AsiaTravel

Did you get that SS is keeping the money they don't pay us anymore?? There is no price cut to customer, so 0 reason that sales increase.

and it's not even Ko Samui, but Ang Thong NP...

Actually, second best month of the year for photo with 177 usd... However, video sales completely stopped (12 usd vs 150 usd on average) as I mostly do travel. However, June was save by a very large SOD of 100 usd, if I remove the highest sale in the last two months, photo income is roughly -50%. Tough to judge the impact of the new structure as my sales are much lower than usually due to covid (would be only -30% without?). I keep my pf on sale, but also hasn't upload anything since 1 June. As a comparison, I made less than 40 usd on AS.

SS is a public company with share traded on the stock market. There are basically 2 kinds of companies, high growth where profit is not really the main objective but to take market share (uber, amazon, ...) and more mature companies that have low or no sales growth but have a nice profit margin and pay dividend. SS saw its growth collapse in 2019, will be negative in 2020. Their big problem is that the valuation is based on high growth with a price earning ratio of 70 (it's huge, market value is 70x 2019 net earning) and to avoid the share to crash, they have to turn the company as a money maker with much higher net margin. Hence the cut of commission and the dividend. If they triple their profit by this, the price earning drops to 20 and it make it resonably priced. Forget the new CEO, he was just hired to do the dirty work.

Well, why not starting then? I believe if someone bet on stock photography to be a significant part of their income in the future, they really have to get out of the "low hanging fruits" of travel and secondary editorial where tons of people can compete. Have to keep cost low of course. I should start to follow my own advice

Sorry, can't help here as I have just started a new exclusive account there. Sales were not bad at P5 before the pandemic (I do travel, so I have been hit hard on sales) but SS was still better. Now with both the new structure which will impact me more on video than on photo and their new subscription model, I really expect SS video income to crash, so P5 make sense. For now, while I don't upload anything anymore at SS, I still keeping my port to see how sales goes once the pandemic is over. I believe it's good to wait a bit to see how things move before going too much on exclusive account.

Microstock killed macrostock, freestock will kill microstock. Main problem imo is the way too low price of large subs package where DT and AS sell even cheaper than SS (they give more commission of course). With these, agencies don't make money. That was ok as long as the market was strongly growing, but now that it reach maturity it's getting a big problem for agencies to be profitable. I don't boycott SS as without them my microstock pf would really bring peanuts but decided to boycott microstock as a whole and upload video exclusive at P5 and photos to Getty (no Istock). Despite all the bad that happens with them, I still have a RPD around 5 usd (was 50 in 2013). Anyway even with them, I see stock photography as a kind of lottery, tons of sales at a few cents price for the chance to sell a full licence once in a while. While I was very lucky to enter Getty via the flick deal 10 years ago, I don't really understand very talented people here who didn't push to join a more exlusive agency (like stocksy) and concentrated 100% on micro.

Good luck to convince finance people that massive increase in short term profit, even if long term prospect are slightly worse, is not a good move Very rough calculation, in a everythink is equal setting. In 2019, 150 mio paid to contributor, with new structure divide this by two which means 75 mio in additional profit, hence more than 300% increase compared with the 20 mio profit made in 2019. Actually, SS try to change from a high valuation high growth stock to a "cash cow" stock, low growth but high cash flow and better net margin. That's why they start paying a dividend now.

So AS sells cheaper than SS, their 750 subs plan is also cheaper than SS and they do pay contributors more. As SS is publicly traded, we know they make little profit (20 mio out of 650 mio of sales) and for what I see in ad spending, AS should have a simialr cost structure. So promoting AS is really a good long term move as their image are cheaper? Or do people think that since Adobe bought Fotolia to complete their cloud offering, they don't care if they don't make profit on AS?

That's clearly the main reason of why people are so upset by the SS move, as SS is for a lot of contributors the main earning site and microstock with SS earning are not worth it. Some have good performance at AS, not me (I still mostly sell to asian countries where SS is stronger I guess). Looks like lots of people who boycott SS now are still uploading to Istock, or even unsplash or freepik, who pays less as a minimum commission, but since those site are not those who bring most money, it doesn't really matter.

You can set default price for all you uploads in Generals/default setting

for landscape photography, you might try to make a Black & White conversion in addition to the color photo. Maybe 50% of my sales were B&W for 4 or 5% of the pf size.

Thanks! I am afraid both micro and former macro converge to the same model, vast majority of sales with insulting low fee with a few "lottery" full price licence.

That's what Getty (not Istock) did early this year when the stopped selling RM, that was paying 30% vs 20% for RF. They change all RM photos as RF, but to keep a few (no idea how much) very successful contributors who were complaining, they gave them a special deal at 25% commissions.

So I said If you have a larger proportion of non subs vs subs, you will be less impacted, and you reply that what follow if is not fact. So you believe that everydody has the same distribution of returns???