Until they get the flow of images to and from IS working again, it's probably moot, but all this nonsense about Thinkstock/photos.com and IS addressing different markets and pools of buyers seems to be exposed by the fact that all three now offer essentially the same options. Subscriptions and pay per download.

The only real difference is how much the contributors make on the deal. I think it behooves us (and possibly the calculation is different for independents from IS exclusives) to figure out where we get the best deal and then support those and not the rest.

I wasn't in the partner program and don't intend to start. Given that Thinkstock and photos.com are going after SS's business, I'd think that independents would do best supporting SS and leaving these two Getty offshoots alone.

Whatever the content and whatever the history you have to admit that the name photos.com is pretty good. It says what it is (as opposed to names such as veer, canstock, depositphotos, crestock, dreamstime, etc.). A new buyer with no knowledge of any type of stock imagery will remember the name and might even type photos.com in a browser guessing it might take them somewhere. The key is to hook the buyer and keep them.

New buyers don't care about content on one site vs another, they just want to find an image. So, not a bad move on Getty's part (from a business prospective, nothing to do with fairness to content suppliers). If current contributors don't have images there you can bet that there will be new contributors who will.

I didn't think photos.com ever went away.  I looked there not long ago, to make sure they no longer had my images.  I might be interested if they matched shutterstocks commissions but not for 25 cents and I no longer upload to istock anyway.

GM used to be:
Chevrolet, Pontiac, Saturn, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, GMC.

Making one's own competition was considered good
business. In the long run it turned out to be unsustainable.

I wonder if Getty isn't painting itself into the same corner as GM once did?

GM painted itself into a corner? I never saw it that way. What they did was buy up and absorb competing brands. Many of them eventually were nothing more than labeling the same cars made in the same plants, with different brands. What did in the US car makers was better quality products from foreign sources. Now things have leveled again, and US car makers have had to make economic decisions to consolidate production and remove unnecessary duplication. Kind of what some photo agencies are doing. SS buys BS. IS buys StockXpert and others, all those photos under one roof, bringing buyers in to their consolidated, more efficient business that the lone original business. Less staff.

One of their versions of the divisions was BOC (Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) that took over some GM plants or Chevy plants. Then it reverted back to GM as they moved different models into different locations. Same deal, different cars came out of the same plant, being made for three or four Mfgs. names. Also sometimes a Mazda was a Mercury (I know not GM) or an Izuzu was made by Honda. But Buick, Olds, Chevy and Pontiac, all shared base cars, with trim being the difference. That's not competing against onself, that's diversity.

A bigger market share isn't "competing against oneself" take a good look at Pepsi and Coke, where coke has about 500 brands and I forget how many hundreds of Pepsi products there are. They are in effect blocking out competition from getting any profitable share of the market.

What killed the American auto makers and many manufacturing companies wasn't the product or the marketing, it was the retirement plans, health insurance plans, benefits, the unions and the cost of labor.

Anyway - "GETTY IMAGES UNVEILS THE NEW PHOTOS.COM" which as far as I recall, doesn't have anything with photos.com ever going away and coming back, it's just redesigned. I don't think they ever left.

Cool, the buyers pay 23c a photo and we get paid, 25c a download, that's - 128% commission. Way cool for people who are absorbed by percentages not bottom line.   And for the annual subscriber we get a bigger 131% commission. Wow, I should see all the percentage freaks, wanting to get in on this.

Meanwhile I'll stay with bottom line and it's a crummy quarter per download, nothing more, nothing less.

Aside from the sarcastic, making fun of subscriptions and 25c sales, photos.com is offering "crapstock" (my images are there with the identical file numbers, keywords and everything, same as ThinkStock) for 90 cents a download and playing me 25c which is (audience shouts) 27% and it goes up from there. It's nothing new, it's the identical collection as ThinkStock.

Didn;t anyone else get photos.com downloads in Oct? That would be difficult from a site that didn't exist?

What's sad is the day of the dollar download has once again been nipped and, prices have again been cut. Now we have 90c downloads without a subscription.

Many of them eventually were nothing more than labeling the same cars made in the same plants, with different brands.

This is pretty much what I meant.
People eventually got wise to things like a Cadillac Cimarron was really just a gussied up Chevy Cavalier.
You can't fool all the people all the time.

Thinkstock & Photos.com are the same thing re-branded with the same or very similar content.

Coke and Pepsi have lots and lot of different products, not 500 versions of cola.
I fail to see the comparison, sorry.

I changed the title as you are probably correct in that I misread the headline of the news story.

Still given the huge "FAIL" that is the current IS situation, one might think that Getty has thrown its IT resources at the wrong target.

I was probably wrong as it was a relaunch not bringing it back from the dead and gone.

Coke isn't just cola. It's the whole corporation just like Pepsi isn't just cola. Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that cars aren't all sedans, would be a comparison that all beverages that Coke and Pepsi make are not cola's. No big deal, the issue was why the auto makers and much of the manufacturing industry went South, literally, and then left the country altogether in the US. It wasn't competing with themselves by re-branding that caused the big problems.

Where we agree is that photos.com is just another smelly tennis shoe in the locker room. As Vonkara pointed out, the search doesn't work right. So what we have is yet another version of Getty branded subs. I don't know if it works or not, but the idea is a mass marketing the old stale collections, cheap. I don't believe the sites are intended to compete with the fresh new materials? (opinion) Just a was to run an outlet store with over runs and discontinued products.

Many of them eventually were nothing more than labeling the same cars made in the same plants, with different brands.

This is pretty much what I meant.
People eventually got wise to things like a Cadillac Cimarron was really just a gussied up Chevy Cavalier.
You can't fool all the people all the time.

Thinkstock & Photos.com are the same thing re-branded with the same or very similar content.

Coke and Pepsi have lots and lot of different products, not 500 versions of cola.
I fail to see the comparison, sorry.

I changed the title as you are probably correct in that I misread the headline of the news story.

Still given the huge "FAIL" that is the current IS situation, one might think that Getty has thrown its IT resources at the wrong target.

I've been browsing on Thinkstock, photos.com, Jupiter Images, Punchstock and Getty Images trying to get my head around where each of these sites now within the "Getty Family" fits. Potentially, content from iStock could be on more than one of these sites, although I don't think any one image could be on all. They've apparently tried to make pricing tiers and put content only a few places.

Apologies that this is a bit long, but I think as contributors we need to understand what Getty's doing to be able to make decisions about whether and where to contribute to their (many) collections.

You can get the same image at very, very different prices depending on where you shop - even the Image Packs sold at the various sites aren't priced the same. If I were a buyer, I think I'd find this whole thing miserably confusing - not sure where to go to get the best price.  Thinkstock's image packs start at $59 for 5; photos.com charges $14.99 for a 5 pack. So if you chose to purchase an IS image it could be $12 or $3 depending on which family site you shop at. Plus there are subscriptions...

A Comstock image at Thinkstock will cost you $12 (max size at that price) via an image pack, but at Jupiter Images or Getty, the same will cost you $370. Check out Comstock 86501880 as an example (same image number on all - it's as if they were coordinating things Photos.com doesn't appear to have these images.

Then I looked at Punchstock - they have the Comstock image up to 3156 x 3156 (i.e. not the max size of 4385 x 4385) but they're selling at a discount - $236.25 instead of $315 for the High res 3156x size. I think I'll still take it for $12 though - cheaper and I get the 4385x maximum size to boot.

I don't see how you can have content at $370 or $12 depending on which of Getty's stores you happen into - how does that make sense?

Agency Collection images show up at Getty, Jupiter Images and iStock (RubberBall Productions images, for example). These don't appear at photos.com or Thinkstock. The price for images (the ones I looked at from the Agency Collection; Comstock images at Jupiter are cheaper, for example, maxing out at $370) is the same on Jupiter & Getty at max of $525, but at iStock that'd be 200 credits for Agency (which would be $300 if you paid $1.50 per credit - cheaper if you buy in bulk). If I get this image at Punchstock, it's on sale at $393.75 for the largest size

104302851 at Getty, Punchstock & Jupiter, 14628640 at IS as an example Rubberball image in case anyone wants to look.

If you click on the Subscription link on the top right of a Jupiter page, you're taken to Thinkstock (where you can't buy a subscription to the stuff that's on Jupiter, but I guess buyers will figure that out) . I don't see anyone linking to photos.com - not even Thinkstock, which does have a link to clipart.com (dregs vectors)

IS partner program images are at Thinkstock and photos.com, but the prices are cheaper at the latter. Example: 104787028 at Thinkstock & Photos.com. $299 for one month subscription at TS or 3 months at photos.com; image packs $12 or $3 per image if you buy a 5 pack. You don't get the largest size via photos.com I can't find that particular image at IS, but  one that size would be 15 credits, or $15 - $22.

So it looks as though Photos.com is at the bottom of the barrel in terms of pricing and has the least content. Then there's Thinkstock with some of the content at the higher end sites and some real bargain prices if you go for image packs. Then there's IS which is a bargain or not depending on what type of content you're shopping for. Then there's Getty/Jupiter/Punchstock with the same nominal prices but things are on sale at Punchstock (25% off until March).

And IS contributors (via the partner program and/or Vetta/Agency mirroring) will get 20% of the sale price.

At one point 20% looked terrible, but for an independent (not counting Yuri), 20% is now a step up! However, if you were at 18%, your royalty on $20 would be $3.60 whereas 20% of $12 is $2.40 and of $3 is 60 cents (better than 25, but still pretty crappy). Even at 15% of $20 - $3 - you're better off.

World's gone bonkers

Wow, JoAnn, You've been busy!  Thanks for doing all that research.

Seems like Istock is the intersection of the Venn diagram.  It has both some expensive content from Getty, Jupiter, Etc., and low end content which is being sloughed off on Thinkstock and Photos.com.  

Of course, Istock also has a lot of unique content that is not available anywhere else.  But I suspect over time there will be more pressure on exclusives to either move up to Getty via Agency/Vetta, or move down to Thinkstock/Photo.com (along with independents).  Once that is accomplished, Istock will be completely redundant.  

...My eyes glazed over after about the fourth paragraph. 

So you passed your health screening for this week! What other response could there be to this sort of tangle?

@Lisa - thanks for the fence

Just trying to think through my options and see what the landscape looks like today - it's been over 2 years since I was independent and lots of royalty rates have been altered since then   Whether independent or exclusive, what Getty is up to has an impact on our business. Seemed prudent to try and get some data as they are wholly useless at sharing info with us (beyond the happy talk newsletters which are info free).

I think the next step is likely to be a removal of the opt out on the partner program (to feed TS and Photos.com). That'd probably prove to be the proverbial straw for me.

What a confusing mixed up muddle!

"Interesting investigation and the prices are all over the place. But people who sell the same images on micro and Alamy have long contended that there's nothing wrong with doing that?

Good point.

Quote from: loop on January 13, 2011, 18:52

"Interesting investigation and the prices are all over the place. But people who sell the same images on micro and Alamy have long contended that there's nothing wrong with doing that?

Good point.

The agencies have never had a problem doing that.  Alamy certainly doesn't.  Just this month I have sold RF alamy images for $299, $40, and .83.  If this was ever an issue, it certainly hasn't been for a long time.  

I think where you will find contributors, particularly Istock exclusives, getting angry at Getty, is when they are intentionally advertising to drive buyers from the higher paying Istock, to the rock bottom sub sites - TS & Photos.com.

My only point is, that some people can't complain that various price points are a conflict of interest for an agency, when the same people, try to market their photos at diverse price points and also claim, it's not an issue. That old double edge sword cuts both ways.

I hate to say this, because it's curt and contrite, but if you (meaning anyone, not you personally) don't like what Getty is doing, "you" can always go someplace else. I don't like what some other agencies have done with policy or payments, I quit.

We aren't prisoners, we aren't conscribed, we haven't sold our souls to the Devil, and we don't have to take this anymore.

Unless someone is holding your hand to the fire or has you chained to the computer and camera, we have free will to participate or find other outlets.

IS knows that. Contributors can complain, get irate, or debate until they are blue in the face, but the reality is, either take what they offer or get out.

I'm not supporting their actions in any way, just pointing out the situation. We can document the pricing inequity and artist payment cuts, but the bottom line is, the agencies have tens of millions of images, darn good images, new images coming in, and things aren't what they used to be.

The comments often discuss the future of microstock and what changes are coming to the market. One that people don't face is that the image supply has been inundated with better and better stock images from a huge international supply. The Internet has removed all borders. The camera technology has removed the barriers to quality at basic financial levels. Here's the future... commission cuts, consolidation, agency closings, tough acceptance policies in the face of abundant supplies of inexpensive, repetitious, cliche, stock images.

2009 is gone, 2010 was transition. Welcome to the new microstock with less opportunity and growth. There's still a place to work and make some money, but the times have changed.