Something seem to have changed since monday. I have a small Travel port online since July. Up till now got about 8-10 Sales per week, and this week i'm over 20 in two days. Surprisingly, almost Sales come from images uploaded last week,  and most of them were resubmitted After a rejection

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in the attributes, when you select that you don't have a model or property release, the License type changes automatically to "Rights Managed" and is sold as Editorial.

..... only one keyword box.

 
finally..

$0.02 does not even cover the usage of a shutter actuation (based on cost of shutter repair when one has to repair a broken shutter which inevitably happens after lots of shutter actuations).

Nice math.....
 an average/good camera should resist 250.000 actuations and it costs around 1000$:
it means 0,004$ per actuation. You need to make one photo (that sells at least once) every five actuations just to pay for the camera

@ Zorba: even if this is an english speaking forum, it's not very polite the way you labelled the .PNG file 

You are 100% right, but as a musician and also an amateur composer I never thought there was a such large market.
Anyway I'm glad of it because it takes longer to prepare a good track than most good pictures, and sometimes even than some footage, so it's nice to see that this work is rewarded.

I think I'll try to add something to my portfolio

Did you look on Fotolia contributor page?
For what I have understood sales should be mirrored on both websites.

Remember that Adobe Stock site is still in beta version; some functionalities still don't work.

If I go to my contributor page I can see the total number of sales and amount earned, but the page states "No sales yet" (in Italian).

Anyway Mat from Adobe disclosed his address and have been available for support, you can find info in this topic

http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-contributor-site-now-live!/

...and the same day of the big rejection 2 downloads of travel images...

Ok, so I'm not alone.

I just had a 0% approval on a 230 images batch, while on other platforms it was ranging between 70%-90% approval, and some of the images have already been sold.

They're quite clear on the stuff they want, but my previously batches were composed by similar subjects and got a good approval rate, so I was a little bit concerned.

Probably for travel/nature images it's simply not worth

@ Irina

I agree with you, but I already had the equipment and many pictures sitting in my hard drive

Photography is a hobby for me, and I would already be satisfied if it pays for itself not changing too much my habits.

I'm aware that footage is the present and next future, and already started to produce some, but I didn't have an archive to choose from and upload

Anyway in the future I think I will keep on producing both, just because I like both

Hi!
I want to share my experience as a newbie in Microstock so far, hoping that it could help other people just approaching this world.

I became aware of this kind of agencies some years ago, but thinking my images weren't good enough I didn't apply for a long time. Some months ago I decided to dedicate some time to see how it works: I read a lot of blogs and advices, edited and cleaned up my images archive and dived in.
I bought my first DSLR in 2008 so my hard disk was quite full of images:in reality not very stock oriented, but mainly travel, animals and landscapes  pictures.
To my surprise I was approved at Istock and Shutterstock at the first try and in June I started to upload to as many agencies as I could, setting a goal of 200 images online (per Agency) by the end of August. Right now I have about 500 images spread across 11 agencies, with a maximum of 300-350 images in a single agency: approval rate and selected files vary greatly from one site to the other, and sometimes my best seller with an agency is rejected by all the others. Misteries of Microstock!
I have to admit that my portfolio doesn't look great to my eyes when I compare it to the other images on the web, but one of the big surprise in this world is that the author perspective is really different from buyers one, and you may find out that an image that you consider just below average sells well while the ones that you'd print big for your home walls are not interesting for the market.

Anyway things got encouraging right from the beginning and I kept working on it.

After exactly 3 months since my first upload I reached my 100th download and below I share my experience with the different agencies:


1) Shutterstock : 55 DLs , mostly subscription but a big SOD (Single&Other Download) made me reach the first payout in August, already. It has been the most encouraging agency at the beginning, with the first sale just after a couple of days, but now things have started to slow down. Quite fast review time, with an average approval rate (about 60%)

2) Fotolia : 30 DLs, less then SS but with an often higher commission, sales are not so regular, but quite steady.Quite fast review time, approval rate is almost the same as SS, but they do chose different images. My best seller on Fotolia (7 DL) has been rejected twice by SS .

3) 123RF   : 7 DLs, quite easy upload and submission (no categories) but not very fast. Higher approval rate.

4) iStock :  4 DLs, quite good considering that I had only 30 images online until last week. Review time is painfully long, I had hundreds of images waiting for many weeks. The submission through Deepmeta is quite painful, too, since it doesn't recognize all the keywords in metadata; at least when you have finished your work offline you don't need to do anything else. Approval rate is quite high, the only rejections I have are due to errors in editorial captions (they don't like capital letters like SS wants)

5) BigStock : 2 DLs, slow sales but I knew it in advance. Not the best submission interface but exceptionally fast review: I wonder if it's really done by human reviewers.

6) DepositPhotos : 1 DL, slow sales and slow review time: newly approved images are released one at a time. Submission quite easy.

7) Photodune : 1 DL , same as DP, but review time is a little less.

8 ) Dreamstime : No sales. This has been my biggest disappointment: it's one of the top agencies and as far as I knew it should have been better than others for my style of images (nature, landscapes,...). Long review time and high approval rate, but with no results up till now.

9) Canstock   : No sales. Not great expectations that were confirmed, and very slow portfolio growth (25 submissions daily limit and slow review time). I continue to upload only becouse it's quite easy and no categories asked, otherwise I'd already given up.

10) Alamy     : No sales even if views counter is quite high. Painful submission interface, the only one that oblige you to add "most important keywords" online. Thinking of giving up, even if their approval rate is nearly 100%.

11) Pond5     : No sales. Signed up mainly to upload some Real Time and Time-lapse Videos, but in the meanwhile uploaded also images. The submission is quite  easy (no categories), but the review time is the longest among all agencies. And approval rate is the lowest (abut 30%).I do not quite understand their placement in Images market.



Overall, I was quite encouraged that things were starting to move even with a small portfolio and in summer time, so I tried to increase numbers in portfolio and was quite sure that September would have been a great month, but at the moment it seems difficult that September will be better than August. Anyway, I've finished uploading pictures from my archive: next goal is to keep producing and reach 1000 images online by the end  of the year, hoping that sales will follow.

Alex