is also not as efficient and the turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds per year. Nuclear is dangerous as we've seen in Japan. The world doesn't have any solutions to remove its reliance on fossil fuels, and until it does, neither coal or gasoline are going away.
I'm not a big fan of some of the huge solar farms that take up a ton of land. There is one visible from Joshua Trees National Park and another one near Indianapolis airport that really stick out. But you could put solar cells on every rooftop without using an inch of additional land. That wouldn't solve all our energy needs, but it would allow the most polluting power plants to be closed and would reduce peak demand in the summer, limiting the strain on the power grid. Distributed solar would have many benefits, not the least of which would be tons of jobs installing all of the panels.
Yesterday I had someone over to work on my geothermal system. It is always difficult to get geothermal experts out because it is not as popular as it should be, due to the high initial cost I assume. I asked him what proportion of people use geothermal and he said in our area it was around 3%. I couldn't believe it was that low. He also said that a lot of smaller, rural power companies are making plans to tax all of their customers a certain amount and using the money to help people install geothermal loops. The reasoning is that geothermal would reduce peak demand during the winter (and to a lesser extent during the summer) and this would lower costs to the companies so that they could reduce rates overall. That was the first I had heard of that or the concept that spending money up front to install geothermal could lower power rates for everyone in the future.
Worries about wind turbines killing birds are overblown. The first time I was near the base of a wind turbine I expected to see piles of dead birds, and instead I saw none. More recent work has shown that the number of birds killed by wind turbines per gigawatt of electricity produced is 20 times less than those killed by traditional power generation. The world has plenty of potential solutions, they just need to be implemented and for that we need good governments that are not beholden to special interests.
The main reason why they had to roll back mileage requirements because it's technically not possible to achieve it today. Unless you want every car to drive like a Prius and even the Prius has reached its limits, it cannot be achieved. The weight of the vehicle is also a huge factor and hybrids gets less and less efficient with more and more weight. The max efficiency of lithium ion batteries in cars can achieve about 40-50 mpg on a regular size sedan today and that's with very careful driving. Mazda with its HCCI SkyActiv-X engine may be promising if combined with a battery, but you can only fit so much into a vehicle. Unless battery technology improves around the world, it's impossible to meet the Obama era requirements. Here is a chart of energy breakdown: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/images/charts/electricity-generation-by-major-energy-source.pngHere is a chart of renewable energy breakdown: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/images/charts/electricity-generation-renewable-sources.pngSolar makes up a tiny portion of the renewable section. It's just not efficient, neither is geothermal. The majority of renewable energy comes from hydro-electric with wind following behind. But if you look at the overall chart, the huge majority of energy comes from fossil fuels and it's not because of just politics. It's because it's much more efficient and it's required to meet the needs of the energy grid. People driving Electric vehicles think they're completely green, but all they did was just transfer the energy production elsewhere. A power plants burns fossil fuels so people can charge their vehicles at home. The entire airline industry runs on nothing but gasoline and short of installing a nuclear reactor on every airplane, their reliance on gasoline is not going away anytime soon. I want to see the industry make a change as well, into more environmentally friendly ways of upkeeping the powergrid. However, I will not deny the reality of the situation. We NEED fossil fuels right now and it's the main reason why governments are fighting for oil. It's the reason why China and Russia are supporting Maduro, so they can get a piece of that petrol pie in Venezuela for cheap. Sadly, it is going to run out eventually and without an alternative, we're going to be in a bad situation.
112
« on: January 29, 2019, 20:00 »
He should have been the one held responsible for letting PG&E get off easy and then signed a bill to bailout PG&E from lawsuits at the expense of tax payers before his departure. That's corruption at its finest.
Brown definitely did some shady things and should be called out on them, but "corruption at its finest" I think has to be reserved for Trump - nobody at the state or Federal level seems to have been as corrupt as Trump, and I suspect we have only heard the tip of the iceberg so far.
I don't believe we are retreating. We pulled out of the Paris Agreement because we were asked to give the world $100 billion dollars so they can do whatever they want with that money. And some of that money was going to China and India, who does doing little to curtail their pollution. Everyone is blaming the U.S. because we won't give them free money, but giant economies who claim "third world country" status like China does little to contribute. We can do our part to curtail emissions, but if the the rest of the world want the U.S. to lead, it must be a situation where we're not giving $100 billion dollars away.
Pulling out is definitely retreating.
Your idea that we were being asked to pay $100 billion so other countries could do whatever they want is factually inaccurate. The US actually paid $1 billion to a fund that was being used for projects to limit emissions in less developed countries, and our total pledge was only $3 billion. The plan if I remember correctly was for all countries worldwide to contribute $100 billion, but all of that was to go to mitigating and reducing climate change, not for anything they wanted. Everyone is blaming the US because it is a fact that we use way more energy per capita than any other country, including India and China combined. Of course those two countries have total carbon outputs that are high because of their very large populations and they need to be part of the solution. The main problems with the Paris accords were that it allowed too many countries to slide, had no hard goals and no enforcement mechanism, but at least it was a start.
France has a plan to ban gas and diesel cars by 2040 and several other countries (e.g., Norway) plan to do it even earlier. Even India and China have plans to ban gas and diesel vehicles. A couple days ago Germany announced a plan to ban coal use by 2038 and many other countries have done the same. That is what leadership looks like - countries taking firm steps to combat global warming. The US is going the wrong direction, and pulling out of the Paris accords just makes us look weak and impotent.
It may not be $100 billion for the U.S., but were were going to pay a good part of it over 10 years. With China and India claiming "third world country" status, they didn't have to pay anything. They were getting money. I think you underestimate the amount of effort the U.S. put into clean renewable energy compared to other countries. I've visited China a couple years ago and they're not even close to being ready for ban of diesel/gas cars. Neither is India, where they can't even keep the Ganges clean. It's all talk and there has been no progress. That's not leadership. We haven't used coal in our daily lives in decades. The world knows that we have about 75 years of oil left and the reduction of reliance on gasoline is on the map for most of the world powers. It needs to figure out solutions and if there isn't any, we're going to be facing a Mad Max scenario. There will be an energy crisis in the future. Coal and other fossil fuels are used to maintain the power grid. Solar is not nearly as efficient and it takes up land. Wind is also not as efficient and the turbines kill hundreds of thousands of birds per year. Nuclear is dangerous as we've seen in Japan. The world doesn't have any solutions to remove its reliance on fossil fuels, and until it does, neither coal or gasoline are going away.
113
« on: January 29, 2019, 17:09 »
We've gotten so much rain in California in the last few months that people has finally shut up about blaming global warming for everything.
When ice melts, water evaporates and there will be more rain. Scientists have said we should expect more rain due to global warming.
Water can evaporate anywhere. There is a giant ocean of water where it can evaporate from. Global Warming scientists are so inconsistent. First, people blame the lack of rain on it, then too much rain on it. It was supposed to be the dry places get drier and the web places get wetter. Now the dry places get wetter and it's still global warming. Looks like global warming has everything covered. Cold, hot, rain, snow, hail, hurricanes, drought, tornados. What isn't global warming these days? People need to stop crying wolf and people need to stop believing everything they're told.
114
« on: January 28, 2019, 22:58 »
The reality is that climate change is a natural phenomenon. The climate of the planet has been changing for billions of years and it will continue to change in the next million years.
There is no denying that climate change is real, but at the same time, there isn't much that we can do about it. We can try to cut back on emissions and pollution, but it needs to be done around the world and not just be used as a political tool in the United States.
This is certainly true, and there have been many instances of dramatic natural climate change during recorded history. For example, the "year without a summer" in the northern hemisphere in 1816 resulted from a volcanic eruption that caused extensive famines due to crop failures. The explosion of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883 depressed temperatures in the northern hemisphere by over 1 C in some areas and it took almost five years to get back to normal. The "little ice age" in Europe lasted around 500 years - those paintings of people skating on the canals in the Netherlands from the 1600s and 1700s were because they really could do it then. There are lots of other examples and all completely natural. And of course we seem to be in an interglacial period anyway. However, the changes during the past 30-50 years are more extensive and due almost entirely to people. It will be impossible to provide an exact estimate of how much is due to people with a backdrop of natural changes but we can be confident that much of what is occurring now is preventable.
Climate change is a real phenomenon not just a political tool, but I agree that the whole world needs to do something, not just the US. We should be leading on this, not retreating.
And yet, people always used it as a political tool. Former Governor Jerry Brown immediately blamed Global Warming for the wildfires when he was the one responsible for vetoing the fire prevention bill in 2016 that would have forced PG&E to cut trees along their power lines. It was classic deflection to shift the blame from himself to Trump, and it worked because almost everyone in California hates Trump. He should have been the one held responsible for letting PG&E get off easy and then signed a bill to bailout PG&E from lawsuits at the expense of tax payers before his departure. That's corruption at its finest. When it's immeasurable on how much humans affect climate change, that makes it a fairly abstract concept. We have more cars than ever, more humans than ever. We can all do our part by driving hybrids or electric, but we can't control what other countries do. By comparison, the U.S. use refined petrol while many parts of the world use low quality petrol that greatly contributes to the pollution of this planet. The human population will continue to grow and there is little we can do. It seems like over-population of the planet is inevitable and we end up with some sci-fi scenario we've seen in so many movies. I don't believe we are retreating. We pulled out of the Paris Agreement because we were asked to give the world $100 billion dollars so they can do whatever they want with that money. And some of that money was going to China and India, who does doing little to curtail their pollution. Everyone is blaming the U.S. because we won't give them free money, but giant economies who claim "third world country" status like China does little to contribute. We can do our part to curtail emissions, but if the the rest of the world want the U.S. to lead, it must be a situation where we're not giving $100 billion dollars away.
115
« on: January 28, 2019, 17:05 »
This is one thing that SS is dropping the ball on. I've flagged so many infringers over the years and it's starting to make me numb. People were straight up stealing or tracing my work. It unbelievable how many people out there think it's okay to do this kind of thing. And they all come from the same few countries.
SS need to implement some kind of machine learning into their approval process to automatically flag similars before they get approved. They should ban any contributor who attempts to upload infringing work so that we don't have to deal with this nonsense. For a company with so much money, they have the resources to do this.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but the tech is already implemented. All the major sites have a search visually similar images or footage option. When SS lists similars I don't believe they use a keyword or tag based metadata function. I think it is image recognition. If it's not robust enough maybe they should look at something we are looking at implementing from TinEye. If you don't know who TinEye is you really should.
https://services.tineye.com/MatchEngine
As some have alluded to in another forum, the real question is how so many of these are making it past the review process.
Something else many of you might be interested in is https://binded.com. I dare say a fusion of these technologies (plus others) on a single platform is not far off and is exactly what the microstock industry needs right now.
You're right, it is implemented... on the search side. I don't know the inner workings of the approval side, but if that tool was available during the approval process, a lot of these thieves would have caught before they had their first approval. Coming from working in a tech company, we have lousy internal tools and there isn't a lot of resources dedicate to it.
116
« on: January 28, 2019, 15:58 »
What to do about it? The rational world already decided on a way forward - the Paris accords, signed by almost 200 countries. Those are not mandatory and are far from perfect but at least are a start. To make a real effort we should eliminate coal and other fossil fuel sources as much as possible, plant trees, and promote birth control to reduce the size of the human population and slow its growth rate. I'm not sure what else - I'm sure the experts have many other ideas for what can be done. Wind and solar power can make a great contribution - come out to the midwest some time and you will see all the farmers making tons of money having wind turbines on their land. They should provide tax incentives for the development of solar roof tiles and installation of solar panels on every rooftop.
The Paris Agreement was useless. They only reason why countries signed up was to get free money from the U.S. It treated countries like China and India (The biggest polluters) as "third world countries" and they were basically free to pollute for the next 20 years and when the time comes, they were not obligated to do anything. It did absolutely nothing to stop anyone from polluting. That only way to make things work is to make sure the biggest polluters get reigned in instead of given them a free pass. The biggest issues affecting the world are in China and India, including pollution, birthrates and heavy reliance on coal. And we saw what happened when France decided to raise the fuel tax...people riot in Paris. There needs to be balance instead of forcing something that doesn't work. There are more trees now than we had 35 years ago, than 100 years ago. As our usage of paper go down and it will continue to go down as our reliance on digital continue to grow, the tree population will just be fine.
117
« on: January 28, 2019, 15:37 »
Global warming is way more of a US national emergency than any problems on the southern border (I won't even mention gun violence).
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59xpxa/the-next-financial-crisis-could-be-caused-by-climate-change
I wouldn't trust anything from Vice. That's as a bad a website as you can get for any kind of opinion. The reality is that climate change is a natural phenomenon. The climate of the planet has been changing for billions of years and it will continue to change in the next million years. There is no denying that climate change is real, but at the same time, there isn't much that we can do about it. We can try to cut back on emissions and pollution, but it needs to be done around the world and not just be used as a political tool in the United States. People use Global Warming is such abstract ways that it doesn't make any rational sense. I'll give you one example. People said that the wildfires in California were caused by global warming. But no, they were caused by people being careless, they were caused by strong winds knocking down power lines, they were caused by a severe overpopulation of trees constantly fighting for the same water resources. And because of the lack of water resources, many of these trees are dying and environmentalists fight to prevent any kind of tree thinning. When it comes down to it, people were filing lawsuits against PG&E for some of the wild fires. It's funny how money bring out the logic in people. And the reason why PG&E was so careless was because Jerry Brown vetoed a fire safety bill in 2016 that would have held companies like PG&E to be more responsible. People just ignored that fact that PG&E executives were working with Jerry Brown at the time and they were some of the people responsible for the wild fires in California in 2018. We've gotten so much rain in California in the last few months that people has finally shut up about blaming global warming for everything.
118
« on: January 28, 2019, 14:44 »
This is one thing that SS is dropping the ball on. I've flagged so many infringers over the years and it's starting to make me numb. People were straight up stealing or tracing my work. It unbelievable how many people out there think it's okay to do this kind of thing. And they all come from the same few countries.
SS need to implement some kind of machine learning into their approval process to automatically flag similars before they get approved. They should ban any contributor who attempts to upload infringing work so that we don't have to deal with this nonsense. For a company with so much money, they have the resources to do this.
119
« on: January 09, 2019, 21:09 »
The activity graph doesn't work, but the downloads and earnings graph works fine.
120
« on: January 08, 2019, 16:42 »
Try to think like a buyer. Would you buy your own work?
There are too many duplicates in your portfolio. It confuses me, it confuses the buyer and everyone looking at your portfolio. Nobody look at sets, they just care about what they're looking for and what's in your portfolio. When I go into your portfolio, the presentation is overwhelming and I just want to leave.
Understand the market instead of doubling down on your niches. What's the point of 1127 images of the Lofoten Islands? Does anyone care? Simple 3D illustrations (unless they're amazing) are so 2000's. It stopped being trendy about 5 years ago and people have moved on.
You're basically fighting against yourself and competing against yourself. Focus on quality instead of quantity. You have over 100,000 images and very few of them stand out.
121
« on: January 07, 2019, 02:29 »
Hey Mat, any updates on Weekly Rankings and Search within our portfolios? Finding an image in the portfolio is pretty much impossible right now.
122
« on: December 21, 2018, 17:38 »
Probably due to competition from other websites and other contributors.
123
« on: November 30, 2018, 13:24 »
By some kind of miracle, November became my BME on SS. I knew it was going to be a good month, but this exceeded expectations.
AS had a good month, but nothing to write about compare to last month.
124
« on: November 28, 2018, 15:46 »
New content does sell. Of course, not all new content are created equal, so most new content won't sell. The good quality content with good keywording will find its way to the top. It could take weeks or it could take months, but it will find its way.
Don't expect things to go back to the "good old days". The industry was in infancy back then. Now it's a mature adult. It's much harder to please and it demands more from all contributors.
New content doesn't sell like it used to, "upload today, sell tomorrow" because there's much more competition, much more established old content, yet new content can sell, like old content. I think some people are looking at old content and past sales?
Maybe we should be looking at new content current sales, vs old content current sales. I know that some of my older files that used to sell more often, don't anymore. I also have a few new files that have moved from, new upload, into passing old files that are top 20 in earnings. That's because some of the old are slowing down, while some of the new are gaining.
But what I'm trying to say is, current sales of old vs current sales of new, instead of looking at past history as a comparison, because the good old days are absolutely gone, done, over and never coming back. History in this business might not be an indication of the future, just a reflection of the past. 
good content don't sell because any mental healthy person won't even bother to look for a good file in the mess of new images, so they straight go to popular....look fotolia most sold images of week..always the same stuff....christmas sells mostly 100 photos establish who are in page 1. with this scheme is impossible to increase sales constantly working hard. impossible. in ss i always selle 90% of files older than 2 years.it looks like having a small fixed income , is not a case i will end with the same earning of last year and i mean same plus minus 50 dollar, and same number of download, despite much more content added. i even doubt that uploading 50k images would be any difference. even if they were good quality.
till they abolish popular and add a curated or serious best reference files, nothing will change, and i say this knowing that i will lose the constant flow of my popular images
I don't see the problem with the Popular category. It's what people buys and it's what relevant. Why should new files that are unproven get precedence over files that sells well? I was on a website that decided to sort their search by rotating images instead of by quality/popularity. The result was a complete failure. All the long time contributors income decreased dramatically and their search result showed low quality images. The website traffic dropped by half in a year because of low quality images in the search. The communist approach doesn't work in real life or search engines. If a contributor want to rise above the noise, they must create good content and meticulously keyword heck out of it. Automatic keywording tools don't work, neither does keyword suggestions. If you're not putting the same effort into keywording like you do your work, your work will get lost in the flood of new images.
125
« on: November 27, 2018, 13:48 »
the problem in micro stock is always the same...new content don't sell...established photo with many popular photos high in search engine still earn a lot despite uploading nothing...while to increase sales with new content is practically impossible....one moth of christmas and new year production with content who 5 years ago would have sold like hotcakes, today produce practically zero sales. when you upload content if they are not sold after 10 minutes they go in th garbage between snapshot i cannot even understand why they are uploaded fist and accepted secondly. personally i m shooting more and more for rm and i hope been accepted by stocksy this year. i worked a lot this year and so far i have just a 10% earning gain compared to last year and practically same download.
New content does sell. Of course, not all new content are created equal, so most new content won't sell. The good quality content with good keywording will find its way to the top. It could take weeks or it could take months, but it will find its way. Don't expect things to go back to the "good old days". The industry was in infancy back then. Now it's a mature adult. It's much harder to please and it demands more from all contributors.
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