Another month, another dollar. I think the original was actually a dollar a day, which I guess could be the theme song for Shutterstock these days. But how did I do during another month of lockdown in selling my stock photos and videos. Overall, not too badly although there was the one big sale on Fine Art America for $130 that really made a difference to me this month. If only I could manage to get Fine Art sales every...
I mentioned that I had been submitting more of my images to Yay Images since they seem to be revitalizing themselves under a new leadership. I had seen some $0.05 sales in my account, which seemed to be very different to what they were promising and so I asked their Director of Marketing why that would be. Here is his full response: We have a variety of sales models, as we have recently refreshed the website we have also refreshed...
I think we can all agree that the new Shutterstock earnings schedule has been implemented in almost the worst way possible. Throw it over the wall, make a mistake in the email. Allow a low level forum person to give a few answers to legitimate questions, then say nothing more. Ignoring the way it was done, I’ve been thinking about this some more from Shutterstock’s point of view, which I think is important if you are going to decide how...
We’ve seen all the issues with Shutterstock over the past day or so, and many people are looking for alternatives. Interestingly, I’ve been with Yay Images (was Yay Micro in the past) for many years and over the years I have actually earned $352 with them. It appears that they are under new ownership and I’ve been noticing a lot of improvements as they moved from the old Yay Micro site to the new Yay Images one. My portfolio had...
I’ve got to say, from the start, that I have not been very productive in the past couple of weeks. I had a flurry of activity around the green screen work I did and I composited those shots into various backgrounds, but I have not been very motivated. I’m sure you know what I mean! I have even bought a box of 50 face masks to incorporate into my images, but so far the box is unopened. But what I...
I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime by posting some thoughts on the announcement that Shutterstock made today about their new earnings approach to be adopted in just 5 days time. I normally like to see how these changes are explained and then re-explained before commenting, but it is such a train crash of an announcement that I thought I should comment a little more quickly. First, let me say that in 40 years of senior positions in various companies...
I’ve been doing more green screen oriented stock photos recently because my travels have been sorely restricted! Why a green screen when it might be much easier to extract against a pure white background? Well, I wanted to produce both videos and stock photos of the various ideas and Premiere already has a great extraction tool with the Ultra Key effect and that seems to do an excellent job with getting clean edges and a smooth video composite as you...
As I write this, countries around the world are starting to experiment with opening up their businesses and activities. My particular area has not been heavily closed, and I’ve even managed to have two games of golf, but this change is opening up new ideas for stock photos to illustrate this next stage. I think there are lots of opportunities to think of here. A couple of trends will be important in my view. One will certainly be that people...
I’ve been a proponent of taking photos wherever you can, even though there may not be an immediate market for them. As an example, when I was booked on a early flight from Dulles airport in Washington, DC (remember those days…) I spent my waiting time taking a few shots around the terminal and the gate area. As it was early, there were very few people around and I think I uploaded the shots as editorial and they have probably...
As I outlined in my end of April earnings report, I’ve managed to keep my earnings above water, with a lot of help from Coronavirus related imagery. In this post, I’ll walk through the sort of things that I’m working on now and what I’m thinking about for the upcoming months. As I’ve discussed before, I think this new state of affairs will be with us for a long time and we will just have to get used to some...
