MicrostockGroup

I don't care what Getty thinks of my work as long as they get the message loud and clear that they can't have it on the cheap. I don't want to submit to Getty, I just want to continue with a royalty structure at IS that is much more favorable (to me) than what Getty wants to put in its place.

This is all about not rolling over and playing dead because the schoolyard big boy says he wants half my lunch money.

This is not about any notion that I have that Getty proper is my rightful place - can't even figure out why you keep bringing that up. I'll stipulate that my place is with the micros if you stop going on about how none of us is any good for the macros anyway.

The discussion here is only about attempts to cut royalties by moving the business over to a low-royalty newbie site Getty has cooked up.

Well, yeah ... kinda.
That poll suffered (hugely) from unregulated internet voting - if Stephen Colbert had heard about it he could have had himself voted as #1.

Macrosaur reminds me of Old Hippie (or what was his name?). Probably the same. Talking like the gods of the Olympus but no hard portfolio links to support claims.  I'd rather read Locke.

lol 

Well, who talks about opening the gates wide and allowing anyone to submit to Getty (or to other big macro)?!
But there are microstock photographers - like Yuri who was already mentioned here - who's lifestyle images can compete with the best RF images of Getty. These images are not fresh ideas nor new approaches but very decent competitors of the macro RF collections. They might not add anything new to that 'highly creative' Getty RF collection. Yes, there may be a creativity gap between these images and their macro RF counterparts but the difference is not visible for 99% of the customers. And this 99% is happy to buy the 10$ version instead of the 400$ version. This 99% is what is missing from the macro market and this is the symptom ruining the older/more profitable business model.
And Yuri in not the only example. There might not be 1000s of them but 20-50. If Getty would have been open or wise enough to hunt down these 'talents' before they grow up the stock industry would be very different now. I am not talking about accepting their application, I am going further by talking about actively hunting them down and offering them a golden cage inside the macro boundaries. But now, it is too late. Offer them anything, they will reject if leaving the micro market is part of the deal. Simply because they earn more than most of the RF shooters. But a few years ago it could have been done.

Ifsare simple to dole out. If you kept the Wright brothers from flying it would have hardly stopped aviation. I'll mention the book The Outliers one last time. It delves into what makes a success and what doesn't.

Ding, ding, ding.  We have a winner!  

Poor guy just cannot manage to keep that much crazy contained for very long.

Well spotted FD, and Race.  

Posted this on the IS topic, figured I'd post it here as well. Perhaps more of you can share your experience with this.

I was with StockXpert when they introduced subscriptions in Q4 2007. I compiled this graph to show the percentage of my earnings coming from StockXpert from Q4 2007 to Q4 2009. I used percentage of income instead of just income because obviously over the years my portfolio has gotten larger. These numbers are a 3 month rolling average to smooth the outliers.

This is just my earnings from the same period.  I was doing well with subs, having several BME's.  Then there was a slow down, while I was still opted in and a big slump after I turned them off.  I wont miss them going now, last month was my worst in years.

Sorry, could you point me to the people whose RPD on any site has gone UP with the introduction of subs?  I must have missed those posts... 

Did I say RPD? There are quite few people claiming on this forum that their revenue went up not RPD.  Even in this thread somebody said that top microstockers get more than from  macro RF and obviously they got lower RPD but larger volume. I am just trying to say that there is no consensus on subs, everybody is different. Market is saturated and competition is harder so maybe this is a reason that some people earn less?

- so where's your port on Flickr? Or are you really Ansel Adams?