Hmm Mixed emotions-sadness-fear-hapiness and many more that I don't know the english word

"Mixed emotions, buddy. Like Larry Wildman going off a cliff in my new Maserati."

The Wall Street quote is appropriate. This is a Gordon Gecko type of move and photographers are the ones going over the cliff. Thanks to net sale commissions it is assured that photographers will be making less from the customers that take this option, and iStock will be making more. If I wanted this I wouldn't have gone exclusive.

Not sure how I feel about this. Disappointed. Curious. Hesitant.

From an industry perspective, this is a huge move. I don't care for the subscription model but... just about everyone brags SS is their top earner and how much they love it.

IS offering a subscription should attract a lot of new buyer attention but also canibalize existing single image buyers.

The admins keep saying "you like it". If this move improves earnings for contributors, this will validate IS as the industry leaders. If it tanks contributor earnings accross the board, this will be a huge shakeup.  

While earning more per image is important and what so many people are fighting over, in the end we all just really want more earnings. We'll have to wait and see where this goes.

This sucks 

We re getting completely screwed on this one. I-Stock is lowering our percentages. If the customer spends only 1 credit out of 500, istock gets ALL the surplace and it isnt shared out using the old percentage. This is their way of lowering our cut. Please comment in the forums at istock and be negative about it. Seriously, now is the time to state your mind and not do the usual "I-Stock rocks" thing. If they lower it here, theyll keep finding new ways to lower it. Go to their forums and be blunt. Cmon, stick together people.

That front page funeral image should have been a tip off for the week to come.

One thing to consider is that IStock probably does not want to alienate their exclusive contributors. If contributors really do get the short end of the stick IStock may risk losing a substantial number of their exclusive contributors, and hence lose a major advantage they have over other sites. My prediction is the subscription packages will be slightly less than the equivalent bulk purchase but not by a whole lot, just enough to make it look superficially like a slightly better deal to accounting departments.

Yuri has shown that the exclusive content might not be as important as iStock has believed in the past - he is easily the top seller contributor at the moment, and he is non-exclusive.  He has shown that what is all important is the quality of the content, not whether it is exclusive.  All kudos to iStock for being able to sell his stuff in such huge volumes, but it must be giving them big food for thought that they can do that and pay only 20% instead of 40%.

I have just tried to read the whole thread on iStock but got bogged down by the whole thing. Some of the wording of the iStock statement is just too confusing and until they release more details of how the whole thing is going to work I will reserve judgement.

However, nothing iStock has done in the last couple of years has benefitted me as a non-exclusive contributor. First we had the disambiguation fiasco, which cost me a lot of money and time and made no difference to my sales. The Best Match definitely seems to have changed in favour of exclusives and some of my best selling files have gone from dl/month of 120 to next to nothing.

The bottom line for me is sales and income. If this is going to increase my income then great if not, well, it won't come as much of a surprise really.

Yes, leaf, that is exactly how I see it working too.

The story about 'there are customers out there who will only buy subscriptions' is complete and utter twaddle - we have already seen the same story from Dreamstime and StockXpert, and in both cases that story was a smoke screen for 'we want to screw contributors and make more profit for ourselves'.

I doubt that this applies to iStock, but no doubt we will find out in due course.

Why in the world would you doubt that this applies to iStock?  They already keep 80% of the profits.  It's not like they are more supportive of independent contributors than Dreamstime and Stockxpert.

I have posted a considered analysis on the iStock forum, which I'll reproduce here:

Okay, I've given some considerable thought to this subject and here is my analysis and prediction:


First, lets focus on two quotes from earlier, which are: "percentage of daily credits" and "trust me - you are not going to want to opt out". Also, I think Slobo might be the nearest.


Scenario: a buyer takes out a subscription with gives him/her the ability to download images up to 10 credits each day.


First day, the customer buys images worth 10 credits. No problem - the contributors get paid in the normal way (although the credits have been bought at a discount of course).


Second day, the customer downloads only 5 credits worth. On this day the contributors get paid AS IF 10 CREDITS HAVE BEEN SPENT, in other words they split between them the entire 10 credit daily value as a percentage, or in other words they get paid at double the rate


Third day, the customer only buys one XS image. That lucky photographer gets paid AS IF 10 CREDITS have been spent.


Under this scheme contributors always get paid based on the full subscription payment for every day that a customer actually makes a purchase. Very fair (except of coutse those credits have been bought at deep discount).


This scenario explains the 'trust me - you are not going to want to opt out" remark, and also explains the 'percentage'.


However, a percent of zero is always zero. So on any day where the customer fails to make a purchase, the entire subscription for that day is retained by iStock as profit. Istock can rightly claim that by doing so it has disadvantaged nobody because the customer didn't and wouldn't have bought anything.


So where is the advantage to iStock? Of course it lies in the number of days that a subscriber doesn't make a purchase. And there are a lot of them: public holidays, personal holidays, days sick, corporate entertainment days, days spent at a conference or in a strategy meeting or a Board meeting, extended 'holiday' either side of Christmas and Thanksgiving etc etc. There are probably somewhere between 30 and 50 days which will be pure 'profit' to iStock. But once again no contributor is being disadvantaged because the customer wouldn't ordinarily have bought anything on those days.


These 'spare' days represent 10% to 15% of a subscription year, hence that percentage retained by iStock, and why iStock can be fair to contributors in distributing 100% of the subscription payment for each 'purchase' day.


Is this good or bad for contributors (if I am correct)? The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but my initial conclusion is that contributors need to hope and pray that there are many, many days when our theoretical 10 credit subscriber only spends 5 credits.


This is all IMO of course.

My earnings are now hitting new highs with StockXpert despite the subscription sales.  If istock can do that, I will stick with them but if I am going to get 20% of a few cents, I will dump them. 

It would be nice to spend the time I spend on their tedious upload procedure on something else and I am sure over time I will replace their earnings with the other sites.

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, thinking about buyer behaviour on other sub sites.

One thought though:- If IS are trying to attract SS customers, will they abandon the over filtered rejection?