In the last 3 months, I had failed to reach a payout ($100) at Dreamstime. This never happened in the last 2 years. The sales at Dreamstime is very disappointing with a lot of subscription sales ($0.35) and hardly any on-demand sales.
Other agencies such as DepositPhotos, CanStockPhoto, GraphicRiver, 123rf are all doing fine with little fallback. I hope they rise further.
iStockPhoto maintains its usual trend although I did not upload much there. This shows that iStockPhoto is consistent and sustainable. The sales is hard to improve, though.
Just like iStockPhoto, Fotolia remains strong, but again, I do not see major improvement despite heavy upload. The Enhanced License purchase at Fotolia is getting rare and almost unseen these days.
I believe the biggest reason for drop in sales (especially in Shutterstock) are due to summer holiday, Euro Cup, and Olympics. Many have complain that Shutterstock screws up its search algorithm making it difficult for buyers to purchase. I do not believe this is true. Looking at the site analytic from compete.com, Shutterstock traffic is dropping dramatically.
Summer holiday is ending soon, and I hope the slowdown is over. We should be seeing major improvement from September and onward. However, if no improvement can be seen at Shutterstock, then we could have a big problem.
The big problem may caused by competition from sites such as DepositPhotos, Fotolia, and ThinkStock which are currently promoting their subscription model heavily.
I was searching about informations regarding selling vectors to microstock (I'm a beginning vector artist) when I discovered your blog, and I want to thank you for it, because here I'm finding answers to most of my questions.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm an Inkscape (in Linux) user, and I love to use it. When I read in one of your posts that Inkscape could be used to save vectors in EPS and send them to microstocking companies, I decided to try.
But here's my question: to save an SVG (Inkscape's default format) as EPS, do I have first to remove every effects (transparency, gradients, blur, etc.) from it? Is there a standard for an EPS file to be accepted?
It's the only doubts I still have.
Anyway, thanks again for the wonderful blog.
I'll be checking always for news.
Best regards.
I can't comment much about Inkscape because I never used it before. But when you are submitting your vector to stock agencies, all vector files must be:
ReplyDelete1. EPS8 or EPS10
2. EPS8 cannot have transparency.
3. EPS10 can have transparency.
4. Gradient is OK.
5. Blur is not accepted because blur basically turns into raster image.
6. Make sure there is no "Open Path" in your vector.
7. Make sure there is no "Stroke" in your vector. Stroke must be expanded to object before submitting.
Hope have I answered much of your questions :)
Thank you so much for answering me, and you really did solve most of them.
DeleteInkscape can natively save SVG as EPS, so my problem resides in the EPS version it uses to save the files. Do you happen to know any external tool (online or offline) that could convert svg (or an older EPS version) into EPS 10?
Once again, thank you for your kindness and help.