Would you rather have three sets that sell for $60 in total in a year, or would you rather have $500 in a year by putting them in one?
That's how the SS machine works. If you get a lot of downloads within the first week, your image shows up among the most popular and that's critical for its longevity.
You don't have to put 100 business cards in a set, but if you want to compete with the rest of the industry it's a good idea to do so

And I just found large sets at Fotolia and BigStock as well.

Would you rather have three sets that sell for $60 in total in a year, or would you rather have $500 in a year by putting them in one?
That's how the SS machine works. If you get a lot of downloads within the first week, your image shows up among the most popular and that's critical for its longevity.
You don't have to put 100 business cards in a set, but if you want to compete with the rest of the industry it's a good idea to do so

And I just found large sets at Fotolia and BigStock as well.

If they would put a limit on the number of elements in one file you wouldn't have to combine them to make the same amount of money. You could be making $500 on each of the three sets. Remember that the buyers don't use all their downloads (if they did the subs model would collapse). There's no marginal cost for them in downloading the three files rather than the one.
All cramming files does is put more money into the hands of the agency and less into yours (and your fellow contributors)
Where's it going to end, because trust me there are people living in parts of the world where they can afford to make a lot less than you on each of those dozens of elements your are jamming into your files.
It's  short-termism in the extreme.

Quote from: ThomasAmby on November 10, 2010, 04:35

Would you rather have three sets that sell for $60 in total in a year, or would you rather have $500 in a year by putting them in one?
That's how the SS machine works. If you get a lot of downloads within the first week, your image shows up among the most popular and that's critical for its longevity.
You don't have to put 100 business cards in a set, but if you want to compete with the rest of the industry it's a good idea to do so

And I just found large sets at Fotolia and BigStock as well.

Hi Thomas, Think your statement through. What is a business card? What does it do? Who is likely to need one? How many do they need? Would you want your business card to be the same as someone else's? Who are likely to be the biggest buyers of microstock? How will they react to seeing these files at this price point?

I'v got a brand new idea that will make microstock totally obsolete: the tap-on-the-shoulder model.

You obviously missed Flickr.

Quote from: molka on November 10, 2010, 07:56

I'v got a brand new idea that will make microstock totally obsolete: the tap-on-the-shoulder model.

You obviously missed Flickr.

 I'v got requests for single publication usage of my shots on flicker (pratically like rm) and I charged 100 $ or more each time, they payed those wihtout a single complaint. That's 400 or 277 SS downloads f.e. Besides flickr is a nice place without the that repulsive aura of constatly screwing people. : ) It even has better keywording system than microjunk sites, ain't that ridiculous

admin edit: removed needless name calling

I see Microbius' point on this.  It is probably detrimental to the industry to cram so much value into one microstock image.  Like micrstock isn't already priced cheaply enough?

But like so many other things that are going downhill in this industry, it doesn't seem there's much we can do about it.  And I do see collages are lucrative for the people who upload them. 

To be honest, it might make sense doing that with a group of older, no-longer-selling images to squeeze some extra sales out of them.  At some point I may try it myself with some older series that are nearing the end of their run.

You know how it is - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.   

SS accepts web page templates, for example

I didn't know that.

Any idea of their acceptance criteria for web page templates?

To my knowledge FD-regular has never claimed to be a great or knowledgeable photographer or guru type.
He does know a bit about the market, a lot about computing/ the internet/ programming, literature and the world in general.
This makes his posts both interesting and informative, whether you agree with him or not.

Molka has a long running feud with FD that has nothing to do with this thread or its subject matter. 

FD had some sort of altercation with one of molka's many previous identities.  FD is also one of the few who has been able to consistently spot him no matter which of his many trolling incarnations he masquerades behind -  perseus, lefty, batman, tanjomast10,hali, molka, etc., etc., etc.  Honestly, there have been so many it's getting harder and harder to remember them all 

To my knowledge FD-regular has never claimed to be a great or knowledgeable photographer or guru type.
He does know a bit about the market, a lot about computing/ the internet/ programming, literature and the world in general.
This makes his posts both interesting and informative, whether you agree with him or not.

never claims, none of thes guys do, just constantly acts like that. that's enough for me. Some of these guys even 'publish' ebooks on photo and PP, sitting on top of a gelleries with at best mediocre snaphots, and go around calling out 'listen up noobs...' kinda things. They always find a plenty of novices to mislead... juts makes my eyes bleed, what a farce : ((((((((

I see Microbius' point on this.  It is probably detrimental to the industry to cram so much value into one microstock image.  Like micrstock isn't already priced cheaply enough?

But like so many other things that are going downhill in this industry, it doesn't seem there's much we can do about it...

I have to disagree, Lisa. For two reasons. First, I think buyers are savvy enough to know real value when they see it, which is why my set of 8 business cards sells better than my set of 32. I put more time into the set of 8, they are better quality, nicer designs, and buyers recognize that. I think buyers will still always go for the single better image than the collected mediocre images.

Second, I don't think you can apply the same logic to SS that you'd apply to other agencies when it comes to perceived image value. It's not like most buyers at SS even use up their daily quota of downloads, so they're not gaining much by downloading these value-packed image sets. If these large sets of business cards were available at iStock, then sure I'd say the buyer is getting more value than they should for the price of the file. But at SS, there's not much difference to buyers if they download 4 files with 8 images in each file, or 1 file with 32 images in it. And since these files are pretty much only accepted at SS, I think that any harm that this potentially does to the industry is insignificant.

I also think this topic is a slippery slope when it comes to the quantity of elements in a file, or how many elements are considered acceptable by the community and at what point it's considered too many elements. What about icon sets? How many icons are reasonable in a set? You can get a single icon accepted at SS, so is it damaging the industry to pack multiple icons into a set? Should we be selling icons individually instead of in sets?

The problem is that for a lot of things, business cards and icons included, you won't make much money selling them individually, but selling them in large quantities can be considered damaging to the industry. Not sure we'd ever come to a consensus as a community on how many elements in a file is considered reasonable.

Second, I don't think you can apply the same logic to SS that you'd apply to other agencies when it comes to perceived image value. It's not like most buyers at SS even use up their daily quota of downloads, so they're not gaining much by downloading these value-packed image sets.

This is really my point. All you are doing is putting more money into SS's pockets and less into ours. They could equally download them as three or four sets instead of one massive one. More downloads for us, less surplus for SS.

I also think this topic is a slippery slope when it comes to the quantity of elements in a file, or how many elements are considered acceptable by the community and at what point it's considered too many elements. What about icon sets? How many icons are reasonable in a set? You can get a single icon accepted at SS, so is it damaging the industry to pack multiple icons into a set? Should we be selling icons individually instead of in sets?

The problem is that for a lot of things, business cards and icons included, you won't make much money selling them individually, but selling them in large quantities can be considered damaging to the industry. Not sure we'd ever come to a consensus as a community on how many elements in a file is considered reasonable.

It isn't damaging to the industry, it's great for SS and great for the buyers. The only ones it's damaging are the contributors.
No one's saying that there should be a  consensus, only that SS should impose a limit. I haven't really heard anyone up in arms about the limits set by, for example, IStock.
At the extreme end, why not upload individual icons, as you say, it wont cost the buyers any more, they don't use their downloads any way.