MicrostockGroup

seems that there's a new contributor from Getty in the istock agency collection http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=8294224  how many agencies still will land on istock?

As many as they can shove in and get their 80% from.

yup. brutal.

I thought I recognized his senior woman from somewhere too.

So if iStock ends up looking almost like Getty, why will existing buyers shop there?

And for those exclusives who see Agency/Vetta as their way to make the money side of it work for them, aren't they going to feel choked out by this huge pile of OK images competing with theirs?

The original idea of Vetta (and to some extent Agency as it pertained to real iStock contributors) had some value to buyers. Encourage the production of things that couldn't be done for existing microstock prices by having a tightly edited collection at a higher price. There was a hiccup at the beginning as existing files got more expensive overnight and buyers were ticked, but there was some great content being produced.

Now, the buyer gets nothing new - they could get all this stuff, if they wanted, at Getty Images. They're just smearing the content around as many places as they can hoping to pick up a few new sales.

So it seems to me like a huge lose-lose for buyers and contributors. In the long run possibly also for iStock (if not for Getty) if too many buyers for the moderately priced material don't go there as much or at all.

Someone help me. Exclusive, I see the the crown and 56 images. Are we going to be watching the same kind of flood as EdStock or what's going on? Do some people get made instant Exclusive?

the moral of the story is always the same :

any decent photographer can produce saleable stock images nowadays.

too many agencies around, too many photographers, gazillions of new photos added every week ....

how long before the stock industry implodes ?

Yep!  just about it really and ofcourse the fact that with the exeption of a few agencies, others accept just about any old sheit into their files.

Hey Monkeybussinessimages has been a uploading a collection she amassed from how many years back onto Istock and anyone else who will have her.  The collection was taken with a 1ds mark II which came out in what year (2003).  These images are being sold as new with no mention that they have been used in previous years for who knows what. 

I don't think I made myself clear. I was not talking about the goods in the store, but the store itself. Why would having two stores that looked essentially the same, had the same owner and the same prices do anything but confuse buyers? There are various reasons why buyers choose one site over another as the place to buy items - one is subscription, one allows instant cash purchases but others make you buy credits, and so on.

I also was not commenting on the generally old and generally "meh" quality of the images that Getty is smothering iStock with. It was simply a reflection on the futility of Getty making iStock look almost exactly like Getty - they've moved iStock Agency & Vetta to Getty and a pile of iStock content to Thinkstock & photos.com, and are in the process of moving lots of Getty RF stuff to iStock.

People came to iStock for a reason; they have always had Getty to shop at if they wished.

Just because iStock has/had lots of traffic, Greedy Getty thought they could cash in by putting their stuff there too. But when they're done and they have two Getty sites with much of the same imagery, what's the point?

That camera was announced at the end of 2005. I don't know if it was available before 2006. Get your facts right.

Robert Doiseneau's Paris kiss is being sold as new, with no mention that it was taken in 1950. So your point is?

I'm not sure I see an issue with amalgamating images from different agencies together in principle. Isn't that in a way what Ebay does, providing a structure where buyers can go and choose products from a range of suppliers?

The danger for Istock in this is that it becomes 'just another stock agency' rather than a microstock agency with a distinct product for a particular market. Bit too late for that now though.

I also fear the situation (especially with something like Getty) where each layer skims off 50 to 85% after a few shuffles there won't be much left for the artist. If H&F owns all of the other layers they just get to skim more - it is a win win for them and a lose lose for the artists.