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Author Topic: Are the good time gone forever?  (Read 19476 times)

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« Reply #50 on: April 09, 2016, 14:54 »
+3
Jealousy
: an unhappy or angry feeling of wanting to have what someone else has

So you're jealous?


Chichikov

« Reply #51 on: April 10, 2016, 04:38 »
0
Jealousy
: an unhappy or angry feeling of wanting to have what someone else has


So you're jealous?


Yes, a little, I admit it, but I treat myself :)

But here I see people blaming other people/companies because they have success using the weakness and the limits of the microstock system to make money.

As microsctocks sale our images for only cents, today it is not only about quality (what is the sense to produce high quality images for 38?), it is also about quantity.
It is easier to have lower costs of production is you live in less rich countries.
So if you can produce more at a lower cost you are a winner.
Today being an US American or occidental European (in USA or in occidental Europe) is surely not a plus in the microstock world
It is like this and you cannot do a lot against that. You can adapt (as I did) and emigrate in those countries.

Some of the big contributors from eastern Europe have quantity and more than average quality (I am not speaking about Africa studio who has only quantity of S**t)
Just few example here:
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-711892p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-721492p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-624226p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/portfolio/search.mhtml?page=100&gallery_landing=1&gallery_id=370306&safesearch=1
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-1311871p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-968654p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/portfolio/search.mhtml?page=100&gallery_landing=1&gallery_id=106408&safesearch=1
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-150613p1.html
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-57146p1.html

« Last Edit: April 10, 2016, 04:54 by Chichikov »

Justanotherphotographer

« Reply #52 on: April 10, 2016, 05:49 »
0
Two of the three illustrators' portfolios you link to are absolutely terrible. I wont say which ones, but I am shocked by what SS is accepting now. Some of the photographers are very good though.

jonbull

    This user is banned.
« Reply #53 on: April 10, 2016, 06:42 »
0
Two of the three illustrators' portfolios you link to are absolutely terrible. I wont say which ones, but I am shocked by what SS is accepting now. Some of the photographers are very good though.

photo good?

oh god, this are the most amateur portfolio i have ever seen...i understand why big customer buy from rm agency,...look food photo in alamy, or other big rm agency. this guy probably use even other photographer to shoot everything they have around.
we must see what they sell and how much earn, but being often in ukriane i'd say that this guy can earn very good money for living there.  10 photographer account for more than 5 percent of all photo fun ss...unbielevabel

Justanotherphotographer

« Reply #54 on: April 10, 2016, 06:51 »
0
The photography portfolios are mostly decent micro portfolios. I have seen much worse snap shots on Alamy. At a minimum micros have some kind of handle on technical quality.

The owners probably make very decent money, if you want unique or original you need to be shopping RM.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2016, 06:54 by Justanotherphotographer »

jonbull

    This user is banned.
« Reply #55 on: April 10, 2016, 07:01 »
0
The photography portfolios are mostly decent micro portfolios. I have seen much worse snap shots on Alamy. At a minimum micros have some kind of handle on technical quality.

The owners probably make very decent money, if you want unique or original you need to be shopping RM.

yes medium quality..the girl better..but some terrible...they man decent money for sure for their country...but i checked some of their account in dreamtime and stock..they don't feel so much even with so many images...luckily they don't travel a lot and have mostly food ( cheap to make everywhere...buyt some studio chinese stuff u are done)..and people ( mostly nude beautiful girl and baby)...and some object with concept heavily copied or lack of originality...some belarusian are better...more creative...ukraine and russia and thailand are copy land.
luckily i do mostly other stuff so not a lot of competition. i will move to a country like this for 4 months and produce some big number in the near future. where i live to produce a good photo shooting is at the moment too costly.
rm are much better but i see also in rf there are interest for good photo. i sold 100 dollar yesterday in crestock:)...in ss i am selling a lot of 34 and more dollar in the last week.

Chichikov

« Reply #56 on: April 10, 2016, 07:25 »
+1
Two of the three illustrators' portfolios you link to are absolutely terrible. I wont say which ones, but I am shocked by what SS is accepting now. Some of the photographers are very good though.

Yes, I agree. In fact a lot of the big illustrators' portfolios are not so good, but they have enough sales anyway.
I think that it is probably faster and easier to make a big average quality photo portfolio than an illustrations one.

If the photo portfolios are only an average level of quality it is enough for 90% of the needs of the microstock customers I think.
Good or bad does not mean a lot in this industry.
Customers buy an image because it corresponds to their needs (immediately and cheaply - generally they need it for yesterday), not because it is a high quality image (if the quality is high it is a plus, not a main necessity).
I think that if it was not like this all the microstock industry would close in few months.

And to answer to the thread title:
Yes the good times are gone for those unable to adapt themselves to the the market (and claiming the contrary like a lot of the eternal whiners on this forum)

« Reply #57 on: April 10, 2016, 09:51 »
+2
I can think of one agency in which the 'good times' are just getting started..... ;)

IMO, you get out of it what you put into it; relevance, quality, and quantity all play a role.

You also need to diversify; stock alone rarely cuts it these days.


« Reply #58 on: April 10, 2016, 10:19 »
+1
We contributors should set up our own stocksite where the royalty rates are something like 90%. 10% is only for the runing company and the website. And we need webtool for the copy and paste all the photos and keywords from the iStock if contributor wants to leave from the iStock.

Sure. Because customers are just waiting for that. And the site obviously is going to run flawless once set up because it is run by photographers who know what they're doing.  8)

Eh-Hem, I am a photographer, I have set up my own stock site selling purely my own content, it looks far more professional than iStock's site ever did/does. It has very simple pricing, it is easy to navigate, was built on a free and open source CSS platform, nothing is broken, the site can accept both credit card and PayPal payments, and it runs smoother and faster than the iStock site ever does/did.

Granted I don't have a sizable collection when compared to an agency that crowd sources from millions of potential contributors, or the traffic to be successful with it (yet), but it isn't hard to run circles around iStock's web programmers in order to build a stock site that works and people find easy to use, yet I still consider myself very much a coding hack at best. I set it up over only a few month period, on a part time basis, whilst tweaking and working the bugs out. Imagine what one could do if all they did all day was develop a stock site as a full time endeavor?

When I think of the iStock site programming team though I imagine a bunch of children with mental disabilities who can't control their bowels sitting in a bathtub together, whilst floating amongst their own turds, squeezing them like Play-doh, and giggling away as if they haven't a worry in the world.

Good point, I think because most people are inexperienced in building sites they over estimate the technical abilities and expense needed to build a successful sales platform. And the micros have taken full advantage of this. Heck their sites are full of bugs which they make no attempt to resolve.


B8

« Reply #59 on: May 23, 2016, 11:45 »
+2
Eh-Hem, I am a photographer, I have set up my own stock site selling purely my own content

Well, yes, that's your own images. Put on someone else's images who uses different keywording than you do, find out a fair way whose images to show first for any given search terms, make accounting for those, pay out the earned royalties in an easy and cheap way. And then do that for 10,000 contributors and 100 Terrabyte of image data. Good luck trying that with WordPress.

At least you won't need marketing because customers will just jump on board once the word goes around that the photographers get 80 cents per download instead of 35.

Obviously you don't know much about WordPress. Canva is running on WordPress and claims to have 9.8 million users and 74 million images online. See here: https://about.canva.com/our-story/

And here is Canva's WordPress admin back-end login panel, which proves that their site is running on the WordPress platform: https://canva.com/wp-login.php
« Last Edit: May 23, 2016, 11:50 by B8 »

B8

« Reply #60 on: May 23, 2016, 11:55 »
+2
Attached is a screenshot of Canva's WordPress login screen.

« Last Edit: May 23, 2016, 13:42 by B8 »


 

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