MicrostockGroup

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just to be contrarian, i made 70x more at 123 than ft last month, only last month.

I've extracted the data from my spreadsheet to illustrate just how fast FT have been gaining on IS. You can view the last 28 months on a graph by clicking on the link below. The Y axis is the % each agency contributes to my total stock income;

http://tinyurl.com/IS-FT-last28months

As Lisa says __ FT are playing to win.

Gostwyck... Your graph makes very interesting reading thanks for posting. It would be great for IS to have a serious competitor and it looks like it's not far off. For me fotolia and dreamstime are nose to nose but that's with a portfolio of 1500 images. 

For all the negative thoughts I have about FT, I have to give them credit for being the last entrant to the microstock arena who made it beyond the huddle of also-rans to be a major player. They aggressively pioneered selling into markets other than English-speaking and aggressively pursued partnerships and deals. When they introduced V2 software it looked for a while as if they might just have killed the whole operation, but they managed to keep the site going even though very little worked correctly for a very long time.

I do think that more than any other site, FT is creating a very wide chasm between the top earners - independents who get to double (or more) their prices) and just about everybody else. Those who are emerald and above have a vastly different playing field from everyone else. It's not just the higher royalty but the higher prices - and across the whole portfolio, unlike individual images at DT.

I wonder if you took a look at the more middle-tier players (i.e. not emerald & up) and compared FT gold with IS whether you'd see a similar pattern.  Which is not to say that for those who are emerald and up that things aren't rosy at FT, but can FT do great with only the relatively small pool of emerald, sapphire and rubis (1) contributors if things aren't so great for everyone else.

I guess you may not want to be too specific for fear of outing yourself and removing your ability to speak frankly, but I wonder if the period of the graph was all at emerald status?

Well I would have been Gold there ages ago if it wasnt that they count small subscriptions in a differant way. Weird.

Interesting how Fotolia is performing for everyone differently. It used to be my number three after Istock, Shutterstock (not specifically in that order) but this month everything seems to stand on hold. Hardly any sales but they do accept almost anything from me suddenly as they didn't in the past.  I have about 1500 files but still only a few are selling all the time. I'm still very puzzeled by Fotolia.

Hi Lisa!

Agreeing with you!  FT, is doing a great job indeed. Ive been looking through the files of this new Thinkstock and frankly I dont think theyve got the images to match, seems to be leftovers somehow, not very good stuff Im afraid.

Getty??  well what can you say?  they bark and the others jump! its been like that since 93 you know, they keep enforcing weird stuff onto their sub-agencies and its all in aid of enlisting Exclusives, and for total control but for the serious contributor it has the opposite effect.

best.