As in Independent Adobe deal basically matches or betters any other microstock offering I submit to as far as RPD.

Your royalty will be lower than SS by a fairly large margin depending on your level.
Single sales at SS (2 for $29 is smallest package) each $4.35 at Adobe $3.30
On Demand sales at SS $2.85 at Adobe $1.65 or .99.
Subs at SS 38 cents at Adobe 31 cents for same level.

So it's about a 20-70% RPD loss depending on the type of sale.  They also don't have ELs on the site so those will much likely be a lot lower to nonexistent and there won't be any high value SODs.  Bottom line is your RPD will go down and significantly.  If they are successful at nonsubs sales it's likely SS will lower single and on demand pricing so you'll also lose at SS.  If they are successful at subs sales SS may go to a Bigstock style royalty scheme.

Quote from: tickstock on June 25, 2015, 22:13

Quote from: qwerty on June 25, 2015, 21:33

As in Independent Adobe deal basically matches or betters any other microstock offering I submit to as far as RPD.

Your royalty will be lower than SS by a fairly large margin depending on your level.
Single sales at SS (2 for $29 is smallest package) each $4.35 at Adobe $3.30
On Demand sales at SS $2.85 at Adobe $1.65 or .99.
Subs at SS 38 cents at Adobe 31 cents for same level.

So it's about a 20-70% RPD loss depending on the type of sale.  They also don't have ELs on the site so those will much likely be a lot lower to nonexistent and there won't be any high value SODs.  Bottom line is your RPD will go down and significantly.

Okay my statement was too far reaching. Adobe deal isn't the best of all, but its certainly not the worst.
Yes it would probably reduce the RPD if all sales were taken from SS alone.
RPD last month at IS was $0.44 so I'd happily swap those for the Adobe sales.
only 11% of last months sales at Istock were Credit sales.

This is where you chime in and say how awesome exclusive at IS is and your RPD there are massive.

No, I'm not going to say anything about my RPD you probably don't care much about that.  I think you'll be swapping a very small amount of iStock sales and a larger amount of SS sales.  On top of that if Adobe is successful then SS will lower your RPD by cutting prices and possibly changing how subs are paid.

Quote from: tickstock on June 25, 2015, 22:42

Quote from: qwerty on June 25, 2015, 22:37

Quote from: tickstock on June 25, 2015, 22:13

Quote from: qwerty on June 25, 2015, 21:33

As in Independent Adobe deal basically matches or betters any other microstock offering I submit to as far as RPD.

Your royalty will be lower than SS by a fairly large margin depending on your level.
Single sales at SS (2 for $29 is smallest package) each $4.35 at Adobe $3.30
On Demand sales at SS $2.85 at Adobe $1.65 or .99.
Subs at SS 38 cents at Adobe 31 cents for same level.

So it's about a 20-70% RPD loss depending on the type of sale.  They also don't have ELs on the site so those will much likely be a lot lower to nonexistent and there won't be any high value SODs.  Bottom line is your RPD will go down and significantly.

Okay my statement was too far reaching. Adobe deal isn't the best of all, but its certainly not the worst.
Yes it would probably reduce the RPD if all sales were taken from SS alone.
RPD last month at IS was $0.44 so I'd happily swap those for the Adobe sales.
only 11% of last months sales at Istock were Credit sales.

This is where you chime in and say how awesome exclusive at IS is and your RPD there are massive.

No, I'm not going to say anything about my RPD you probably don't care much about that.  I think you'll be swapping a very small amount of iStock sales and a larger amount of SS sales.  On top of that if Adobe is successful then SS will lower your RPD by cutting prices and possibly changing how subs are paid.

I'm interested why you think that Adobe will take more sales from SS than IS ?

I've posted my thoughts on this earlier but the short answer is that iStock has exclusive content and Adobe seems to be going after SS subscription buyers.  The loss from buyers going to Adobe from SS is a lot more than any gain you would get from them leaving iStock.  You will actually lose on some sales if buyers go from iStock to Adobe, hard to believe huh?  10 image a month annual plans at Adobe will pay 99 cents royalty per image at iStock you'll get paid $1.30-1.45 if you are at 15%. 

Both istock and SS are weak in Europe and you can see that in their collections.

Where did you get that from ? There is a ton of European contributors submitting a ton of European content. SS even has their EU HQ in Berlin

my weekly rank dropped more then 2000 places but atleast that means somebody out there earning more because i'm selling less in last week

I spent years trying to attract more localized German content to istock. Believe me, having a local forum with ACTIVE community builders that reach out to people, help organize meet ups, answer questions, call people up if there is a problem...it makes a makes a huge difference. We were really successful, we brought in a lot more content and had a group of very dedicated producers. Just having a forum without anyone looking after people, no, that makes no big difference.

But when talking to a wider group of artist I always encountered the problem that people asked me for exclusive images, like fotolia did. I looked at the royalty rates and thought, well the difference to indie royalties is not that big, why do they give up the option of selling on Shutterstock and istock and dreamstime for that? But people explained to me that exclusive content, which isn�t even specially marked at fotolia and there is no special search for the buyer to use, it raises the visisbility of the whole portfolio, especially in your local market, so even the non exclusive localised content seems to sell better. And of course you can keyword and describe everything in your own language. This creates a very strong incentive and feedback loop so putting local content exclusively on fotolia and sending generic content everywhere is a very useful strategy.

So between using your own language, the community actiity, fotolia is present at every major photo event, very active in the german "fotocommunity" etc...everyone knows fotolia. It is really very,very clever they way they work with local communities.


So here Fotolia has something they can use when they grow across the globe, I could imagine they would be very successful in China, or Asia or many other regions where English is not the first language. It takes a lot of experience and money and good IT to build up something with a distinctly local flavor. Now with adobe they have enough of everything.

The number of people who can take great pictures but are not comfortable with English is huge. And since all agencies have enough generic content, having an army of regional producers can make a big differences in the game of thrones between the agencies.

Yes macro has much more local, authentic content and they keep licensing it too each other so they can make better offers to their local customers.

But getting into macro is difficult for beginners and not all customers need super high quality. You see it with the success of mobile stock, which is often out of focus, underexposed, badly framed, but it is authentic for the location and so it sells.

And of course agencies want to distinguish themselves from each other. So having a much bigger selection of local micro content, not necessarily with expensive production value, just the local beer garden, a few friends eating truly local stuff, images from smaller towns and villages, typical local family things, often just your own snapshots, just placed with an agency where you can communicate in your own language, keyword and upload in your own language and make money...it makes a difference.

If people could easily place this on macro, they would probably all do it. But the macro world is a very closed world and usually not avialble in your local language, so micro is the only option for many people.

I think many people here cannot imagine how intimidating a stock site is if everything is in English.

You can�t follow the forums, you cannot understand the newsletters, you struggle with the upload process and don�t understand the rejections and you cannot write to support because you struggle how to phrase it. some use google translate and then if they get an answer they have to reverse translate that as well. But it is not comfortable. Fotolia makes it easy, everything will be in German, or French or Spanish. All events are in your language, all streamed video presentations are in your language.

That is why I ask people to try to imagine what it would be like to provide stock to an all chinese website, if you have no knowlegde of chinese. Even if you take fantastic pictures and keep hearing you can earn a lot of money there, if you just do a lot of stock on the side, even if you do photography full time, chances are you will never upload there and just stick to a company that is local.

So this "on the ground localeness" is a strength of fotolia that made them the dominant agency in non english speaking Europe. This is nothing new.

Quote from: cobalt on June 26, 2015, 05:41

That is why I ask people to try to imagine what it would be like to provide stock to an all chinese website, if you have no knowlegde of chinese. Even if you take fantastic pictures and keep hearing you can earn a lot of money there, if you just do a lot of stock on the side, even if you do photography full time, chances are you will never upload there and just stick to a company that is local.

Actually iStock/Getty have sort of addressed the Chinese problem with fotomore.com

Can't tell you whether it's successful or not of course because their sales reporting outside of iStock is so poor.

They haven't actually confirmed whether it is actually officially fully up and running yet, despite several enquiries, most recently (I think) http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=364453&messageid=7104391
Maybe no-one actually knows 

Surprised to see this:
"55% of Shutterstock users indicated they would shift usage from Shutterstock to Adobe Stock if features were offered in the Adobe Creative Cloud that made importing images easier"
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/07/14/morgan-stanley-highlights-seven-e-commerce-and-media-stocks/

It doesn't say easier than what, maybe they mean easier than from SS in which case it already is easier so you can expect a large number of buyers to move to Adobe. 

Surprised to see this:
"55% of Shutterstock users indicated they would shift usage from Shutterstock to Adobe Stock if features were offered in the Adobe Creative Cloud that made importing images easier"
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/07/14/morgan-stanley-highlights-seven-e-commerce-and-media-stocks/

That seems to imply that 55% of all users would switch but more likely it was 55% of the polled group of Creative Cloud users that would switch. 

It costs $2400 per year for a SS subscription, I would bet almost all of the yearly subscribers are using Adobe ($600 per month for complete and only $120 for PS).

I know a couple of big blogs that use Shutterstock for their 5-20 articles they publish each and every day. I wouldn't know why they would need any Adobe product as they use the images just the way they get them from Shutterstock. Not sure if that looks so much different for most editorial users.