You're not going to tell who it is, are you?

But I think being a vector artist might be the key to the whole thing .....? Something we button pushers don't have open to us?

I just assumed everybody was sick of me and others singing the praises of Clipartof. I'm also very excited about Toon Vectors and my own site, but those are still relatively small.

I too have tumbled down from a fairly lofty perch.  I was in advertising in NYC for a long time...4000sqft studio...and all that it entailed including fat assignments.  I segued to stock a very long time ago when it produced results.  Now, lucky for me, my wife still works, I'm semi retired and all my earning from stock are icing... but not much.  I have a collection of pics that keep selling and remain fairly industrious because I like to be, but starting over...from where we are now?  Not on your life...certainly not on mine.  The power brokers,  such as the esteemed newly minted billionaire of Silicon Alley in NY are vultures, not good people as my grandma used to say. Yes, they deserve credit for good ideas...but c'mon, pigs are pigs by any standard.  I left a few of these awful places and will another fairly soon.  Been a little lazy about it for obvious reasons to me...the dribs and drabs are MY dribs and drabs.  They do accumulate but in reality it's not oo funny a joke.  The thing is that talent and cameras are everywhere so the many think they'll make a living from this.  It won't happen for the vast majority but don;t try to convince anyone, it's not worth your time.  Worse is true of the art community.  I see huge man-hours spent there too...much more than in stock and it produces the same result: if you enjoy the process, great.  But don't for a split second think you'll be paying your bills with the proceeds.  If you have another thing that tickles you AND you have responsibilities like family, you're better off leaving this nonsense being.   As I said, I'm mostly retired so it's no doubt easier for me to say.  Just steer clear of the vultures if possible.  They don't give a hoot.

Brian, your video is quite shocking.
Revolutions are born out of that kind of distribution.

As for the other posts, there are many many interesting thoughts in your guys wise words. I enjoy reading your elaborate posts.

Quote from: JPSDK on July 16, 2013, 18:32

Brian, your video is quite shocking.
Revolutions are born out of that kind of distribution.

It is quite amazing what its tolerated, but they (or we) keep us pretty busy fighting among ourselves. Howard Zinn has some interesting examples of that in Amercan history.

worst is that it is global and it is getting worse.
 and people believe in all this work hard --> get rich crap.

Because there isn't an available niche for them to slide into. But  Xanox wants to create that niche by raising prices and excluding photographers from selling - basically taking us right back to 2004.

if you want higher prices, just ask for it.
that's what marketers always did !

the finest example is the Vetta collection, same cr-ap but at a premium price.

Won't work, Xanox.  If all the microstock agencies in the world got together tonight and created an entry barrier and push up prices, then tomorrow there would be 20 new agencies pop up to grab all the material that was being pushed away and sell it cheaply. That was what created iStock and the moment it showed there was a niche DT, Canstock and SS sprang into being to grab a slice of the action.

The iStock model, where you don't pay the supplier of goods until months after you have sold them, while the purchaser pays you weeks before they take delivery was a stroke of utter business genius. It made it very difficult not to make money or to run into cash flow problems - your customers became your financial backers without even knowing it.  So anyone can set up one of these operations as soon as they notice that people are trying to mess with the market, push people out of it and charge more than the minimum.  That's the reality. You can't bring the 1990s back again.

Yes, there is a minimum production cost. But if the cumulative average earnings of the images significantly exceed it, then you're basically OK. I've got pictures that have clocked up more than $1,000 in pennies here and there. I suppose that on average each of my images has made $40-$50 and rising (some of them make nothing at all). And I spend hardly anything to create them. Maybe $20,000 on equipment over 10 years. So, it works.

Asian producers won't supplant western ones in the end. The models don't look Western so they won't meet Western market demand. The goods and food aren't Western. I live in the east and my pictures don't sell particularly well in the US, they do sell in Europe and Asia.  If first-world photographers do stop producing, then the prices will have to rise to pull them back again.

I think that the return has now dropped to the level that may well keep new producers out. I've been arguing for about eight years that at some point the return per image will become so low that anybody who isn't already established will just give up. I suspect that we are about there (looking at the $5 iStock has made me on 60 images over the last six months).

well, it takes millions in marketing to launch a new agency and to acquire new buyers.
it's easier if you're the only bloke in the market and you've little or no competition like IS years ago, but nowadays the market is saturated, new small agencies are dime a dozen and as you can see they're going nowhere, even FT and DT are not doing well and they're supposed to have money and being backed by rich investors and yet they still can't compete with SS.

same for Stocksy as i predicted from day one.

to clone the booming success of IS in its early days you would need the same ingredients : either selling products for 1/10th of the competition or providing a solution that it's 10 times better at the same price.

but i can't see a single way to go anywhere near both scenarios, everything has been tried already, any kind of sh-it has been throw at the wall and not much sticked, it's always about rock bottom prices and unfair fees, same situation we can see in music and other creative fields actually.

if there ever was a magic idea someone would be a billionaire by now but instead all we have is SS's founder or Yuri and his clones.

i mean the moral of this story is that SS's founder who just cloned someone else business model made 10 or 20x times more money than the IS founder.

as they always say, ideas are worthless, execution is king !

anyway, yes nobody can bring the '90s back again, but a sort of midstock has certainly reason to exist and its place in the market, not to mention the disasters caused by the RF licence.

asians : agree but there are many niches where they could do fine, i think they just dont know that stock is an option for photographers, they could do well even with travel images alone, think about places like Thailand or Japan, but so few asians travel a lot and in any case they don't have the english skills to do proper keywording, same reason for why there's not a boom of asian writers doing books in english or asians going into written-english journalism.

production costs : yes and as i said we're still having it a lot better than in other creative fields, but i'm scared about the future as there's nothing stopping agencies to reach the point where producing stock is no more profitable for artists, see in the book publishing industry for example where it's taken for granted that only the best selling guys can stay afloat and anybody else (99% ?) is condemned to make peanuts or beer money from spending months doing a book.

so writers know from the starts it's gotta be just a hobby, next it will be musicians' turn, and next .. photographers ? who knows .. if the trends keeps going on yeah this is the future waiting for pretty much any digital artist and good luck saying "adapt or die", the buyers and the agencies owe us nothing !

There are 20 new agencies popping up already that nobody cares about. What boggles my mind is that nobody is really trying it. You have Stocksy, SS's new project and some illustration sites, but not a whole lot beyond that. If contributors want it, why isn't somebody building it?

they don't have money and/or ideas to compete.

their cost to acquire a single buyer is too high compared to the top agencies as they're not backed by a famous brand and they are failing to set themselves apart by offering a unique service or a substancial cost advantage.

simples as that !

it took 20 yrs for brands like Samsung to reach the place they deserve now, and what about KIA, Huawei, Lenovo, Acer .. all these companies were absolutely unknown not long ago.

is Samyang the next Nikon ? we'll see .. but in the meantime it's considered rubbish (wrong, but go tell buyers..) and they will need to spend a sh-itload of money before being perceived at least on par with Tamron, let alone canon or nikon.

producing a product is easy, selling is VERY hard ! that's the hard truth in any business.
i could start selling my worst stock images at 1000$ a pop, but i would probably spend 999$ to find the only crazy buyer willing to pay for it.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 13:41

Won't work, Xanox.  If all the microstock agencies in the world got together tonight and created an entry barrier and push up prices, then tomorrow there would be 20 new agencies pop up to grab all the material that was being pushed away and sell it cheaply. That was what created iStock and the moment it showed there was a niche DT, Canstock and SS sprang into being to grab a slice of the action.

The iStock model, where you don't pay the supplier of goods until months after you have sold them, while the purchaser pays you weeks before they take delivery was a stroke of utter business genius. It made it very difficult not to make money or to run into cash flow problems - your customers became your financial backers without even knowing it.  So anyone can set up one of these operations as soon as they notice that people are trying to mess with the market, push people out of it and charge more than the minimum.  That's the reality. You can't bring the 1990s back again.

Yes, there is a minimum production cost. But if the cumulative average earnings of the images significantly exceed it, then you're basically OK. I've got pictures that have clocked up more than $1,000 in pennies here and there. I suppose that on average each of my images has made $40-$50 and rising (some of them make nothing at all). And I spend hardly anything to create them. Maybe $20,000 on equipment over 10 years. So, it works.

Asian producers won't supplant western ones in the end. The models don't look Western so they won't meet Western market demand. The goods and food aren't Western. I live in the east and my pictures don't sell particularly well in the US, they do sell in Europe and Asia.  If first-world photographers do stop producing, then the prices will have to rise to pull them back again.

I think that the return has now dropped to the level that may well keep new producers out. I've been arguing for about eight years that at some point the return per image will become so low that anybody who isn't already established will just give up. I suspect that we are about there (looking at the $5 iStock has made me on 60 images over the last six months).

well, it takes millions in marketing to launch a new agency and to acquire new buyers.
it's easier if you're the only bloke in the market and you've little or no competition like IS years ago, but nowadays the market is saturated, new small agencies are dime a dozen and as you can see they're going nowhere, even FT and DT are not doing well and they're supposed to have money and being backed by rich investors and yet they still can't compete with SS.

same for Stocksy as i predicted from day one.

to clone the booming success of IS in its early days you would need the same ingredients : either selling products for 1/10th of the competition or providing a solution that it's 10 times better at the same price.

but i can't see a single way to go anywhere near both scenarios, everything has been tried already, any kind of sh-it has been throw at the wall and not much sticked, it's always about rock bottom prices and unfair fees, same situation we can see in music and other creative fields actually.

if there ever was a magic idea someone would be a billionaire by now but instead all we have is SS's founder or Yuri and his clones.

i mean the moral of this story is that SS's founder who just cloned someone else business model made 10 or 20x times more money than the IS founder.

as they always say, ideas are worthless, execution is king !

anyway, yes nobody can bring the '90s back again, but a sort of midstock has certainly reason to exist and its place in the market, not to mention the disasters caused by the RF licence.

asians : agree but there are many niches where they could do fine, i think they just dont know that stock is an option for photographers, they could do well even with travel images alone, think about places like Thailand or Japan, but so few asians travel a lot and in any case they don't have the english skills to do proper keywording, same reason for why there's not a boom of asian writers doing books in english or asians going into written-english journalism.

production costs : yes and as i said we're still having it a lot better than in other creative fields, but i'm scared about the future as there's nothing stopping agencies to reach the point where producing stock is no more profitable for artists, see in the book publishing industry for example where it's taken for granted that only the best selling guys can stay afloat and anybody else (99% ?) is condemned to make peanuts or beer money from spending months doing a book.

so writers know from the starts it's gotta be just a hobby, next it will be musicians' turn, and next .. photographers ? who knows .. if the trends keeps going on yeah this is the future waiting for pretty much any digital artist and good luck saying "adapt or die", the buyers and the agencies owe us nothing !

Great post. However, there is a significant difference between many Musicians and Writers and MS Photographers: Many people who write or make Music want to express themselves, show something special, create something unique (not all though lol), while MS photographers create boring but technical perfect content which is specialized for this kind of commerce. Wanna say: If MS isn`t worth the production anymore, most photographers return on shooting what they love, not what the market demands, and this may dry out the industry.

Quote from: shudderstok on July 16, 2013, 17:54

"5% per year in interest" "return from rent is just over 6%"
bit of a drama queen don't you think? hell of a difference mate between rent and interest.

"Actually, they wanted me to supply another version of something ..... so I dashed it off to Alamy. They paid $529 for it, so I ended up with about $300. I'm not entirely stupid."

So you are saying they somehow contacted you to supply another version of an image, you dashed it off to an agency (Alamy) so that they could find it there and you instantly lost $229 on this image? If you are not entirely stupid, why not sell it direct? or was this just for more drama queen effect to impress us all on how wonderful you are?

Did I touch a raw nerve? Clever of you to point out that I used the wrong word after I had pointed it out. As for (B), I don't have the sort of paperwork - purchase orders, billheads, company name etc. - that Seimens accounts department would probably expect and that might have caused problems, so I decided the best thing was Alamy. As it happens, they negotiated two or three times what I would have asked (since I knew they had been looking at similar stuff on SS) so I ended  up better off by leaving the professional negotiators to do the negotiating.

no, you did not touch a raw nerve at all, rather i find your musings to be arbitrary, exaggerated and entertaining while you make your point.

Quote from: shudderstok on July 17, 2013, 05:20

i find your musings to be arbitrary, exaggerated and entertaining while you make your point.

Good That's how it's meant to be.

Cheers and bottoms up I say...

Quote from: shudderstok on July 17, 2013, 06:03

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 17, 2013, 05:58

Quote from: shudderstok on July 17, 2013, 05:20

i find your musings to be arbitrary, exaggerated and entertaining while you make your point.

Good That's how it's meant to be.

Cheers and bottoms up I say...

Too early where I am

but you said "I live in the east", and from what i gather it's beer thirty there...

Since eloquence has now found its liquid form as is so often the case, I will say cheers, first in Retsina and then in Ouzo.

while we are mixing it up, let's top it off with Aquavit followed by a Caipirinha smoothie