It is not for free, it is 5$ each.

It is not for free, it is 5$ each.

Okay if you really need to be literal...

Does Mat accept pay for one weeks salary to work for free for one year?

Didn't think so, so why should you do the same with your work?

It's not like, images with less than 4 downloads are bringing you bunch of money, so you can get 5$ for each selected or you can have them sit in your port for free.

Number of past downloads doesn't mean much for future sales. You should hire advisor, I see you made few inaccurate statements regarding statistics before.

It's not like, images with less than 4 downloads are bringing you bunch of money, so you can get 5$ for each selected or you can have them sit in your port for free.

Oh, but images with less than 4 downloads on Adobe actually bring me quite a bunch of money....just not on Adobe.

Quote from: Dumc on June 18, 2021, 12:42

It's not like, images with less than 4 downloads are bringing you bunch of money, so you can get 5$ for each selected or you can have them sit in your port for free.

Oh, but images with less than 4 downloads on Adobe actually bring me quite a bunch of money....just not on Adobe.

so if they're not selling on AS, why not take the $5?  it's not like most users go to multiple sites

Quote from: cascoly on June 18, 2021, 20:06

Quote from: Firn on June 18, 2021, 13:46

Quote from: Dumc on June 18, 2021, 12:42

It's not like, images with less than 4 downloads are bringing you bunch of money, so you can get 5$ for each selected or you can have them sit in your port for free.

Oh, but images with less than 4 downloads on Adobe actually bring me quite a bunch of money....just not on Adobe.

so if they're not selling on AS, why not take the $5?  it's not like most users go to multiple sites

Quote from: Firn on June 13, 2021, 13:51

Big companies with a 750 images per month subscription probably won't search for free alternatives as many might not even use up all their images and they have a large budget to begin with. But these are the 0.10$ customers I don't really care about anyways.
What I care about are the smaller customers who have a 10 image subscription plan or even buy images on demand because they actually earn me dollar amounts instead of cents per sale. And someone who is on a tight budget and  has only 5 or 10 images he can download within a month might very likely look for free alternatives.

No chance in hell I am going to ruin some of my bestsellers by offering them for free. If it's worth it for you, then good for you, take the offer. But for me it's a question of "Do you want 500$ for that image or 5$"? And that's not a hard choice for me. I have nominated a few images that don't sell well anywhere. In these cases 5$ is better than 0$. Doubt Adobe will pick them in the end. But I am not going to give away any image that sells regularly for me on other agencies for free for a meager 5$.

No one is selling their best photos. Read Mat's post again: "We will not be accepting any images that received more than 4 downloads in the past 12 months".

No one is selling their best photos. Read Mat's post again: "We will not be accepting any images that received more than 4 downloads in the past 12 months".

Doesn't matter. Some people see this as a positive opportunity and some only see negative. The rest is just arguing their opinion why. 

First thing, after we check low selling or never sold images, like I did, is then having Adobe select them. It has been repeated many times, only a limited number will be put into the collection. No one is going to get 200 images accepted, for $5 each. Myself if I get two, I'll be pretty happy with the $10. These are not going to be huge numbers of our images, so I won't be competing with myself or losing potential sales. And I only selected images that aren't selling on Adobe or anywhere else. Pretty basic?

This is not promoting a free website, it's attracting customers to a pay site. One that I work at and have many more images, which more new buyers, might like. The giving away free images, is like free lunch... but you have to pay for everything else while you are there. It's marketing and promotion, which brings more paid sales.

For those who don't like the idea, don't participate. You have free will and free choice.

Most of you who are posting "5$ is better than nothing", I don't think you are seeing bigger picture. With appearance of free sites, prices are constantly dropping, buyers are getting broader rights with standard licenses and so on. With more high quality free pictures of any kind, there will be less need to pay subscription to microstock sites, prices will drop even more etc. Plus, contributors are already moving on or becoming demotivated, so nice and original images are hard to find on some stock sites and buyers who need something special will search somewhere else.

I am designer, just couple years ago most of my clients had some subscription to microstock. These days most of them think there is no need to have subscription because there is great choice of free images. Even if they can't find exactly what they want, they will stay with free rather than buying images. Just my 2 cents.

You are absolutely correct! Not so long ago there was the same argument with microstock... better get 0.25c per download as it's better than nothing... look where that got us.

Or maybe the is the next step in the regress (this should read 'evolution') of the stock industry.

I don't know your port but I am convinced that $500 for an image these days is more like a fantasy even for the best contributors.

I guess Firn didn't mean getting 500$ for one image with one sale, but getting 500$ for one image with combined sales spread in a one year period. And not at Adobe obviously, but at another agency. Now, that would still require an exceptionally good selling image, but it's not completely unrealistic either. Lower the bar with a factor 10, getting 50$ for one image (combined sales at another agency) instead of 5$ at adobe with the instant pay option is still a no-brainer: keep it for sale, not for free. Much more realistic, and I'm sure a lot of the images selected by adobe fall within this category. I fully understand that contributors don't want to potentially compromise their sales at other agencies.

Another factor: by selecting high quality images for the free section, you basically "teach" customers that also high quality images are available for free, so we're all lowering our own bars here and raising the customer expectation's bar. They already have their images dirt cheap, now they also have an increasingly growing number of quality images for free and that expectation is not gonna go away after one year. 

As I said before: not saying it's a bad deal by adobe, but let's all handle it with care. So what I did: I manually selected the images that are 1. lower quality and 2. don't sell at other agencies either. Let's see how many of them make it to the final selection. High quality images are out of scope for me, also the the ones that didn't sell.  I sold some EL's this year at Shutterstock for 30 dollars or more, images that never sold before and then suddenly got a big sale. I don't want to compromise that. Many say customers don't shop around, and I'm willing to go along with that for subscription sales, but EL's are a different story I think. So I'm still very careful here, and take for the vast majority of my images the long run instead of instant gratification.

As I mentioned in an earlier post... stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

I think you are making an erroneous suggestion that all microstock photos are equal in value. Value to me is what sells or has potential to sell. In my opinion, I think a good percentage of current microstock libraries is overpriced even at a penny (some of my own included in there).

I had some photos on free sites when I was researching those, and I can tell you I never got very many actual downloads (the thousands and thousands were more the exception than the norm). I wonder if people would be more offended or less offended if no one ever used their photos on the free offerings (if Adobe showed the download numbers of course).

Quote from: Dodie on June 19, 2021, 05:51

I don't know your port but I am convinced that $500 for an image these days is more like a fantasy even for the best contributors.

I guess Firn didn't mean getting 500$ for one image with one sale, but getting 500$ for one image with combined sales spread in a one year period. .

Exactly.