Author Topic: I Think I'm Done (Read 29509 times)

Xanox · « **Reply #75 on:** July 16, 2013, 02:55 »

Quote from: ShadySue on July 16, 2013, 02:17

He hasn't left the micros. iS is still a micro and has just cut the prices of half its files to underline this. Also, his deal with iS/getty, didn't prevent his pics remaining in the PP, undeniably low-cost micro.

That's true for his micro archive, but as far i understood for his new stuff he's only focusing on Getty and will give to micros only some leftovers.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #76 on:** July 16, 2013, 03:41 »

Xanox, your problem was you trad guys had had it too easy. You bragged about your professionalism but you weren't able to compete with a load of amateurs because your stuff wasn't good enough (not you, personally, whoever you are, I've no idea, but your private club of people allowed into traditional agencies).

You wanted to run a closed shop and keep it secret from the world that most of you weren't really doing anything very special. And we broke it for you and you had to share the money with people you despised. Well, hard luck, that's the way the world works.

Whether or not microstock is sustainable has got nothing to do with it. Jobs for life went out of the window a generation ago. We all have to be able to adapt to innovation, at least enough to keep ourselves fed.

Those of us who didn't listen to the carping of you and your ilk a decade ago have done very nicely, thank you, and made a big pile of money we wouldn't have had otherwise. The boom may be behind us, and a lot of people are looking at ways to adapt to microstock being a dwindling income source from now on, but that's just the way things go, it doesn't mean that you were giving us good advice in the early noughties.

All you guys ever cared about was yourselves and your comfy little earner, and we spoiled it for you. Now you want to wallow in glorious schadenfreude over life getting tough for microstockers. Well, sorry, chum, it's not a big shock for us. We're still making some pretty decent cash and we've known for a long time that one day we would have to adapt to a flooded market.

Now, if you're a real professional, go and shoot something remarkable that I can't do and then you can sell it for a pile on Getty or Corbis or do something for one of the many major corporations who no doubt hire you on a huge day-rate.

shudderstok · « **Reply #77 on:** July 16, 2013, 04:31 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 03:41

Xanox, your problem was you trad guys had had it too easy. You bragged about your professionalism but you weren't able to compete with a load of amateurs because your stuff wasn't good enough (not you, personally, whoever you are, I've no idea, but your private club of people allowed into traditional agencies).

You wanted to run a closed shop and keep it secret from the world that most of you weren't really doing anything very special. And we broke it for you and you had to share the money with people you despised. Well, hard luck, that's the way the world works.

Whether or not microstock is sustainable has got nothing to do with it. Jobs for life went out of the window a generation ago. We all have to be able to adapt to innovation, at least enough to keep ourselves fed.

Those of us who didn't listen to the carping of you and your ilk a decade ago have done very nicely, thank you, and made a big pile of money we wouldn't have had otherwise. The boom may be behind us, and a lot of people are looking at ways to adapt to microstock being a dwindling income source from now on, but that's just the way things go, it doesn't mean that you were giving us good advice in the early noughties.

All you guys ever cared about was yourselves and your comfy little earner, and we spoiled it for you. Now you want to wallow in glorious schadenfreude over life getting tough for microstockers. Well, sorry, chum, it's not a big shock for us. We're still making some pretty decent cash and we've known for a long time that one day we would have to adapt to a flooded market.

Now, if you're a real professional, go and shoot something remarkable that I can't do and then you can sell it for a pile on Getty or Corbis or do something for one of the many major corporations who no doubt hire you on a huge day-rate.

Mate, you have it all wrong. Us trad guys had to submit at least 100 solid images in order to get accepted to an agency like Getty, Corbis, Tony Stone, The Image Bank, etc. If you did not have the mojo, then it was always a flat out rejection to any agency of note, big or small. Once you did get in based on talent that actually showed any consistency, you were lucky if you got 10% of your best work accepted, and yes we made tons of cash.
Your ilk came along and only had to submit three borderline photos and pass a brainless ten question multiple choice test (Istock) then wham, you were in, heck, you've never even had to go through the rigor of a ruthless editor, this inspector bu!!sh!t is easy street man.
FYI, the Macros, Trads, whatever you want to call it were never ever a closed shop, provided you had the mojo to prove yourself, nor was it ever a big secret.
Water seeks it's own level, and congratulations, you made it into microstock - you have it so easy. Why don't you take it to the next level if it's so easy?

Xanox · « **Reply #78 on:** July 16, 2013, 04:33 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 01:07

Your RM wisdom amounted to "we don't want competition, we don't want the world to change". You weren't the only ones who saw that it probably wouldn't be a job for life but what you are overlooking is the £100,000+ that I've shoved in my back pocket thanks to microstock (and which now yields 5% per year in interests). Your argument that we would all have been better off if you had had that 100k instead of me is a crock of nonsense. You would have been. I wouldn't.

great, so now that nobody is making serious money composing music, writing books, drawing cartoons, recording videos, with journalism, or doing stock photography, what's left for us creatives ? doing gigs in bars and getting paid in beers ? switching to wedding photography and buying a cheap canon rebel ?

nobody ever complained about selling cr-ap images at bulk prices, but there's a big difference between a huge discount and selling stuff at 1/10th or even 1/100th of the going rates.

competition has always been welcome in pretty much any industry selling digital products, it's the distributors filtering the sh-it out of the whole sea of products for sale and finally it's the buyers voting with their feet.

you 100K could have been 500K or 1 million not long time ago, all you guys were doing was unfair competition and underpricing.

moral of the story, photographers are the ones who got scre-wed again and now it's too late to complain, agencies don't have a single reason to raise our fees, actually they can't even keep up with their backlog of new images on que and you're all thinking here they will miss you or other exclusives if they ever leave in droves ?

Maui · « **Reply #79 on:** July 16, 2013, 05:05 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 01:07

£100,000+ that I've shoved in my back pocket thanks to microstock (and which now yields 5% per year in interests).

Baldrick, that is off-topic, but where do you get 5% interest in the current financial climate? Just curious, I would love to know

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #80 on:** July 16, 2013, 05:48 »

So what, Shudderstock? Most of us may have been really crap at the start but we supplied a market need that you didn't meet. And if your lot had been that much better than us, we would have only ever had the small-time designers buying from us, instead of having Seimens looking to buy my work off SS.

In any case, I read the GI terms back then and the whole thing was designed to minimise the number of applications, I seem to recall that you had to be exclusive to them for stock and on call at 48 hours notice to do assignments for them anywhere they liked, there was a camera list and most likely the only digital one on it would have been the Canon 1Ds, which cost $8,000 - it's a long time ago I can't remember all the stuff but it was perfectly clear that unless you had a well stocked studio and a long record of having been working solely as a photographer they weren't going to look at you.

I know they took very few of the images that were submitted, but I also saw some of the garbage that got through, anyway. Sure there always has been some really fabulous stuff, too, but there were some real stinkers there as well.

Xanox, I know that if I was where I am now 20 years ago and got into stock I would have made a million. In fact, if I had known 10 years ago what I know now I could have been a Lise Gagne or a Sean Locke and made a million in the micros. But I was learning. No way were your lot going to invite me in to your little clubs and let me get my hands on the big cash, so I did what I could, where I could and when I could and it worked out for me.

It wasn't unfair competition, either. Unfair competition happens when people sell things for less than they cost to make. Your problem wasn't really me, it was the Canon 300D. 6MP digital for less than $1,000. That cut the cost of making big digital pictures by almost 90% at a stroke and as soon as that happened your existing stock was overpriced by the same amount (at least, if we are talking about isolated objects, plates of food and holiday snaps; for real top-quality stuff it's a different story). The technology made everything inevitable.

@ Maui - Buy a house and rent it out. My return from rent is just over 6% with a sixth of that going out on costs. It compensates for the slippage in microstock earnings and helps towards the next house purchase, hopefully next year. Like I said, we need to be ready to adapt to a time when MS won't deliver much any more. [PS - I suppose that isn't really interest, but I think of it as being interest]

PPS: Xanox - I think writing books, drawing cartoons and journalism are still potentially profitable. So is photography. Like everything, it depends how good you are and how willing you are to adapt to the market.

djpadavona · « **Reply #81 on:** July 16, 2013, 07:01 »

Baldricks is on to the right idea. My skill is in options trading, where I can safely make 6 to 8 percent per year. Like anything else, is takes a few years of skills development. Some of the money I started with came from microstock, that much is true. Eventually I see trading as a way to keep a full income in retirement. The bottom line is I can rely on my mind to make my next paycheck, rather than the whims of an agency which wants me to produce better images for smaller and smaller commissions. Deciding where to focus my future energies is not difficult at all.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #82 on:** July 16, 2013, 08:48 »

Quote from: shudderstok on July 16, 2013, 04:31

Your ilk came along and only had to submit three borderline photos and pass a brainless ten question multiple choice test (Istock) then wham, you were in, heck, you've never even had to go through the rigor of a ruthless editor, this inspector bu!!sh!t is easy street man.
......
Water seeks it's own level, and congratulations, you made it into microstock - you have it so easy. Why don't you take it to the next level if it's so easy?

I obviously don't know what the "ruthless editing" in the old agencies is like, not being there, but I have been amused by the squeals of rage from some old trad guys who throw wobblies when they fail the entry tests for microstock or have work rejected by the inspector bu!!sh!t (is that why it's bu!!sh!t? Have you had rejections?)
Personally, I'm not interested in learning the ropes at the trad libraries. I do, indeed, have it easy and I don't feel the need to scrabble for more any longer. It's an age thing. I'll set my own levels and do what I want rather than making what would necessarily be a considerable investment risk to try to become a mini-Yuri and head off in a different direction. Now, if I were 30 or even 40 it would be a different thing.

travelwitness · « **Reply #83 on:** July 16, 2013, 09:28 »

Quote from: shudderstok on July 16, 2013, 04:31

heck, you've never even had to go through the rigor of a ruthless editor, this inspector bu!!sh!t is easy street man.

I still have the old RF Photodisc's from Getty in the 90's sitting on my shelves, there was not much ruthless editing going on in those, lots of mediocre images for £500 per disc with about 200 photo's - that's £2.50 per photo. These pricing models have been around longer than Microstock was conceived.

Saturation and falling royalties are a bigger longterm problem and will eventually make the industry unsustainable.

Xanox · « **Reply #84 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:15 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 03:41

Xanox, your problem was you trad guys had had it too easy. You bragged about your professionalism but you weren't able to compete with a load of amateurs because your stuff wasn't good enough (not you, personally, whoever you are, I've no idea, but your private club of people allowed into traditional agencies).

You wanted to run a closed shop and keep it secret from the world that most of you weren't really doing anything very special. And we broke it for you and you had to share the money with people you despised. Well, hard luck, that's the way the world works.

Whether or not microstock is sustainable has got nothing to do with it. Jobs for life went out of the window a generation ago. We all have to be able to adapt to innovation, at least enough to keep ourselves fed.

Those of us who didn't listen to the carping of you and your ilk a decade ago have done very nicely, thank you, and made a big pile of money we wouldn't have had otherwise. The boom may be behind us, and a lot of people are looking at ways to adapt to microstock being a dwindling income source from now on, but that's just the way things go, it doesn't mean that you were giving us good advice in the early noughties.

All you guys ever cared about was yourselves and your comfy little earner, and we spoiled it for you. Now you want to wallow in glorious schadenfreude over life getting tough for microstockers. Well, sorry, chum, it's not a big shock for us. We're still making some pretty decent cash and we've known for a long time that one day we would have to adapt to a flooded market.

Now, if you're a real professional, go and shoot something remarkable that I can't do and then you can sell it for a pile on Getty or Corbis or do something for one of the many major corporations who no doubt hire you on a huge day-rate.

walled-gardens are the norm in many creative fields, it's not only the old RM agencies being difficult to get the foot in the door.

try doing film music they'll hardly give you a chance if you don't live in L.A. and you're friend with producers, try showing some demos to Sony or Universal, no way if you're not friend of producers and if you're not famous already.

what about fine-art photos sold in art galleries ? even worse, that's a whole mafia in itself.

books & ebooks : good luck finding a medium/big publisher if you don't have an agent, and no agent will care about you if you're not recommended by someone in the industry or other agents.

getty had strict requirements but was not impossible to join, it's Corbis the only one who's not taking anybody in apart for news and other niches.

by the way, my market hasn't been ruined much by micros, i will survive pretty well don't worry, what makes my blood boiling is to see once again artists and creatives happy to self-scre-w themselves agreeing on unacceptable low fees and creating a domino effect where the only ones doing good money are the rats owning the agencies.

they're the ones laughing all the way to the bank, not me !

your rants about pay cust are pointless, do you think it makes such a big difference if you get 2$ instead of 0.50$ when by all means in 2013 we should expect at least 5$ for the crap-piest snapshot ?

yeah, musicians sell their sh-it for 0.99$ gross but there's a big difference : their biz in doing live gigs as that's where the money is, we can't do live gigs nor we can expect to do exhibitions with stock images, in the best scenario we can make some beer money with PoD sites and merchandising but that's all.

cthoman · « **Reply #85 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:25 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 03:41

Xanox, your problem was you trad guys had had it too easy.

I like your post, but I was thinking the same could probably said for micro. We all had it pretty easy in the beginning days. You could make money off any crappy image.

Now, it is a little tougher. My problem has been that I don't think the model has evolved properly to accommodate contributors needs and wants. I still have some faith that it might, but it doesn't seem to be happening.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #86 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:32 »

So you're saying the walled gardens are OK and buskers should be banned to prevent them interfering with elite musicians earnings rights?
Actually, there are plenty of ways we can go and do gigs if we feel like it. Try marketing yourself around town if you want to get "gig" payouts. I've turned down a few requests for jobs because I don't want the hassle of dealing with clients.
It does make a difference getting 50c per dl instead of $2. It is 75% less. If you don't know the difference between $10,000 and $2,500, I'm afraid I can't help you.

@ cthoman - yes, it was ridiculously easy to make money in the early days. We should have kept quiet about it!

The problem is that the market keeps demanding higher quality for lower prices. It's a natural consequence of there being a glut in supply. I don't see anything that will change that, any more then Xanox and his chums could halt the tide of microstock.

cthoman · « **Reply #87 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:41 »

Quote from: Xanox on July 16, 2013, 11:15

...do you think it makes such a big difference if you get 2$ instead of 0.50$ when by all means in 2013 we should expect at least 5$ for the crap-piest snapshot ?

I actually agree with this. $5 is where I'd like to see the minimum royalty.

Xanox · « **Reply #88 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:44 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 05:48

instead of having Seimens looking to buy my work off SS.

Xanox, I know that if I was where I am now 20 years ago and got into stock I would have made a million. In fact, if I had known 10 years ago what I know now I could have been a Lise Gagne or a Sean Locke and made a million in the micros. But I was learning. No way were your lot going to invite me in to your little clubs and let me get my hands on the big cash, so I did what I could, where I could and when I could and it worked out for me.

It wasn't unfair competition, either. Unfair competition happens when people sell things for less than they cost to make. Your problem wasn't really me, it was the Canon 300D. 6MP digital for less than $1,000. That cut the cost of making big digital pictures by almost 90% at a stroke and as soon as that happened your existing stock was overpriced by the same amount (at least, if we are talking about isolated objects, plates of food and holiday snaps; for real top-quality stuff it's a different story). The technology made everything inevitable.

PPS: Xanox - I think writing books, drawing cartoons and journalism are still potentially profitable. So is photography. Like everything, it depends how good you are and how willing you are to adapt to the market.

well congratulations selling to Siemens and earning what .. 10$ ?

20 yrs ago : i don't think so, people hated film cameras at that time, even autofocus was a sort of novelty.
a pro was supposed to everything manual including white balance and spent a lot on print labs.

even as a hobby the bar was raised pretty high from the start, it's not like today where any one with a bit of luck can make some lucky shots on green mode on a 500$ canon rebel and send the image anywhere with a few clicks.

in a nutshell, only the few ones with talent had any reason to invest time and money on it, anyone else quickly lost insterent and gave up.

Canon 300D : maybe, but what about the cost of prints, of shipping prints with DHL/UPS, of storing negatives, etc etc ? it's the internet that disrupted everything and broke the distribution chain, not the cheap canon rebels, there were already many "auto everything" film cameras around producing decent results.

and then Photoshop of course, allowing you to quickly correct white balance, dodge and burn, spots, saturation, exposure, cropping ..

i mean with the actual gear we have today the sky is the limit, even my grandma now takes snapshots with her smartphone and she could upload the whole cr-ap on instagram with a couple clicks if she just knew how.

and yet, how many of these punks with their Rebels will join the stock industry nowadays ? one in a million ? maybe.

Ron · « **Reply #89 on:** July 16, 2013, 11:56 »

I guess the internet is now guilty of breaking things.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #90 on:** July 16, 2013, 12:02 »

Quote from: Xanox on July 16, 2013, 11:44

well congratulations selling to Siemens and earning what .. 10$ ?

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.

The digital rebel was THE istock camera of 2004. Hundreds of people were uploading using them. Today more than 200,000 people have tried to get into microstock, most of them haven't made it, but the fact that it is possible with everyday gear is and was the major incentive.

You're right about the internet, though, and digital generally. Didn't you have to make and supply half-a-dozen copies of slides for stock libraries in the old days? And if you had 10 slides selected out of 100 that you had selected from maybe 300 shots, then you had to pony up for 360 slides - 30 rolls of 120 film and developing - to get 10 pictures on sale. At today's prices, it costs about $1 a frame, so that's $360 up front for materials, then fingers crossed you get a sale. It was that sort of investment that justified the prices.

With digital, once you've got your camera you can take 10,000 shots to get 10 decent ones if you want to without incurring any significant cost, and then transmit the 10 best to an agency for nothing. So the value of the product slumps. That's what happens.

Xanox · « **Reply #91 on:** July 16, 2013, 13:12 »

@Baldrick : the issue is all about the so called "entry barrier".

yes, nowadays the bar has belowered so low that anyone can produce some stock snapshots and start selling for fun and profit and then see what sticks on the wall.

but this because to get the foot into a micro agency all you need is a few decent photos and you're done.
if just they asked 100 or 500 photos to start the whole crowd of amateurs will stick to Flickr rather than polluting the stock market.

it should be a basic requirement as without at least 500 images you can't earn any decent sum anyway, where's the logic in allowing access to anyone with portfolios of 30 images ?

but the value of an image is still there as it still had a production cost.
even if i take a sh-it in my toilet and make a photo of it i will waste 30-60 minutes to get the final photo edited keyworded and uploaded.

that's the bare minimum production cost .. so i must earn 5-10$ at least if i plan to sell the image once, or 1-5$ if i plan to sell multiple times, but these numbers are barely to get my production costs back actually, what about taxes and all, what about working to make a decent profit, or we're supposed to just pay the bills and save nothing for tomorrow ?

yeah, you can take a snap with your image and send it to instagram in 30 seconds all inclusive.
ok, but that's not a stock photo, it's not edited it;s not keyworded, and that means 10-20 minutes more at least, so end of the story it's half an hour even for images of your dog taking a po-o.

this is the reality agencies dont want to admit and buyers fail to realize and instead prices will keep going down and fees will keep getting slashed.

no problem, but people will just stop producing images altogether, only phoographers living in third world country will be able to keep costs down as doing stock in the west will soon become unsustainable.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #92 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).

farbled · « **Reply #93 on:** July 16, 2013, 14:03 »

Quote from: Xanox on July 16, 2013, 13:12

yes, nowadays the bar has belowered so low that anyone can produce some stock snapshots and start selling for fun and profit and then see what sticks on the wall.
....
if just they asked 100 or 500 photos to start the whole crowd of amateurs will stick to Flickr rather than polluting the stock market.

You could make the argument that the polluted stock market you're referring to did not exist before MS and that the pros were responsible for raising the quality bar (without demanding higher prices) instead of amateurs lowering it.

I think you need to put at least some of the blame back onto the pro stock photogs who decided to upload high quality images for a very low return per image. No one asked those guys to raise the quality bar in MS so high that great images are worth next to nothing now. There is absolutely no surprise that high end buyers decided to save money by buying the same quality images for a fraction of the price. The high end shooters brought it on themselves by intentionally competing for pennies on the dollar. Some made out very well because they looked at the numbers and decided it was worth it, some just complain about the good old days.

cthoman · « **Reply #94 on:** July 16, 2013, 14:03 »

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

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.

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?

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #95 on:** July 16, 2013, 14:28 »

Quote from: cthoman on July 16, 2013, 14:03

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

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?

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.

cthoman · « **Reply #96 on:** July 16, 2013, 14:50 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 14:28

Quote from: cthoman on July 16, 2013, 14:03
Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 13:41
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.

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?

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.

I actually do pretty well with that philosophy, so I'm not sure about the niche not being available. It's just not being filled at all. I only have 3 sites that I've found and one of them I had to build. They are all still within the micro pricing model, but they just don't have all the garbage at the bottom (subs, images for a buck, poor royalty rates, etc.). I wish I had 2 more sites like these, but they don't exist.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #97 on:** July 16, 2013, 15:02 »

Quote from: cthoman on July 16, 2013, 14:50

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 14:28
Quote from: cthoman on July 16, 2013, 14:03
Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 13:41
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.

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?

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.

I actually do pretty well with that philosophy, so I'm not sure about the niche not being available. It's just not being filled at all. I only have 3 sites that I've found and one of them I had to build. They are all still within the micro pricing model, but they just don't have all the garbage at the bottom (subs, images for a buck, poor royalty rates, etc.). I wish I had 2 more sites like these, but they don't exist.

Is that about them charging more, or are they charging the same and paying higher commissions? I guess Stocksy would be the prime example of pricing high, excluding people and giving good commissions but I've yet to see any sign that it is delivering livable returns (and Sean sounded less than excited last time I saw a comment from him about how things are going).

cthoman · « **Reply #98 on:** July 16, 2013, 15:16 »

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 15:02

Is that about them charging more, or are they charging the same and paying higher commissions? I guess Stocksy would be the prime example of pricing high, excluding people and giving good commissions but I've yet to see any sign that it is delivering livable returns (and Sean sounded less than excited last time I saw a comment from him about how things are going).

It's a little of both. It's really about getting in a certain RPD range for me (Obviously sales too). Like Xanox said, I'm not really interested in the difference between $2 and $.50. I'm more interested in the $5-$15 range. It's just hard to find anybody offering that even though it has proven to be hugely profitable for me. If I had two more sites like this, I'd seriously consider packing it up with the traditional micros.

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #99 on:** July 16, 2013, 16:19 »

Quote from: cthoman on July 16, 2013, 15:16

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 16, 2013, 15:02
Is that about them charging more, or are they charging the same and paying higher commissions? I guess Stocksy would be the prime example of pricing high, excluding people and giving good commissions but I've yet to see any sign that it is delivering livable returns (and Sean sounded less than excited last time I saw a comment from him about how things are going).

It's a little of both. It's really about getting in a certain RPD range for me (Obviously sales too). Like Xanox said, I'm not really interested in the difference between $2 and $.50. I'm more interested in the $5-$15 range. It's just hard to find anybody offering that even though it has proven to be hugely profitable for me. If I had two more sites like this, I'd seriously consider packing it up with the traditional micros.

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?

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Author Topic: I Think I'm Done (Read 29509 times)

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