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Messages - BalkanskiMacak
51
« on: September 25, 2019, 10:52 »
So, based on my experience, here are a few numbers and rankings in terms of performance:
total revenue
1. SS
2. IS
3. Alamy
4. BS
5. DT
6. AS
7. 123RF
8. DP
(SS, IS and Alamy represent cca 88% of the revenue)
2019 revenue
1. SS
2. IS
3. Alamy
4. BS
5. DT
6. AS
7. DP
8. 123RF
(SS, IS and Alamy represent cca 85% of the revenue)
total RPI
1. IS
2. SS
3. Alamy
4. AS
5. BS
6. DT
7. 123RF
8. DP
(there's only a $0,017 difference between SS and IS RPI)
2019 RPI
1. SS
2. IS
3. Alamy
4. AS
5. BS
6. DT
7. DP
8. 123RF
(there's only a $0,002 difference between SS and IS RPI, there's only a $0,001 difference between DT and DP RPI)
I'm mainly in editorial (cca 2/3 of my portfolio).
To summarize, both in terms of revenue and RPI, SS and IS are leading, being slowly competed by Alamy, even though there's still some gap between them.
In terms of middle tier, AS is giving me some great hopes, BS is getting ok as a complement to the main platforms, while DT is kind of coming back.
Then, talking about race to the bottom, I hardly see any future for DP and 123RF.
So, in the end, even though I hate IS due to the disastrous treatment they reserve to contributors and their huge and unforgivable failures, I am forced to say they are still among the top platforms to contribute to, with absolute and relative numbers that are good in comparison to most of the platforms...
52
« on: September 17, 2019, 10:10 »
This month is definitely a roller coaster for me as well. It terribly started, not only on SS, it was the first time, for instance, that I was recording a weekly revenue growth below 0.4% (it doesn't even happen during Christmas). On SS, however, it started to spectacularly recover last week, and it seems to continue.
The weird thing is that I am having a lot of single & other, not only in terms of revenue, but as well in terms of volume. It's the first time such a thing happens this year.
Last time it happened, I was facing the same pattern (unusually low sales, and suddenly plenty of single and others that appear, covering all the previous losses). It can definitely be a coincidence, but I have some feeling SS is actually using the single & other column to do some reconciliation following some bugs and failures. At the moment, it's just a theory, but it would make some kind of sense.
53
« on: September 17, 2019, 07:53 »
For a company like Getty that is supposed to "work with" photo journalists, it's indeed a pretty big fail to participate in an even located in one of the worst countries in terms of freedom of the press...
54
« on: September 07, 2019, 07:18 »
That said, the extra effort required to get new techniques, locations, topics may not be worth it if you sell an image for $0.20 or a video for $0.6.
+100
Especially as most things not well covered or oversaturated have limited buyer interest, so pointless in Micro.
I'm sure there are some desirable niches to find, but not many, and I suspect most of them would be very difficult and/or expensive to get pemission to shoot.
I definitely disagree. From my personal experience, there are plenty of niches that are definitely worth exploiting, some of them being huge.
For obvious reasons, I won't say too much, but I'd say that the key is "local", to take some pictures that are country, or even region specific.
From my experience, I only got two failures: France and Ukraine. The French failure is probably due to the fact that there are strong local actors, mainly the huge databases of the local press and the AFP giant, that go, very often, past the simple news material. The Ukrainian failure is probably due to the fact there are proportionally way more contributors than the local market demand.
The only issue with this comes from the keywording. You need to be able to use general keywords and very specific keywords, and it takes research. As a result, it's pretty hard for me to caption more than 10 files per hour. Calculating the revenue, it's however worth it. To summarize, I have noticed that even the "duck in pond" pictures can work if they are keyworded with precision. One of the first pictures I got on microstock back in the time gave me an RPI that is probably 10 times higher than my average, mainly because of the precise keywording. There are, furthermore, plenty of other topics that are usually extremely ordinary, but that are giving a good return on investment as long as you have a clean shot and good keywords.
When the agencies talk about "authenticity", they are kind of right. It takes however a bit more than just doing less processed snapshots or integrating "diversity people" in a picture. In the end, the buyers are getting pretty sensitive to this.
To summarize, to indentify a niche, just explore the local market potentials and the situation of the local competition.
I'd certainly go along with "local" its an area you know better than your competitors and one where you can get images at far less cost. The days of recouping the cost of a holiday in exotic places is long gone I fear. Bus Fare maybe ;-).
It depends actually. I got some cases where my travel was repaid in less than six months. There's even the question of the inspiration. When you're not in your usual environment, you may see things that look "typical" but that will seem usual to local photographers. I remember asking in North America to some photographers what would they describe as a typical local landscape, and most of them were not able to tell me, while I was able to see it, as it was unusual to me. Actually, most of the "local" shots that I'm doing in the places I'm going are not landmarks, but rather "ordinary" landscapes, urban or not. Actually, it's still possible to travel to do stock, the question is however to plan everything and to target your destinations, keeping in mind there's a risk you gonna lose money.
55
« on: September 06, 2019, 12:39 »
"Over 293,187,520 royalty-free images with 1,180,191 new stock images added weekly."
Im sure that was roughly 1.5M recently so they maybe 20% or so down. Thats not as big a change as i'd expected.
Maybe because similars are not representing such a huge amount in terms of percentage... Maybe because there are way bigger reasons than similars to blame for the market...
56
« on: September 06, 2019, 11:41 »
That said, the extra effort required to get new techniques, locations, topics may not be worth it if you sell an image for $0.20 or a video for $0.6.
+100
Especially as most things not well covered or oversaturated have limited buyer interest, so pointless in Micro.
I'm sure there are some desirable niches to find, but not many, and I suspect most of them would be very difficult and/or expensive to get pemission to shoot.
I definitely disagree. From my personal experience, there are plenty of niches that are definitely worth exploiting, some of them being huge. For obvious reasons, I won't say too much, but I'd say that the key is "local", to take some pictures that are country, or even region specific. From my experience, I only got two failures: France and Ukraine. The French failure is probably due to the fact that there are strong local actors, mainly the huge databases of the local press and the AFP giant, that go, very often, past the simple news material. The Ukrainian failure is probably due to the fact there are proportionally way more contributors than the local market demand. The only issue with this comes from the keywording. You need to be able to use general keywords and very specific keywords, and it takes research. As a result, it's pretty hard for me to caption more than 10 files per hour. Calculating the revenue, it's however worth it. To summarize, I have noticed that even the "duck in pond" pictures can work if they are keyworded with precision. One of the first pictures I got on microstock back in the time gave me an RPI that is probably 10 times higher than my average, mainly because of the precise keywording. There are, furthermore, plenty of other topics that are usually extremely ordinary, but that are giving a good return on investment as long as you have a clean shot and good keywords. When the agencies talk about "authenticity", they are kind of right. It takes however a bit more than just doing less processed snapshots or integrating "diversity people" in a picture. In the end, the buyers are getting pretty sensitive to this. To summarize, to indentify a niche, just explore the local market potentials and the situation of the local competition.
57
« on: August 30, 2019, 07:21 »
So, here are my two cents about what is SS doing. It's my own interpretation from what I have seen, the evidence is, of course, hard to find, but it may be close to the reality, way more than all the radical statements I have seen here.
Basically, they started something like two years ago now a war on portfolio size, that was quickly followed by most of the main stock agencies.
Why so? Competing: with other microstock websites of course, but also with free websites. By doing so, their goal was to get as much content as possible to become kind of universal. You have any request? We have the solution, unlike IS, DT, etc. or unlike Pixabay.
The second part of the plan, I guess, was to setup an algorithm that could exclude, almost immediately, all the rubbish. That could explain why they have made that many changes to the algorithm, at least till the end of 2018. I got the feeling it became less radical after.
The results? Well, they are a bit complicated to see for the moment. As far as I remember, the last results were showing a 30% increase of the portfolio for a 3% increase of the revenue.
That being said, on the long term run, the strategy is not that stupid, the only issue will be for SS, eventually, to get rid of all the "rubbish" content that is pretty costly in terms of server space while not generating anything. It's as well a good opportunity to get rid of a part of the reviewing process that has been handled by completely incompetent people. An example: I tried recently to resubmit files that were rejected in 2015 for their quality, big surprise: not only they got accepted, but even more, they are among my best performers this year. Conclusion: the heavy process that was existing in 2015 was not only a pain in the ass for me, but as well for SS, given they had to pay the guys, and they lost some sales opportunities.
Then, why didn't it work, at least not for the moment? At the contrary of most of the people here, I don't think it's because of similar content. All the agencies now are accepting similar content! I recently uploaded by mistake the same batch twice, it got accepted everywhere... except Bigstock that flagged a few pictures as similar. Yes, even Adobe didn't see anything. So, judging by the differences of financial results from all the agencies, there is something else.
To me, that something else is pretty clear: if Shutterstock is failing, it's because there is a heavy competition in the agencies' world. If we look at the market, in fact, there hasn't been a lot of agencies that closed down/got bought over the past years, meaning there are still heavy fights on the market.
The future? Well, it's hard to say. It seems SS is trying to revert their acceptance strategy. It may be a good thing about similar content, but I got as well the feeling they became again completely stupid on other issues, especially for the commercial licenses (like the infamous "Focus: The main subject of this image is not in focus." for panoramas that were completely sharp).
About the big picture, the global financial situation will have an impact, if the recession gets confirmed. In the microstock market, there will be casualties. Either some major platforms will simply shut down (my forecast: 123RF will be among the first) or will be bought and merged by other platforms (my forecast: DT will be bought, even though I wouldn't be surprised if Getty were to sell IS).
So, SS, in this game, is definitely not on the verge of collapsing. That being said, fewer agencies may not be such good news for the contributors, as there will be less bargain power facing platforms that will be in an almost monopolistic situation.
58
« on: July 30, 2019, 08:35 »
TBH, I don't even see why we should be preoccupied by such mediocre examples, because they are not really a threat to people doing stock seriously.
On one side, the guy complaining about the sales is very likely to abandon pretty fast. Most of his pictures, due to his low skills in photo taking, editing and keywording, won't even be visible.
On the other side, that dear Grossinger seems to miss a lot of points about stock and algorithm. He's focused on volume, on which he's partially true. You need a lot of pictures, indeed, it is a major parameter. In the end, however, he does not understand that he's drowning his statistics and that most of his pictures will go down the rankings pretty fast, once they won't be anymore that "fresh". We can see pretty easily that he's not doing very well: when I search the query "grossinger shutterstock" on Google for last week's results, I can find only two uses of his pictures. It's just a sample, as many websites won't credit photographers nor agencies. In the same time, when I perform the same query for my Shutterstock name, I find three times more uses, while my portfolio on SS is two to three times smaller.
So, to summarize, he's pretty irritating, because he pretends to know everything on stock while being on purpose on a single platform (he posted somewhere else: "Yep, I'm taking and submitting as many images as I can and have little time for other activity. So I don't waste my time on other agencies when I can use that time right here on Shutterstock to submit more images."), offering uninteresting pictures and missing out essential points of market strategy. However, I don't see him as a threat, given he doesn't seem to question himself.
These kind of contributors, however, are much more a threat to Shutterstock, that is hosting non valuable assets on its servers, but I will gladly let these corporate vultures (SS) deal with it, given that, in the end, such examples of newbies won't do me real harm.
59
« on: July 26, 2019, 07:58 »
I confirm there's an issue: the thread isn't visible anymore for me on the list of the most recent messages. However, it's still accessible through my browsing history and through the normal path on the forum.
60
« on: July 26, 2019, 05:45 »
Hello
oui je suis dans les microstocks depuis fin 2010 et pour l'instant a se passe toujours bien
Dans quel pays de l'est es-tu situ (par curiosit) ?
Oui moi aussi je suis curieux.
Je suis Kiev, en Ukraine.
Quelqu'un d'autre ici ?
Je suis en Serbie :-) J'ai quelques centaines de photos d'Ukraine (de l'ditorial suite plusieurs voyages lis la situation gopolitique), mais je dois avouer que l'Ukraine n'est clairement pas le plus rentable de mes portfolios ;-)
61
« on: July 24, 2019, 17:47 »
Bonjour bonjour et bienvenue ;-)
Alors, je suis franais, mme si je n'habite plus en France depuis longtemps (je suis exil en Europe de l'est).
Concrtement, lorsque je dis en France que je fais du stock, j'ai l'impression que c'est beaucoup moins rpandu que dans la plupart des pays de l'ancien bloc, je pense qu'il y a pas mal de raisons qui l'expliquent.
Aprs, peut-tre que certains ici seront capables de me contredire ;-)
62
« on: July 24, 2019, 07:25 »
Quote from: steheap on Today at 18:42
However... The poster referred to images inside the plane of the staff and images through the window. Unless you were give permission to take and sell images on the private property of the airline, then you have no legal right to place the images for sale under any sort of license. You can't sell an editorial license for an image that you didn't have permission to take in the first place. Taking a plane from a private airport (and some are privately owned and operated I believe) may fall into the same category although less risky.
Steve
So waht you are saying is that there is a risk to actually do what site allow you to do ?
... and sell it...
What I did was to take some picture from inside the plane during the traveling. Pictures are allowed... selling them... who ask ?!
Fact is that I think someone did not use those images as editorial like it should and Air Canada (the copany) are upset about it.
The fact is that the bad usage of those image is not my problem as I undersand.
Sometimes the agencies will reject images because they don't believe you have the right to take the photo - the thread recently on Disney locations was a case in point. I personally think that if the airline believes that you took the images inside their plane with their employees, then they are definitely within their rights to stop you selling them and displaying them. When you buy a ticket you sign up to all sorts of legal conditions - one might be to not use the airplane for commercial photography (I don't don't mean editorial usage here - just taking pictures with a financial gain in mind). The agencies can't catch every possible legal issue which is why you are ultimately liable.
Perhaps others have another view, but that is why the airline are taking that stance - nothing to do with first amendment rights. Those apply to a public place, not a private location.
Steve
It's not that simple. Many legal systems will acknowledge the editorial character of the picture, and therefore consider it journalistic content, independently from the photographer's status, as you don't need to be a journalist to do journalism. Then, actually, most of the photography restrictions can be ignored, as it would fall under the freedom of the press principle. The last thing the company could sue for would be for any damage caused by the picture, but unless the metadata contained something insulting (which is very unlikely), it's gonna be hard to do so. But once again, this depends on a country's legal system.
63
« on: May 15, 2019, 09:00 »
Let me guess the agency: IStock?
64
« on: May 09, 2019, 06:05 »
Well, more than doubled or quadrupled, I'd say that my sales got multiplied by 0.4 :p
65
« on: May 07, 2019, 09:21 »
There are indeed some issues. For me, it happens when I use the web uploader while the bandwidth is limited (for instance when I'm uploading on other platforms at the same time). The only workaround I have found was to wait till the other platforms have finished uploading (including the ones on FTP), before starting to upload on DT.
66
« on: May 07, 2019, 09:19 »
Cool! I can't wait to have a rejection on Sundays because I took a picture of a "castle in Europe", because I was indoor so I may require a release, or because they don't want my content to compete with Getty while I will upload it on several other websites...
67
« on: May 06, 2019, 09:52 »
I got a total of 3 sales, ranging between $15 and $20 each. Pretty low volume, interesting RPD, but I got way bigger amounts in the column single and others.
68
« on: May 05, 2019, 16:24 »
Having a portfolio that is something like 99% photos, I never got a single sale in almost two years... Funny thing: they keep on displaying a popup asking me if I would recommend Videoblocks...
70
« on: April 25, 2019, 10:31 »
Actually, for DT, I would say it depends on the topic. Up until the end of last year, it used to be one of the biggest disasters among the platforms I'm uploading, with RPI performances competing with 123RF and DP...
Then, I went for two weeks in North America to massively shoot for stock. The result: +200% monthly revenue for a 15% portfolio increase. Tracking the use of the pictures, it seems that there are a lot of influent local news/blog websites in the area, especially in Montreal/Ottawa/Toronto that are buying from DT. Therefore, DT suddenly became way a bit more interesting, even though we're talking about less than 10% of my global monthly revenue.
71
« on: April 23, 2019, 04:56 »
I'd say it's gonna work, excpet for IStock, given therte is a 0.01% chance somebody would complain.
72
« on: April 22, 2019, 09:21 »
They would deserve the worst. They suck in almost any aspect: the shares we get are shameful, their interface is one of the worst, the rejections policies don't follow any real legal nor technical sense, their reporting is, at best deficient, and they are able to generate more bugs and technical errors than Alamy, SS and AS together.
There's one problem: they represent around 25% of my revenue. So, like many people around here, I'm dependent on them, as I have some financial goals with microstock. The situation is deeply frustrating, but, well, I do stock for money, so I don't have a lot of options, even though I know that this attitude may make me lose on long term...
73
« on: March 20, 2019, 20:31 »
I have forgotten so much about the 1000 pictures I had uploaded there that my browser did not even remember the password.
So, after a password reset, the reply is: No.
74
« on: March 06, 2019, 05:44 »
I personally felt a sales decrease by the end of last week till Monday, but the losses got spectacularly covered yesterday and this morning. I am not sure if it's due to the design, or some other bug, as it seems a lot of things got delayed on SS at the same times: reviews were slow, a lot of people reported long reviews, and some others were as well mentioning a slow server to upload new files.
75
« on: February 17, 2019, 21:12 »
With 123RF, I'm not surprised. At the beginning of each month, for a few days, I always have a few sales that disappear to reappear later.
Other theory: the cut our royalties so much that the expectable RPD is now $0.00, but I was expecting this announcement for the end of this year ;-)
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