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Author Topic: For Indies who pulled ports from Istock...  (Read 41489 times)

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« Reply #100 on: January 08, 2012, 18:41 »
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I don't know of any company that pays their sales team or even their distributors based on how long they've been there. There's a monthly quota and it's all about performance. Those who don't hit quota either make a lower percentage or don 't get paid at all. Weaker salespeople leave because they can't afford to stay. This is sales 101.

The sales analogy is completely off base. Sales people don't build the product, they just flog it (and I used to work in pre-sales support for a publishing software company; I know the sales reps work hard, but they don't create things). And the sales reps who don't perform usually get fired before they can quit.

Okay, let's try a different model. Any model you can think of. Walmart. Do you think Walmart values products, and their creators, based on sales volume and profit or how long the supplier has been supplying? If a product creator stops producing sellable products then what? Regarding sales reps getting fired, that's the old way. The new way is most sales reps positions are based on performance and when reps miss their quota their pay is gradually lowered until they quit. This enables companies to reduce paying unemployment and other costs. 

You keep coming back to the time issue - and iStock never gave anyone more money for having been around a long time. It's all about measuring the money you brought in - the old way was lifetime and the current way is loosely related to how much money over the last year. I say loosely because the charts are not linear for any given media (look at the gap between the top two levels for photos vs. for illustrations) and they are hopelessly unfair when you compare money in for illustrators vs. money in for photographers. It's even worse if you compare total money delivered to the compay for anyone foolish enough to still be contributing in multiple media.

If they felt so inclined they couild have a scheme that paid you for the current six months based on the last six months' earnings. That would be really dastardly. The rate you earn for the the first six months (typically slower except for March) gets you lower royalties for the high selling half of the year. You then earn a higher royalty rate but only for the slow selling half of the year.

What you're missing is that all the iStock schemes so far have been pay for performance - no longevity pay for anyone ever. What makes the 6 month scheme more or less fair than the current RC system? IMO the RC scheme was an attempt to move the overal payout for the contributor base to 20% and given that iStock wanted to keep exclusives it had to figure out some way to pay a lot of people less. It wasn't about weeding out poor performers.


On top of that, iStock was never paying for contributors having been there a long time - it was always for sales. Go take a look at how many people have been there ages and have sold squat - there's a large group.

They are paying top commissions, 40%, to a lot of diamonds whose main contribution is that they have been there long enough to reach a diamond canister and are not necessarily good performers

I don't know what you mean by "a lot" but there are around 900 diamonds and 45 black diamonds out of over 38,000 contributors. The reality is that most of those 38,000 won't make diamond no matter how long they hang around. There are under 10K bronze and under 4K silver, and that's with iStock having been around over 10 years. I think it's just a myth that the real problem was a world where everyone ends up diamond and poor iStock goes broke. That would never happen.

Also, sales is an inherently short-term thinking business. Many software companies had problems with sales reps booking business that cost the company way too much over the long run, making it much less profitable. One of my favorite quotes from a sales rep with whom I once worked, referring to this issue was that he'd be long gone by then.  

I'd agree.

Even someone whose volume of images produced is lower than the factories but who doesn't cost the company much (in terms of images that don't sell or masses and masses of rejects) can be a big asset over time, particularly if they fill out the collection. They're profitable, just not high volume. Having more non-factory contributors also helps your collection stay fresh looking - you have a wide variety of looks and styles, not just one or two.

This is not about volume of images produced. It's about revenue generated from each image, whether it's 100 or 10,000. I've seen some newbies with 100 images that are producing exceptional work and are doing incredible download numbers.

It is not about revenue generated from each image, it's about RCs generated per year, per medium. iStock doesn't care if you upload masses and masses of images to get your RC totals (easier to do for an exclusive than independent, but if you hang around long enough you can build up some numbers). They might at some future point start to set royalties on the basis of having a high number of successful images, but right now they don't


ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #101 on: January 08, 2012, 18:53 »
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Besides, they'd save much more money if they fixed the whole system properly. There are more and more bugs reported all the time and there are far fewer fixes than new reports. Plus almost every fix adds more problems.
None of that is our fault, so we shouldn't be penalised for it.

wut

« Reply #102 on: January 08, 2012, 18:54 »
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I think it's just a myth that the real problem was a world where everyone ends up diamond and poor iStock goes broke. That would never happen.

It's a myth even if it did happen - why would they go broke if every single exclusive would make 40%? That's still just a small percentage of contributors, so factoring in independents earning 20% no matter the canister, but also that exclusives usually sell more (most top contributors are exclusive and they make the majority for IS) the average payout would be what, 30%? It would surely be below 35% and if Alamy is getting along just fine by paying double of those mythical 30%, than IS would do twice as good ;)

« Reply #103 on: January 08, 2012, 19:18 »
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Perhaps I missed it, but let's remember that Independents were never rewarded for longevity, or even for making a lot of sales over a long or short period of time.  Our only rewards were new canister colors, which have no real value, and the right to a larger upload quota.  Our compensation was fixed: 20% of the sale price, whether it was our first sale or our 500,000th.  The only way we cost iStock more over time were the storage costs for our growing portfolios and the extra time for reviewers to look over a few more images per week.  Exclusives cost more as their work sold, not Independents.

That has changed, but in a negative way.  Keep in mind that the maximum compensation, which none of us will ever see again, is that same 20% that we all signed up for back in the dark ages before September, 2010.  I'd have to produce content that sells far better than anything I've produced, and would still be able to upload only a small number of images.  So I cost them less, 20% less last year and this year, and likely another few percent in 2013 when I can't meet their minimums.

Oh, and for anyone who believes that sales reps can't be screwed with by Corporate, ask a few reps how many times their territories were broken up or their compensation plans reevaluated.  I've seen it happen way too often.

« Reply #104 on: January 08, 2012, 21:21 »
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Our compensation was fixed: 20% of the sale price, whether it was our first sale or our 500,000th.

they were the lowest already but wanted to make sure again

the more curious was the 25% overall collection grow despite the 15% less downloads, will see 2012
« Last Edit: January 08, 2012, 21:24 by luissantos84 »

« Reply #105 on: January 08, 2012, 22:07 »
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Wow! This topic really went off the rails. I promised myself I'd try not to do too much IS bashing this year, but it seems to show up everywhere and hard to avoid.  ;)

SNP

  • Canadian Photographer
« Reply #106 on: January 08, 2012, 23:21 »
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A combination of both. Too many diamonds making 40% who were performing poorly.

Yes, I've seen some diamonds say that they've dropped from 2-3 canister % levels under the new RC system. What does that indicate? For some probably that they've been there for a long time and aren't selling a whole lot. For others, maybe IS overall sales are down. It's a hard truth but not everyone performs equally. Should everybody get a trophy no matter how they perform?

I don't know of any company that pays their sales team or even their distributors based on how long they've been there. There's a monthly quota and it's all about performance. Those who don't hit quota either make a lower percentage or don 't get paid at all. Weaker salespeople leave because they can't afford to stay. This is sales 101.

Taking IS's overall sales performance out of the equation, who's more valuable?
- Someone who started in 2002, has 25,000 files, and just hit 25,000 downloads to reach diamond ten years later?
- Or someone who joined in 2010, has 100 files, and already hit 25,000 downloads to reach diamond in a year?

Which one is more profitable? Which one is producing what buyers want? Should they be compensated equally?

good post and I almost completely agree....except that it still doesn't explain some of the top performers getting stung. if what you are saying is true (and for the most part I think it is), I'd think iStock would be taking special care to continue to incentivize the top performers like Sean, but a number of those major sales generators are also reporting losses. iStock aren't providing incentive to produce, so I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

« Reply #107 on: January 08, 2012, 23:39 »
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jsnover's comment about bacterial films - which reminds me of "the tipping point" - is well-worth keeping in mind.

Jsnover: "If you've ever read about bacterial films (meaning a collection of bacteria on a surface, not a movie) nothing much special happens until they're there in sufficient quantity. It may be that there is no immediate effect of one or two photographers leaving iStock, especially if those anecdotes about how buyers work that we've heard here are true - that buyers choose a site and stick with it rather than shopping around for each purchase to find their chosen image at the cheapest price."


The advantage, for me at least, is peace of mind.  I can't in good conscience support a company that refuses to support its contributors.

+1 Well said.

+1

« Reply #108 on: January 09, 2012, 01:54 »
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jsnover's comment about bacterial films - which reminds me of "the tipping point" - is well-worth keeping in mind.

Jsnover: "If you've ever read about bacterial films (meaning a collection of bacteria on a surface, not a movie) nothing much special happens until they're there in sufficient quantity. It may be that there is no immediate effect of one or two photographers leaving iStock, especially if those anecdotes about how buyers work that we've heard here are true - that buyers choose a site and stick with it rather than shopping around for each purchase to find their chosen image at the cheapest price."


The advantage, for me at least, is peace of mind.  I can't in good conscience support a company that refuses to support its contributors.

+1 Well said.

+1

A very good reminder.  Documentation is mounting, and eventually something is going to give that will expose what's really going on at IS.

fujiko

« Reply #109 on: January 09, 2012, 02:48 »
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'Sales & performance' analogy fails completely for one thing.

How can performance be measured properly when one big factor of it is the search engine and there are serious doubts that it works at all? Good performers are almost hand picked at this point with so many best mast shifts.

They are also pissing a lot of 'sales people' in the way, 'sales people' that helped build the company from scratch and sure have contacts they will take with them when they leave.

And last thing, contributors are not sales people, Istock is the salesman here. It's istock the one that has to prove it's performance to the contributor year after year.

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #110 on: January 09, 2012, 06:00 »
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Plus, never let it be forgotten that they made various promises, in particular that people would be 'grandfathered in' at their next level, extending that promise to those who became exclusive within a certain timeframe, then broke the promise.
I don't see how they can hope to attract new, outstanding talent with a record of breaking very serious promises.

« Reply #111 on: January 09, 2012, 07:42 »
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It is really very simple. iStock is being fattened up for sale.  Whether that is being done successfully or not, we are not privvy to as we don't see their income figures.  Everyone who works there knows it is being sold and has an appropriately short term mentality and approach. iStock was screwed from the moment Bruce Livingstone decided to sell it.  No good ever comes from making decisions based on purely how much money you will make and the great shame is that those sort of values have been imposed upon a company that once strived for fairness, inclusion, employee and contributor reward and having fun over a drive for pure profit alone.  Someone in here recently posted a copy of a current iStock staff recruitment ad, telling of an in-house masseur for those stiff shoulders, subsidised courses and time off to take them, a groovy canteen full of cool arcade games etc.  It sounded like the sort of place we would all like to work at and many of us once thought that in some small way, we did.

It is a shame, but it has happened and it cannot be reversed.   Time to move on - my energies are far better focussed on agencies that are going to be around and will be big players in five years time.

« Reply #112 on: January 09, 2012, 18:16 »
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The lower IS sales get the easier it will be for indies to just give up on them completely.

Very true!  And I'm one of those indies.  I've been slowing deactivating images, but at this point I might as well just drop IS altogether.  Used to be I had regular 20-sales days...now I have regular zero-sales days.   

+ 1
Exact same story here

« Reply #113 on: January 09, 2012, 18:45 »
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Sorry if there has been a response similar to this, but I read this and felt the need to respond, and haven't read the rest yet.

Quote
A combination of both. Too many diamonds making 40% who were performing poorly.

Yes, I've seen some diamonds say that they've dropped from 2-3 canister % levels under the new RC system. What does that indicate? For some probably that they've been there for a long time and aren't selling a whole lot. For others, maybe IS overall sales are down. It's a hard truth but not everyone performs equally. Should everybody get a trophy no matter how they perform?

I don't know of any company that pays their sales team or even their distributors based on how long they've been there. There's a monthly quota and it's all about performance. Those who don't hit quota either make a lower percentage or don 't get paid at all. Weaker salespeople leave because they can't afford to stay. This is sales 101.

Taking IS's overall sales performance out of the equation, who's more valuable?
- Someone who started in 2002, has 25,000 files, and just hit 25,000 downloads to reach diamond ten years later?
- Or someone who joined in 2010, has 100 files, and already hit 25,000 downloads to reach diamond in a year?

Which one is more profitable? Which one is producing what buyers want? Should they be compensated equally?

I get that that was their thinking, and I get that it does make SOME sense.  Really, I do get it, and you won't find me with any iStock voodoo dolls.

But really, I think there's another type of very valuable contributor that got screwed, like me.  The high-performing-files but low-amount-of-files type of contributor.  By the time I reached 10k downloads, it had been about 5 years and I had about 300 files.  Thats a download per file per day of about 0.02, which is pretty good.  Not the word's greatest, but by no means shabby at all.  If you're not familiar with ballpark figures, istock provides enough data for you to calculate it yourself, using some famous names you know, if you want.

What's my point?  My point is that, while I'm certainly not as "valuable" as the big names, I'm no more deserving of a royalty reduction, because although I earn less money, they'd also be saving less money by slashing my royalties.  It's very simple.  Like gostwyk keeps saying, we are all equally valuable per download, which is at the heart of what I mean.  But it goes even further... what do we cost istock? Server/storage space, time (reviewing), and advertising.  When factoring in these admittedly secondary factors, high-performing-files but low-amount-of-files type of contributor are even more valuable "per download".  

If RC targets were per file, I'd have done just fine.  Even if I didn't do just fine, I wouldnt have felt that their move was unfair.  Instead, it felt like a move that had nothing to do with true performance/cost analysis, but rather a way to screw contributors while keeping the biggest names relatively happy.  I'm sorry, but 20 of this type of contributor are at LEAST as valuable as an image factory, and far more than that have dropped the crown as a result.
« Last Edit: January 09, 2012, 19:03 by mtilghma »

lisafx

« Reply #114 on: January 10, 2012, 16:31 »
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Thanks a lot to everyone who has posted useful info in this thread.  Cathy, JoAnn, and Christian, I know we have talked privately about this but I also appreciate your participating in a public discussion about it. 
...  JoAnn, I'll bring the tea if you bring the cookies :)

I'm up for cookies any time, but I don't know about you bringing the tea :) I drink masses of it, and buy British tea bags - nearly as much caffeine as coffee!

Although if sales keep plummeting, I think it should be something much stronger to drink...

LOL!  Good point.  You bring the tea, I'll bring the bourbon ;D

lisafx

« Reply #115 on: January 10, 2012, 16:54 »
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Really interesting thread.  Thanks to everyone who has posted about their sales post leaving Istock.  Sounds like there IS life after Istock, for those brave enough to try it.  :)

@Bridget (Stockcube), you have been great about sharing your post-exclusive experiences.  Your blog is great reading.  I recommend it to people all the time :)
« Last Edit: January 10, 2012, 16:58 by lisafx »

« Reply #116 on: January 10, 2012, 17:10 »
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Aw, thanks Lisa, that reminds me, I must update it....

wut

« Reply #117 on: January 10, 2012, 17:58 »
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Really interesting thread.  Thanks to everyone who has posted about their sales post leaving Istock.  Sounds like there IS life after Istock, for those brave enough to try it.  :)

I always thought you were a brave gal ;)

So what it's going to be after so many posts and opinions? Are you any closer to pulling the plug?

lisafx

« Reply #118 on: January 10, 2012, 18:18 »
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Really interesting thread.  Thanks to everyone who has posted about their sales post leaving Istock.  Sounds like there IS life after Istock, for those brave enough to try it.  :)

I always thought you were a brave gal ;)

So what it's going to be after so many posts and opinions? Are you any closer to pulling the plug?

You must have me confused with someone else.  I am a big chicken! 

In my original post I stated that I can foresee a time when I would not be making enough at Istock to be worth sticking around.  Things at IS haven't reached that point yet, but the way they are going, it's something I have to consider, and it seems others are giving it some thought too. 

Meanwhile, I'm going to hold off uploading any new content until after it's been on SS and the rest for awhile, to give them an advantage over TS.  Beyond that, it's wait-and-see. 

wut

« Reply #119 on: January 10, 2012, 18:41 »
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Meanwhile, I'm going to hold off uploading any new content until after it's been on SS and the rest for awhile, to give them an advantage over TS.  Beyond that, it's wait-and-see. 

I'll do exactly that with my 100 photos that I'm going to submit during this month (I still have to pp and keyword 20 or so). And it feels pretty good :) . I actually don't know when I'll submit to IS again, I'll wait until this best match mess gets back to normal and then I'll wait for a couple of weeks just to see if it was just a trick to lure us back in (to fill PP sites more than anything). Because they could return it for a week so that everybody who was holding off ULing, dumps all of their accumulated stuff on IS

Wim

« Reply #120 on: January 11, 2012, 05:34 »
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This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of weeks now.
Does TS bite in SS sales? if so then I would immediately remove my SS best Sellers from IS.
SS triples my IS income and I doubt this will change anytime soon.

wut

« Reply #121 on: January 11, 2012, 05:45 »
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This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of weeks now.
Does TS bite in SS sales? if so then I would immediately remove my SS best Sellers from IS.
SS triples my IS income and I doubt this will change anytime soon.

I think any subs based site sites into SS sales. The more the traffic they have, the more market share they take from them. Ans TS is growing fast with all the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of images they transfer every month. My port for example is already fully transferred over there, I kept many out of PP before that and I was about to remove all files from PP, because I too didn't want to jeopardize IS and also SS sales.

WarrenPrice

« Reply #122 on: January 11, 2012, 09:28 »
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I've started doing what Lisa recommended -- not uploading files to iS that I have accepted at SS.  That should give me some idea of how much effect TS has on SS sales.  Maybe?   ???

« Reply #123 on: January 11, 2012, 10:06 »
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This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of weeks now.
Does TS bite in SS sales? if so then I would immediately remove my SS best Sellers from IS.
SS triples my IS income and I doubt this will change anytime soon.

This what I have said over the last couple of months.  I was promptly told that price was not the defining issue to buyers.  That even though you were distributing your photos online to sites that were selling the exact photos at different price points the buyers were going to equally choose between expensive price points ( istock, dreamstime, etc.)  and the cheap sites like SS.   I found this wishful thinking as when I looked for some top selling indies on istock at the SS and even bigstock they were basically in the same position of the best match.  The only difference was they were even easier to find since there weren't any istock exclusives in the mix.  Lets see BMW is selling its M3 at its company owned dealership for $69,000 and down the street the non-BMW car shack has the exact M3 for $4600 ( actually difference between cost of IS and SS for same photo at the  large file size for a independent file).  But I love the lattes at BMW.  so I will pay the higher price. 
   Getty has seen this price war before.  So now instead of getting thumped by a low price site they are keeping SS in check by creating their own SS.  This will keep SS from raising prices to compete with Istock.  Without exclusive content SS is stuck in the low price model.

« Reply #124 on: January 11, 2012, 10:34 »
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If you look at the example here, Getty apparently thinks it can sell the same image at $10 - $350 via its own site verus subscription or $20 (image pack) via Thinkstock.  This is two BMW dealers a few blocks apart selling for $70,000 or $4,000 (again using the ratio of actual prices from Getty and TS image packs).


 

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