I was surprised when iStock already sent out my month's payment (which I requested today) as they typically stick to their schedule of paying the second monday after you request your money.  But then I realized the amount was much less than my requested amount (1/3 about) and I don't see the payout on my payout report on this page

Did anyone else get an extra strange payment?  Is this the credit card sales that Jsnover was talking about or is there some other mess up?  I guess if I don't hear anything I'll ask them through support.

Here are three articles talking about Shutterstock's IPO offering.  It looks like the price of the stock will be around $14-$16.  They'll raise between $54 - $80 million from the sale (which is down from the initial $115 million hope)

Nasdaq.com
TechCrunch
Reuters

.. so who's buying stock?

I think it would feel nice to own stock in company I work with and to collect a bigger chunk of my sales in a way, but on the other hand, if I were to invest $10,000 in any company on the stock market other companies may be a better buy.  Thoughts?

Doesn't look like much has changed since the 40's

Photography - 1946 Vocational Guidance Film

Hobby photogrpahers selling images to magazines for income and a crowded industry

I've started a new email service that will be sent out on a weekly basis.  The email will simply highlight the weeks top 10 threads.  This is what last week's email looked like
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=0d203b5fd3ae00d726bb03c3f&id=531e42b5a4

 You won't be receiving this email unless you've already signed up for it (most people aren't), so if you want to receive the top 10 threads each week, you can sign up for it here
http://eepurl.com/bRqiz

Perhaps they are already working on this, but if someone has a quick fix I'd be interested in hearing it.

As it is now (version 4.0.9) on my site, when you search for cow (wanting the animal that eats grass) the search will automatically sort the images by the latest uploaded first and return any result with cow within the word.  That means that coworker will be a positive hit.  So.. when a buyer searches for cow they get 5 pages of business teams and on the last page finally a cow turns up.  Not good.  It would be really great to be able to tweek the search somehow, choose which is the default search sort and have the best matches show up first. 

I realize the broad search is usefull to catch plurals and 'ing' or 'ed' endings, but it also returns a lot of false positives as well

Do you have a free stock photo section in your store and if so, how have you implemented it?

In the digital version tab of an image you can set the original copy to be 'free' but I'd like to have just the 600px file free on some images but the larger files pay files.  Also, on the original copy solution - the user doesn't even have to sign in to download the image.

The gauges are back in place.  To get them to show you have to go to your profile settings and enter your dreamstime and iStock user names.  You can also choose to hide your portfolio links but still show your gauges (like before). Once you enter your user details it may take up to 30 minutes to get your gauges in place as it is run on an automatic update that only gets processed every 15 minutes.

There is also three options to show what your primary media type is.

http://www.microstockgroup.com/profile/?area=forumprofile

I love old threads that really show how far things have come (a fun side effect of the Internet that will only get better)

Anyhow, I first heard about Shutterstock on DPChallenge and I was looking for the thread recently when I stumbled on this one.  Where Joey Lawrence complains that he only has a 1.4 megapixel camera and has to trick the system and up-rez to 2 MP to upload on Shutterstock.  He also says how he doesn't have any good stock photos.

For referance - Joey has now done some rather prestigeous things, like shoot the twilight movie poster , shot 50 cent, shot for Vibe, Forbes and was on the Key Note panel at PhotoPlus Expo in NYC last year with Chase Jarvis and a few others.  He's come a long way since 2004 to put it mildly.

.. and here's that original Shutterstock thread

Here are my numbers for august 2012

Shutterstock was a few dollars less than last month which was surprising and they they contributed 2% less to my overall income.  Dreamstime and Fotolia are each up a percent.  Really, no changes overall.  My income was up 6% over last month which is pretty insignificant considering august is generally a better earning month compared to July.

Oh yeah, and the polls (or more notably the graphs) are working again.  You can find it on the top menu under Polls.
Here is a link to cast this months vote
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?page=microstockmonthlysurvey

As I'm sure you've noticed and perhaps have read that the forum was updated.  Along with that came some changes and lots of little things that were added the past have been lost and a few layout tweeks are gone.

If there are things you miss or something that doesn't quite look good on your computer, this is the thread to voice your request / complaint and I'll try and fix / get working what I can.

I don't promise to implement everything, but if it makes sense I'm happy to try.

I'm wondering if people want the number of posts shown beside your post in each thread.  Is it nice to see how long a member has been here or is it nice with a clean layout and to have that gone?

There has been some discussion about this in this thread after Yuri supposed the amount to be under 20% and later Scott Braut from Shutterstock stepped in to correct him saying it was 25%-30%.  Scott's statement confused the matter a bit using the words 'in general' and talking about % net revenue, not gross.

For the record, the effective royalty rate we pay our contributors varies based on product type, customer usage, currency exchange rates and other factors.  In aggregate, it is generally in the range of 25%-30% of net revenue, not the 20% rate that was previously suggested.

Anyhow, I took a look at the IPO offering data again and took a good look at the numbers.

Shutterstock states the gross revenue for the last three years are as follows
2009 - 61.1M
2010 - 82.9M
2011 - 120.3M

As their income is the sale of our images, that is what I'll consider as the starting point of what they take in.. or what they sell our images for. 
The IPO doesn't state what they pay out in royalties.  The only hard number they provide is cost of revenue which includes royalties

Cost of Revenue.    Cost of revenue consists of royalties paid to contributors, credit card processing fees, image and video review costs, customer service expenses, the infrastructure costs related to maintaining our websites and associated employee compensation, facility costs and other supporting overhead costs. We expect that our cost of revenue will increase in absolute dollars in the foreseeable future as our revenue grows.

That's not accurate enough

What they DO however state, in hard facts - within a paragraph of text mind you is the increase in royalties year over year
2009 -> 2010 :

Contributor royalties increased by $6.7 million, or 41%

2010->2011 :

Royalties increased $10.8 million, or 47%

If we know the percent they increased and the amount they increased we can then know what the actual royalty payout figures were in those years.. and they are...
2009 - 16.3M
2010 - 23.3M
2011 - 33.8M

So if the gross revenue is divided by the royalties paid out, we get (on average)
2009 - 26.7 %
2010 - 27.7 %
2011 - 28 %

.. I guess Scott wasn't too far off after all

Ok, sorry for being ignorant here..

I thought PhotoXpress was a free (or really really low pay) site and we weren't getting paid for any downloads and that the images were sourced from free donations from Fotolia.

But, I see that there are 2000+ of my images, 2000+ of Lisa's images, 16,000 of Yuri's etc.. and often the best sellers.  Are we getting paid for these downloads? I haven't opted in to giving my images away for free anywhere - at least not that I know of!!!