I read something about GAME OVER earlier in this thread, and there's something I want to say to all those people who are painting doom n' gloom scenarios about micro stock.

You're right !

The whole business is becoming an exercise in futility.  Revenue keeps edging down doesn't matter how regularly one uploads, RPD is in something of a free fall, and the one thing that's certain is one or another piece of 'bad news' from one or another agency relating to sale (or giveaway) of contributor content or some other business (mal-) practice.  The only thing that seems to be seeing phenomenal growth is the number of new contributors coming on to add to the chase for pennies and nickels.  There's very little incentive to upload new content because most of it disappears among the gazillions of images that search words now produce.

 Tis soon time to shake out the mood and seek a new place in the sun.  Microstock has had its day - and it will soon be time to foray into some other business model and another brave new world

I agree with her Majesty that image factories are doing way more damage to micro stock than newbies.  You hear buyers complain about all micro pictures looking the same.  Many of us upload pictures that don't have same boring look but they don't get viewed in the mass of factory uploads.

I guess I feel the opposite. I don't have a problem with the image factories. They are in it to make a bunch of money. They are easy to understand and they usually have expectations for how they perform. It's the other side with no expectations and tons of files collectively that scare me.

There are probably less then 5000 serious contributors in microstock.
Using the Fotolia week rank, I got it to 4000 once with less than 200 pictures there.

A few industries are probably responsible for more than 80% of the uploads. There will always be people from undeveloped countries where 0.25/d is not that low, but they are not the big threat here.

I've got less than 500 images there and my seven day rank is regularly under 3,000 depending on how many sales I make. My regular rank is 5,000 and it is rare that my 7-day ranking goes above the 5,000 but sometimes it does for a day or two.

I would agree with gostwyck that opting out of DPC has made little difference to sales volume on FT main site and it is 'encouraging' to note that DPC-optersout do not appear to be being punished as optersout of subs were punished at FT in the old days. (If you opted out of subs as an exclusive, within days, your images were never seen and sales dropped off a cliff. FT actually explained how the algo worked and why you would get few sales when opted out of subs).

As to serious contributor numbers, I don't know how many there would be. I'm a serious contributor with relatively few images. I make most of my money with the occasional commission from long-standing clients. Nevertheless, I wouldn't like to go without my stock income even if it is less than �300/month. It is not to be sneezed at. And I do keep adding to my portfolio at a steady but minimal rate.

What does surprise me about DPC is that at least one image factory with 500,000 images is still opted in despite having the same port at Shutterstock. If I were to lose my ODD's income at SS because I opted in to DPC, then my income from SS would easily be halved. If an image factory with income from SS and DPC saw that SS income halve as a result of buyers downloading from DPC instead of buying ODD packs at SS, I would think they would notice that drop in income and withdraw from DPC to protect their SS ODD sales. But maybe things work differently when you have 500K pics at every agency on the planet! Maybe they just don't care or have some sort of links with DPC/FT that they're not going to reveal.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 10, 2014, 05:27

That's actually a positive for us.  It must be eight or nine years since I first pointed out that as the return per image falls the incentive for the creation of new images also falls, making it less attractive for competitors to enter the field.  At some point, the market should stabilise as the flow of new images starts to dry up. Maybe we are approaching that. I'm certainly feeling less of an incentive to upload than I used to.
.....

I don't think it is going to happen. It is too easy to grow earnings as a beginner. It's difficult to explain without a diagram but the problem comes a few years later when the decline in sales of older files out paces the new files you are adding. It's a product of the shelf life of an image. New people will keep joining the market thinking that the increasing income will last forever and be caught in the same trap. I don't know if there is a solution.

That's an interesting point, but it does depend on newbies seeing a return for their uploads. I just had a look at iStock and I had more than 100 approvals in April from which I've had three downloads. That's $3 or thereabouts in a couple of months from a week's work. It's no wonder I don't feel motivated. Shutterstock is considerably better, of course, but I think it is the only one that is.

Oboy your charts are great, can I just ask you something? How it's possible for DP be your #3?

My May results are these:

there is no way i could pay model in my country and earn some money, no way!

I see your comment and raise you: australia!

it's going to be increasingly more difficult for those us from the so-called "successful" countries, where coffee is $4 and hourly rates are $22+ (lol, unless you're a plumber, then it's $80/hr) and a house costs x10 your annual salary. Luckily I don't do this as a full-time income source, but I can report:
Stocksy BME
SS BMY and nearly BME
others were very ordinary.
Not quite enough to pay the plumber and electrician's bill... if only they were better looking I could try using them as models.

From above....."All to end up exactly where I was last year, nearly to the dollar"

Me too! All sites Jan - May this year within 10 dollars of the same period last year, despite uploading etc.

Not the total...each site is virtually the same....

VERY strange!

i think the best thing for stock world that the agency will look 2+ years unsold pictures and start deleting pictures that dose not meet this days standards

with 20-30 millions pics in each site and 10-50 pages for each search you make really it's going to down hill from here

Why would they do that? Yesterday I had a first sale of a file I uploaded in 2009, and this is not unusual. (on iS, it would be far more suprising to have a 2014 upload sell, but iS is 'up to something' in this respect, and other places aren't the same.)

How much do you think it would cost an agency to pay people to manually review images one by one to see if they match 'this day's standards'? This is microstock, margins aren't to be thrown away.

Besides which, when you've  been round the block for longer, you'll find that 'not selling' can have far more to do with the default search position a file gets into early in its career than anything else.

i ment this in more of the multiply pictures for same pupose for example X building in new york, that there is 4000 pictures of the same buliding, don't u think it worth deleting the more standard pictures and leave 400 of the same and not 4000? i mean in terms of quality lighting and act

How much would it cost to get someone to go through these manually?
Firstly, they'd have to run a program to see what subjects they have lots of, yet sell relatively few of. Then, to be fair (yet which agancy is fair?) they'd have to consider whether it's a 'bad' image (however you define that) or whether it just got caught in an unfortunate algorithm when it was uploaded.

How would you like it if your file was deleted?
What is 'quality' - "you never can tell what will sell".

How can an agency decide what a buyer would want? I once saw a particular bird photo from Alamy in a publication, and thought it was pretty bad. I checked on Alamy and there were hundreds of pics of that species, as I thought there would be, and IMO, that one pic was the worst of them all, in just about any way of judging; yet it was the one that buyer chose.

Also re Alamy, but nor specific to it, I remember someone blogging about how they'd had a good value sale of a particular subject, which is common on Alamy. I can't remember the actual subject, but I do remember he said he'd found out that the buyer specifically wanted the subject with a hazel tree in the background. That was an unusual specific, as AFAIK, the two are not normally connected. So if the agency had deleted the image because there were a lot of images of that subject and that file hadn't sold, they'd have lost a good sale, as his was the only file with subject and hazel tree in the keywords.

How can an agency decide what a buyer would want?

I suppose it depends on the strategy of the agency. I think most of the majors are kind of a "one stop shop" where they try to have everything you'd ever want. I don't see any reason why they should delete anything unless it is really outdated. Other agencies might want to have a more curated collection, although they usually do that by just not accepting things in the first place.