microstock was a real game changer for the industry price wise and i personally don't see it as sustainable for the long run for photographers and it's here to stay so we all need to deal with it

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on August 15, 2014, 01:54

Quote from: PixelBytes on August 14, 2014, 23:45

That exclusive policy work great for the trads.  I bet their real happy with the result.

It worked brilliantly for 10 or 20 years at the end of the 20th Century. The agencies controlled the market - they were effectively a price-fixing cartel who monopolised the supply and sale of stock images. The price had to be a bit less than hiring a photographer to take the shot, but if you didn't hire someone the only way to get quality, released pictures was via an agency. The price limited demand: only the big boys could afford to put photos in their adverts and publishers would limit the number of images in cookery books and travel guides because of the costs. I was in newspapers back then and shops and service businesses relied on black and white text for adverts or maybe made use of crummy line art to promote themselves.

The arrival of digital created a big pool of images able to meet the pent-up demand and this came shortly after computers took over from cameras in the creation of colour separations. The cost of separations used to be huge, we paid hundreds of pounds to get the separations made just for the cover of our annual A4 magazine back in 85, the internal content was all black and white - today I could scan and separate that slide in minutes on the scanner and computer I have at home - a digital image is even easier, of course. It was a "black swan moment" for the trads - suddenly the trade they had controlled slithered through their fingers and there wasn't much they could do except try to adjust to the new market reality.

It wasn't just photography that was changing in the publishing industry during last decades of the century.  During my time in papers we went from letterpress to offset lithography, from B&W printing to the regular use of colour, from camera-made colour separations to digital ones, from compositor-set text to journalist-set text, from hot-metal to cold film, we said goodbye to flongs and chases, galley proofs and the hiss and clang and smell of the linotypes and hello to resin-coated aluminium plates. We went from hard copy that clattered out of telex machines hours after an event to instant transmission via satellite. We no longer lost stories because someone had forgotten to put a new reel of paper in the telex machines overnight.  In the 'togs section the Rolleis got thrown out and Nikon Fs became de-rigeur, then they got thrown out, too. Exciting times, but I suppose it was much the same in most industries during the last quarter of the 20th Century

that is a nice theory, but agencies were around for much longer than 10 or 20 years and they did not control the market, it was a market and many agencies were in it. that all said, most agencies of the time charged for the usage of an image and/or space rate so a magazine cover was worth what it was worth roughly $1000 for an in flight magazine and the photographer got his 50% cut, whereas now you guys are happy to sell a photo for much much less than it costs to produce and get 0.38 royalty for the same cover 20 years later (as recently happened to a good friend of mine from SS). when RF first came out for the first time that cover then dropped to about $350. digital or not, microstock was a real game changer for the industry price wise and i personally don't see it as sustainable for the long run for photographers and it's here to stay so we all need to deal with it and try to accept it and the agencies that now run the industry could not give a hoot about the suppliers as we are now sadly called "liabilities" at the AGM's. i am so glad i invested my earnings in some other lucrative investments years ago, cause the ship in photography sailed long ago.

1 dollar to 4 dollar is  300% increase. Without your figures the percentage tells us little. But congratulations on the results.

Istock is picking up considerably for me this week.

Does anyone else see the same?

Quote from: Freedom on September 11, 2014, 14:00

Istock is picking up considerably for me this week.

Does anyone else see the same?

Exactly the opposite in my port. Very few sales, almost all of which are S.