But to have a place where blocked accounts can be discussed is useful. Producers need freedom to talk about their problems.

If Adobe bans it from their company support groups, that is their decision, but personally I do not believe that is helpful.

And talking about the blocks also helps to create awareness for the problem and especially what kind of mistakes will trigger a block.

For instance there is the problem of credit card thieves abusing a portfolio and as a producer you have zero influence on that. But can be punished by losing access to your income and having all your image algos reset.

Then there are many people who are completely new to stock, who are being edged on by youtubers and simply make mistakes because they do not know that what they are doing is wrong.

And finally you have actual criminals, who upload stolen content, who buy each others files to improve their rank etc..

All these cases need a different level of attention.

However, although all agencies suffer from the same criminal activity I only see Adobe blocking accounts of reliable, decades old producers abruptly.

So, of course people are terrified!

There should be some kind of system in place, where reliable producers have their issues cleared up much faster.

That would help to alleviate the real fears in the community.

you don't do olympics with olympic rings or anything copyright related

you do people celebrating with gold medals, people doing sports, large stadions around the major olympic summer sports

general sports competition stuff and obviously never any copyright danger keywords

winner loser scenarios, goals, achievement, hard work success can also be used in many other themes outside of sparts as well

same like for content that supports the superbowl time, world football competitions, the oscars etc...there is also something you can do that is free of copyright but works for these events

compared to april 23 i am up by 51%, so I should probably not complain. but compared to march 24 I am down by 57%...

and...it is far from enough money, so...I will complain

summer is always very slow for me.

what is good is that many of the illustrations that I uploaded last year, that never got a single sale, are slowly beginning to sell. I simply have no "footsteps" in the algos for illustration.

for now illustrations are perhaps 5% of my sales, although it is over 20% of my port. longterm I hope it will increase and I will learn what I can produce that customers like to buy.

Fantastic news! Thank you for letting us now!

It was the easiest money I ever made, and it was a lot of fun.

Fantastic people as well!

for me the slowest months are july august, especially in Europe many companies close down for 4 weeks.

business teams is probably the best money maker, but you no longer need people in suits. you can do messy tech start ups. which is probably even more difficult to get it right than the classic penthouse glass office.

anything with real people needs great models, many hire professional actors.

or you need a photographer who is really, really good at getting natural expressions out of normal people.

you can try doing people teams with ai. it is also something i want to learn this year.

but the more people in the image, the more mistakes.

i had such high hopes for my ai flower illustrations�well, maybe better to do abstract people instead

Quote from: cobalt on April 18, 2024, 03:29

For marketing purposes alone I can see many customers using only real photos and no ai.

If I had a food magazine, I would insist on real food and cooking only.

Medical needs theme - only real people and real situations�etc..

Doesn't really answer the question - if you cannot distinguish real photos from Ai created images, why should you inists on using real photos? Yes, AI suck at most medical content right now (though I have sold AI images of medical conditions already) and food is hit or miss, but I have sold many AI food photos as well. I even once posted  a link here to a site with Asian recipes - all images were AI created. (And most looked very weird. Obviously the creator of that site did not care)
But AI is only going to get better in the future. So why should someone inists of using a real photo "just for the sake of using a real photo", when there is no difference in the end result?
Why use a real photo when, at some point, the people buying and reading the food magazine will not be able to tell whether real photos or AI images were used? Especially if AI images were so much cheaper and faster to create?  I don't see the advantage from the publisher's point of view.

If it was my food magazine I would make an important point that everything we print or write about is real content. It would be a major point for us.

There will be other magazines that don't care and that is their choice.

Quote from: blvdone on April 15, 2024, 19:55

So, the number of sales per week didn't actually increase, but revenue nearly doubled since I started to price my bestsellers much higher to $149/HD and $199/4K from $74/HD and $149/4K.  On Pond5, I think if you want to make money, you got to price your clips at decent level and can push it higher for your bestsellers.  Buyers don't buy them because it's cheap.  Those cheapo buyers just pay $10/month and download on cheapo sites or get subscription plans on SS or AS.  My RPD is about $95 now since I started this high price strategy.  Some folks are pricing their clips at $25/HD and $27/4k and get like $10 for a download.  I think they're making a big mistake.  I'm surprised to see the number of high price HD sales is the same as regular price HD sale.  Only 707 clips out of my 30k clips are set at higher price.  So, the popular bestselling clips have pricing power we may be underestimating.

My port.
https://www.pond5.com/artist/blvdoneprime

Your stats and work are very impressive. How do you grow your port with those numbers of clips because I recall looking some 6 or so months ago (maybe a bit longer) and there were like 16k clips. There's now nearly 30k clips. You do this full time?

I may be wrong, but if I remember correctly he said, he removed his non exclusive content from other places and added the files to his exclusive port.

It is unlikely he produced 14k clips in 6 months.

precisely that.

i spend a lot of time doing research, trying to find missing content, but I need to get the files live to see if it will actually sell.

It could be that a genre is empty because these files get no sales.

i wish I could upload higher volume of files, but it is usually 10-15 files a day, sometimes even less than 10.

anyway, back to research.

eta

they take illustrations and videos really quickly, so perhaps I should not be complaining so much.

Thank you! For my 2-3 files in one session that is perfect.

.

I have already passed my total income from april 2023, so perhaps i should not complain.

But the extreme drop after good high is always depressing.