Educated guess - the majority of 'new' contributors are east indian/south east asian spammers - and yes, I agree with you that it is simply spamming near duplicates of popular sellers. In that respect - I'd say it's a 'good' thing - because they (in general) aren't really that 'creative' (& they don't like "hard work", scamming is what they like) - its just basically massive theft & spam as fast as possible... so - if you have a more varied port with 'mid-level' sellers (i.e., like cobalt as said she does) - I think you'll be okay.

The spammers aren't really about "research" & "good quality" - they are about spam as fast as you can & get rich quick... eventually I'd say most will get to the point where they realize it's not worth all the effort to "maybe" try and get $100/month (my guess is the majority of them probably make less than $100/month)...

In any saturated market, the key to success is to focus on quality. People will always be willing to pay premium prices for premium products.

I believe that with current increases in content due to AI, quality will be the determining factor in ones success.

if you want to know if an image is AI generated use this cool tool:
https://sightengine.com/detect-ai-generated-images

The best news is that people keep reporting a rise in sales on Adobe yoy, compared to other places. And even if they just upload very little and often without any ai.

This means Adobe knows what they are doing, they want to attract more customers and I suppose the customers enjoy browsing a large ai collection.

It also is a collection most other agencies don�t have.

As long as the quality coming in is fine, is it really worse that the mobile phone snapshots that the amateurs are mass producing? Adobe at least has some standards but other places take literally anything and only filter out images with legal issues.

I think the algos on all agencies are very advanced. The clients who do their searches by newest content act as a second inspection layer.

Whenever they view or lightbox images, the best content gets filtered by them very quickly.

And like others have said, ai content has the advantage of at least being properly lit but is often extremely repetitive because they all use the same prompts.

But the duplicates of duplicates thing means�in the end there is not so much really new content coming in as the numbers suggest.

This is also true for normal photos.

If you think about how many different recipes there are on the planet, how many different professions, how many different festivals, culture and traditions, how many possible daily life situations that look geographically very differently, even 600 million files is extremely little to document the daily lives and creative concepts of 8 billion people.

The real competition are only the files that do the same niche as you. And I find that competition grows very slowly, because the genres are not on the radar of the spammers.

The youtubers don�t seem to give any advice on what sells well. The examples they show are usually pretty looking files with little commercial value.

I suppose this is their way of protecting their income from their ports.

Get people to mass upload, but mislead on what customers actually buy.

Eventually the ai craze will get less.

However a reliable 100 dollars a month is a life changing additional income in countries where 300 dollars is a decent full time income.

Basically Adobe got etsyfied, it is now just one more online store where people try their luck.

Can�t blame young people for trying to improve their circumstances.

And for every 10000 spammers there will be one person who really understands that ai can be a great tool and has a service oriented mentality and wants to understand the customer.

As long as our sales are growing, maybe we should put a little more faith into the Adobe sales team and their plans.

I have heard reports that accounts are being 'frozen' and locked due to spamming (here's hoping)
However there are videos on youtube that try to provide a route to unlocking said frozen accounts

If there's a niche being filled, then some may do well for a while, however, I'd imagine conventional images probably don't fit into that niche, at least not available on adobe-stock

There is something wrong with the bestseller lists, I think it is being manipulated.

It has a lot of weird ports.

Here is someone with extremely bad isolations/pngs

https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/adorable-white-rabbit-jumping-in-mid-air-with-a-transparent-background-illustrating-agility-and-playfulness/996237919?prev_url=detail&asset_id=996237919

How did these files ever get accepted and who would download that when the low quality can already be seen in the thumbnail.

The entire port is like that.

 

I really don't get how these get accepted. I have given up submitting pngs to Adobe, because they got rejected so often, even though I could not see anything wrong with them. I even clean them up precisely with a graphic tablet. And then I see something like this gets accepted?

That image by Herr Mustafa is brutal

Scary almost.

I really don't get how these get accepted. I have given up submitting pngs to Adobe, because they got rejected so often, even though I could not see anything wrong with them. I even clean them up precisely with a graphic tablet. And then I see something like this gets accepted?

I haven't quite given up yet, but I agree with you, some things I see accepted are terrible, and some rejections, don't make sense. The distorted and bizarre AI that sneaks is, is another part that's unexplained.

There is something wrong with the bestseller lists, I think it is being manipulated.

It has a lot of weird ports.

Here is someone with extremely bad isolations/pngs

English US version:
https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/208564524/mustafa?load_type=author&prev_url=detail

100 pages of 100% AI, which looks like it's from an image factory.

Reminder:

Recent top sellers are determined each week using the following process:

    For each asset type we generate a list of 200 contributors who made the most sales in the previous week, only considering their uploads from the past six months. Then, we order the list based on each contributor�s uploads/sales ratio, and the top 10 contributors on this list are featured as �Recent top sellers�.

    Contributors are eligible to be featured at most once every five weeks. This selection process is subject to change in the future.

Recent top sellers = most sales in the previous week, only considering their uploads from the past six months

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on November 21, 2024, 15:36

...
Over all, the collection grew 32% between the end of April 2024 and today, but the genAI portion of the collection grew 82% versus the human-made portion grew 6.1%.
...

do we have actual numbers in each case? 6% of a very large number can be much greater than 82% of a much smaller number

Adobe Stock growth Apr 30 - Nov 21 2024; roughly 7 months

total collection: 139,801,939 (576,474,125 up from 436,672,186) - up 32%

genAI: 117,178,564 (181,469,399 up from 64,290,835) - up 82%

human made: 22,623,375 (395,004,726 up from 372,381,351) - up 6.1%

human made asset types

photos growth 9,936,406 (228,291,001 up from 218,354,595) - up 4.5%

videos shrunk 3,202,090 (15,884,530 down from 19,086,620) - down 16.8%

illos growth 1,990,088 (33,691,112 up from 31,701,024) - up 6.3%

genAI asset types

photos 49,408,590 (71,313,378 up from 21,904,788) - up 126%

illos 65,134,599 (106,056,450 up from 40,921,851) - up 59%

videos 846,305 (1,237,747 up from 391,442) - up 116%

I am back to submitting simply on white because I cannot find the problem why my pngs get declined.

Then this port comes a long and is filled with just horrible stuff. Even a half blind person can see the problem.

And how can this port be in the bestseller list? I doubt customers will buy this stuff.

Look at the rest of the port, it is a cabinet of horrors. The base image itself is also often underexposed or has bad focus or other issues.

Why does nobody check the bestseller ports before the page goes live?

Should be easy for a member of the content team to look at them.

Regarding your rejection problems with png's...I generally don't have an issue getting png's with transparent backgrounds accepted. One thing I do (working in Photoshop),
when I create the png, to in effect test it while still in Photoshop, I alternate a pure white layer and then a  pure black layer behind the masked isolated subject and check for anomalies around the edges etc..

There is something wrong with the bestseller lists, I think it is being manipulated.

That portfolio is chock full of things that should never have been approved. But regarding the recent top seller list, it's by design a strange beast, so doesn't really tell us much of interest.

Here's the explanation text on how it's calculated:

"For each asset type we generate a list of 200 contributors who made the most sales in the previous week, only considering their uploads from the past six months. Then, we order the list based on each contributor�s uploads/sales ratio, and the top 10 contributors on this list are featured as �Recent top sellers�.

Contributors are eligible to be featured at most once every five weeks. This selection process is subject to change in the future."

So lots of images could be selling much, much better than the ones featured. If the huge sellers were uploaded 7 months or more ago then they aren't shown; and the total volume of sales from the 6 months or less group could potentially be very small.

When you consider the tsunami of genAI content being added of late, one would expect genAI-heavy portfolios to be well represented in that list.

And given the very erratic inspection speeds - some taking many months and some only a few days - the recent sellers list could become very skewed.

I do exactly that, I test them against an alternate solid color layer, usually a bright red, sometimes other colors.

I also always isolated in photoshop manually.

I still have two pngs in the queue, but they have been there for over two months. If I do them on simple white they get accepted in 5-10 days.

I would like to do more pngs, but a waiting time of months is too frustrating. So I focus on normal on white now.

Oh, I  mis-understood, I thought the issue was rejections not inspection time. I think for me, both jpg's and png's take equivalently agonizingly long to get inspected.