Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on May 02, 2012, 17:05

From Cobalt's link:
"Based on preliminary, unaudited financial statements, for the three months    
ended Dec. 31, 2011, Getty's revenue decreased 0.7% on a currency neutral    
basis"
I seem to recall the late, unlamented COO telling us that the bulk of earnings for iStock (and presumably Getty) came in the last quarter.

Wouldn't this be comparing to the last quarter of the year before?  The link isn't working for me.

It's really not clear if it is a quarter by quarter comparison or 2011 versus 2010. To me it looks more like quarter by quarter.

It would be interesting to be a shareholder if only for the information they send out - It might be hard to tell the shareholders how wonderful everything is and then at the same time tell the artists that they need to lower commissions because of the competition... Then again, it seems like many of the other sites have done that without even having any shareholders.

A closer look at the financials would be interesting though.

plus if they screw the contributors in favor of the shareholders, it would be nice to be a shareholder.

Quote from: nataq on May 02, 2012, 02:07

In a perfect world there would only be one Stock agency, paying their contributors good money and having a lot of well paid and satisfied employees. The photographers will pay their models a fair fee and buy new equipment produced by people that are getting paid well. Models and stock agency employees would buy fair trade food and goods.

Sorry, I'm confused.  When has a monopoly ever produced a fair trade environment?  If there were only one stock agency, or if GOD FORBID, Getty bought Shutterstock, then there is no incentive to pay contributors well.  As the only game in town, (or in the second scenario nearly the only one) they can pay contributors whatever pittance they can get away with. 

Lisa, you put my quote out of connection. My post continued like that...

...The well paid farmers on their end would buy fair produced products in factories that care about the environment,... In the end everybody would be happy and live a comfortable life. Sounds like real communism, does it? But this is never going to happen because humans are never satisfied with the things they have. They always want more, even if they can never ever spend the money they have. Am I different? Perhaps a bit - but not really.

BTW: I don�t think regulatory authorities will allow a fusion of SS and Getty, so there�s probably nothing to worry about.

I haven't read all this topic...
But I wonder myself, what will be if Getty buy more than 51% of SS shares in IPO?
I think that shadow of "fair trade killing machine" known as Getty is above us...
Maybe that is main reason why Yuri will open new agency...

Yuri save us! We are yours!

Don't understand the logic behind buying shares to get more information.  All of that information (on ANY publicly traded company) is available on the SEC EDGAR database.

I won't be buying into the company.  I've bought into other advertising companies in the past only to see the price plunge.  This isn't an industry I'd be interested in investing in from the investor side of things.  The money and profits aren't there and they won't be there for a long time.  If you want to invest, think of companies that cater to the aging population - that's where the money will be.

I can't see SS giving away too much of the company in an IPO.  They must of turned down some big offers in the past and hopefully they're only trying to raise cash to buy istock

Quote from: nataq on May 03, 2012, 01:00

this is never going to happen because humans are never satisfied with the things they have. They always want more, even if they can never ever spend the money they have. Am I different? Perhaps a bit...

Good lord! So the rumours about you being a non-human lifeform are true, then?
(sorry, I can't resist an open goal).

I'd win any E.T. lookalike contest hands down

SS going public isn't necessarily a bad thing. Shareholders definitely want to see profits. But for a small company like SS, shareholders want to see revenue growth more than anything. Using the funds from the IPO on efforts to grow revenues would be good for contributors.  Sure, they have to manage expenses (i.e. commissions) but that only goes so far. Especially if cutting commissions may threaten revenue growth. Many IPO's, especially technology, aren't even profitable.  Investors are buying future profits not current, so there may not be pressure on profitability for quite a while, as long as they grow revenues.
I see the fact that the new directors are from large corporations as a good sign.  Seems like the SS management is seeking advice on how to become a large corp. rather than just "cashing in." The new directors certainly bring a different point of view that could drive growth. Although, one of them is from News Corp, so I wouldn't give them your cell number!

Exactly. Well said. Plus of course the contributor has the opportunity to buy shares and also profit from the gain in the value of the business. I really wish I'd had this opportunity with Istock before they sold out for peanuts to Getty.

^^^That's the worst case scenario.  There's lots of companies with shareholders that are run well and are good with their suppliers.  There's lots that are only interested in keeping their shareholders happy.  The owners of SS have avoided selling out to Getty, so I'm hopeful that they will want to make the most of their business and keep their suppliers motivated.  If the current owners keep full control of the company and it raises cash to increase growth, I wouldn't be against it.

Quote from: sharpshot on May 05, 2012, 04:27

The owners of SS have avoided selling out to Getty

In addition, technology keeps delivering new challenges to the image licensing market. None of us know whether a new image marketing model will derail microstock in the next few years.

That could be a good thing. In fact how could it get any worse? Images are sold for peanuts and we get, on average, 30% out of it. At best, since we earn majority of our money at SS and IS, that pay us from, by my estimation, 15-25%. And that's pretty optimistic I'd say, since SS doesn't pay us more than 30% for any DL (and to get that you have to be in the top tier). A new way of licencing, limiting the usage, raising prices, that really are absurdly low for virtually unlimited usage. Either raising prices and forcing them to buy more ELs or selling images for strictly limited usages (like there is now for ELs, for instance web usage, prints in both cases with different prices for different print runs or web usage linked to number of visitors on that page etc). Perhaps a whole new model of licencing images, a revised RF model, with a lot more restrictions, you could say a form of RF with a touch of RM. But I can't see the new model that would be so much more restricting to the buyers burying the existent. So far, as it is, IS is doing the most to raise prices. Everybody cuts commissions anyway. Well SS doesn't, but it a way they do; no raises in years is really meaning we get micro cuts every year, because of the inflation.

I'm not sure H&F were ever interested in the stock images business.  They just want to make money and they seem to be quite good at doing that.  It's a disaster for us but we have different ambitions to a business that's only interested in generating money.

That's exactly right I'm afraid. I'm sure people at Getty are just as passionate about photography as the people at iStock, but if your business has been take over by * fat cats you've got no chance to improve and grow. It must be as frustrating for the staff at iStock and Getty as it is with us - they just don't have a public forum to vent in.

Why has my post been edited? And edited silently. Very sneaky and questionable behaviour if you ask me.

Why has my post been edited? And edited silently. Very sneaky and questionable behaviour if you ask me.

You lost me - was a post removed, or just a word deleted? There's some automatic editing that the forum does on certain words (the name of the party in Germany's third reich, for example, just gets deleted if you include it); could that have been what happened?