balajisrinivasan

Nope. I've applied twice and was rejected both times. So that should tell you something about the quality controls there.

The quality standards on SS used to be a lot more stringent than they are today. Nowadays, it's just inconsistent. Depending on your luck, you can have a perfect image rejected for noise/focus or you can get about the worst image full of noise and exposure issues accepted. An agency like Arcangel which handpicks images is far more trustworthy in that regard.

Because the images available for sale on Arcangel are exclusive to Arcangel and aren't available anywhere else for cheap. And a buyer can be assured that the quality checks are far stricter than what they find on the microstock sites. So anyone looking for a quality book cover would rather buy an image from an agency like Arcangel than microstock agencies.

Oh I got plenty of .10s in March and earlier this month. But this week it's nothing.

I think my port is probably shut down by the algorithm. No sales on Monday and today. Hasn't happened in over 6 months. I mean, this month's been so bad on SS that I've made more money on DT than I have here.

You're absolutely right. That is all I've done to my images for microstock in the last few months. Auto-adjustments, auto medium contrast curve, a bit of sharpness/NR and then export by downsizing res to 8 mp or less. Takes less than a minute per picture and for the money I make out of MS, anything more would be overwork. But it has also killed the joy of photography for me. Someday I'll quit microstock and go back to the older days of trying to make a great image just for the joy of it instead of hundreds of merely functional ones.

I get what you're saying. SS probably makes a lot more money from non-subscription sources like affiliates and deals we don't know of. But as for companies not using up the quota of subscription downloads, it's truer than you think. I've worked in many news and ad agencies who had big accounts at both SS and Getty where I had to source images and I don't remember a single instance where we used up the monthly quota of images. In fact, it's only rarely that we ever used more than half our subscription quota. Now why do companies have these big accounts that they don't utilize fully? Becaus

Shutterstock isn't thinking about contributors but about their own balance sheets. They're doing just fine financially, probably better than they ever have and their balance sheets confirm that. The whole idea of moving from an individual image based package to a subscription structure is brilliant from a profit point of view. They don't care about bigger sales, but about a bigger volume of sales that give them a steady stream of money. A customer who pays 250$ a month every month is far more valuable than the one who spends 100$ on an image once every few months. And as @Firn mentioned earlie

It's a Friday.

Actually you don't need to do any work on facebook or instagram. In fact, it's better if you don't. Because organic traffic gets you more income. All you need to do is work on the site design and make it more, well, navigable. And then apply for adsense or ezoic and you're set. It's probably a week's work but you can get steady income for a lifetime. I'm pretty sure you get decent traffic. But yeah, you won't have a lot of control on what's being advertised. If adsense puts in a pest control ad and you don't like it, you can't do an awful lot about it. But you'll definitely be making a lo

Have you thought of monetizing your website? You have a pretty cool niche and you know your bees. So I think you may have a chance of making a lot more money through your site than stock photography.

Best month in terms of downloads. RPD is, of course, quite bad, less than 20 cents. But a good number of decent (by which I mean "above 10 cents") sales in the last two days of the month means it was pretty alright overall. I hit level 3 and it appears to have had some effect because the last few sales of the month were certainly a bit higher than before. Hopefully RPD improves in the months to come.

Yeah, IG also doesn't allow you to see who's sharing/saving your posts and how they're being used. And since every big brand has a presence on IG, they could be using your pictures for their IG campaigns for free and you wouldn't even know and of course, wouldn't get paid.

Over a 100 downloads this month. Hit Level 3. And made less money than I did with less than 50 downloads in March 2019.

Ah, that's certainly strange. No explanations for that