MicrostockGroup

Sorry for being a Negative Nelly, but I think Ichiro is right here. 

Vast majority of sales in recent months on StockXpert are from the JIU/Photos.com sites.  Grapevine has it that Getty has pulled resources (staff, advertising, etc.) from StockXpert already.  No real reason to keep them going if they aren't going to be feeding those sites. 

And FWIW the reason this concerns me is because StockXpert (and it's partnerships) bring in 6% of my income, which for me is a significant loss.

I think the photos.com part is important because it will include exclusive material older than 18 months.  No one has really noticed, but the IS subs don't work very well.  And I think that photos.com will be important because I do think that compared to everywhere else, IS does have a better search so I think they may be using the same type of engine over at photos.com.

Regardless, StockXpert was just part of the package, so they needed to take it and since they did, they killed off a competitor.  This is a great long term thing for the industry.  Consolidation is great and the buyers will have to go somewhere, so its not like they will disappear.  In the end, it will mean higher prices charged, and hopefully, bigger commissions.  When you have too many players, they compete on price.  IS is allowed to get away with their prices because they have selected content not available anywhere else.  The only thing that sucks is that people who submitted essentially are losing the time they spent in submitting.  Nonetheless, the buyers will still be there.

Photos.com is Old Navy.  Just like Toyota is to Lexus.  Cars may be a bad example, just because you can't buy a subscription on a car.  iStock has the same content as most other sites minus the odd ones here and there that refuse to submit or don't for various reasons, but the attractive draw is that you can get the best of the exclusive world and the regular world.  Add that you have subs too, and you are covering your bases.  StockXpert would then be a duplicate - a bad idea for business - just like GM - too much duplication.  Smart, streamlined model that makes sense business-wise for them.  Costs are cut, buyers go to one place, and the charts show an increase in traffic.

My opinion, I'm not Jon Klein but I'm just trying to put together the clues.

True, they say 350,000 available for subscription and over 2 million, it's kind of odd, isn't it?

StockXpert says millions and claims 50,000 new uploads a month. That would be 2,6000,000 new photos a year. New photos this month shows 37,000 unless they only show the last three weeks?

While some people complain about subs, all subs, especially JUI/PDot at 30c each, now that we are losing the affiliate, many are saying they will be hurt by losing those same subs?

What's to say that the customers won't move to StockXpert and other agencies, or that the lose of JUI/Pdot won't be beneficial to income from StockXpert?

If Getty shuts down one of the top six outlets, where are they going to make up those sales and that income? I don't think this is as simple as, losing some cheap subs and then just pulling the plug on StockXpert. If StockXpert is 6-8% of the stock sellers income, it stands to reason that it's going to be at least that much of IS style/Getty income. Would they throw away that much income without having some plan to compensate for the situation.

Find out if the sky is falling, in three weeks.  

I still get some!   Lately they've equaled aprox. 50% of my income at StockXpert.  It only takes a handfull of the OD sales to accomplish this!

^^^ More or less the same here. JIU/PC sales represent about 2% of my total stock revenue so hopefully I won't starve to death when they go. If their customers were prepared to pay Istock's prices then they'd already be doing so. If they miss the 3M-odd images that they are about to lose (including over 20K of Yuri's for example) then they can always stump up for a subscription at SS, DT or FT.

JIU/PC subscriptions appear to be priced to attract the bottom of the market, not the sort of accounts we should be chasing IMHO. The site facilities are very poor in comparison to most micros too. For example, because they don't name the artist, it makes it impossible to search for more images in a particular series. There's only one search-order option too, you can't search by age, popularity, downloads, etc. The search-order also promotes their own wholly-owned content above all else too, most of which are horribly dated and rubbish by today's standards, presumably so that they don't have to pay any commissions. If you try a search on 'business team' for example then you've got to jump to page 25 before you get to see the modern quality stuff. It'll be interesting to see if they do anything about the fact that all IS files' keywords are CV'd but, at least at the moment, JIU/PC do not have such a system in place.

I still can't understand why any IS exclusive or independent contributor would support this plan. At best they're likely to increase their income by about 1% (because it is only their non-selling rubbish going there) whilst allowing JIU/PC to promote themselves with the IS name __ basically turkeys voting for Christmas.

Thank you for the added perspective.

I don't care about Jupiter because they are bottom feeders? I could have started at that point and avoided reasons why losing them shouldn't matter that much?  

Here's the list of their image sources. Seems that the one they list as "New" is StockXpert, which will soon be gone.

Brand X Pictures
Comstock Images
BananaStock
Creatas Images
Thinkstock Images
Polka Dot Images
Goodshoot
Pixland
Essential Collections
Photos.com
AbleStock.com
liquidlibrary
PhotoObjects.net
Stockxpert

I really think some people are jumping way ahead with what they think will be happening vs what will actually happen. (doom and gloom, earnings loss and the demise of StockXpert) Back to the usual, please wait and see.

Neither can I, but then I opted out.

I think there's some notion that it's incremental revenue that won't have any impact on the IS revenue - IOW only upside potential. I think that's false - (a) that there's much income to be had from this (b) that it will have no effect on IS revenue. The other argument I heard was that (paraphrasing massively) we're all headed down the toilet with these bargain basement subscriptions, but grabbing as much cash as fast as you can is the best way to deal with this gloomy situation.

I think you were too kind in describing the Jupiter wholly owned content as rubbish by today's standards - I guess the fact that StockXpert contributors have been making anything from Jupiter subs at all (given their terrible search results position) is a testament to how much buyers don't want the old dated dreck.

I wish IS would fix the dollar bin (two prices; 1 credit for Large and smaller, 2 credits for XL and up) and promote their own subscriptions (which have lower, but still reasonable commissions) instead of pursuing moving content to the other sites.

I think most, if not all, of the 'sources' are actually stock agencies that they bought out years ago __ that why so many of the images look dated.

StockXpert are still proudly claiming '46,504 images added this week' and that takes a lot of money to achieve __ probably half a dozen full-time employees going balls-out reviewing images.

Reviewing images is a significant cost and is an investment that will hopefully be recovered sometime in the future. If Getty had already decided that they were going to close StockXpert down there would be no point in continuing to make that investment. I suspect StockXpert is being run very lean, to make it as profitable as possible, and little or nothing will be spent on marketing.Our first warning of any impending change might be if they stop accepting new submissions.

Yes __ Klein has already stated so. Have a read of our honourable friend Sean's thread at IS;

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=127691&page=1

Unfortunately for us all Getty's chosen vehicle for subscriptions is JIU/PC.

...traditional creative stills continues to decline, and even if we see a bump in revenue here after the recession, we must expect that the trends will continue for it to be a smaller part of our overall business. Klein

IS has about 50% of the market in terms of revenue however they are probably only about 30% in volume of licenses sold.

BigStock is probably less than 10% the turnover of SS and even together they'd be less than half the size of IS.

I reckon FT is coming up on the rails really fast though and are seriously pushing SS for 2nd place.

So today's the big day.  Supposedly they are already in the process of removing the StockXpert content from Photos.com.  

Personally, I have had sales on both Photos and JIU today, and from what I can see doing searches for my images, they appear to be there still as of 8:37pm EST.  

Tomorrow (Tuesday 11/3) I am assuming all those images will be gone.  I plan to do searches when I wake up.  

Will be interesting to see if they finally follow through on their plan, and to watch the fallout.  Still having a hard time believing they will actually implement this.

On a more positive note, I had an exceptionally high number of credit sales on StockXpert today