Author Topic: Post Collection Changes Sales Performance (Read 5003 times)

davidgoh · « **on:** June 21, 2013, 00:23 »

I'm slated to have a pretty bad week so far, with 40% of $$$ of what I usually make weekly. I can't help but link it to the recent collection changes, which also seemed to have had a huge impact on how the best match works.

How's everyone else doing? Notice any changes since the collection changes?

shudderstok · « **Reply #1 on:** June 21, 2013, 00:32 »

the whole problem with the microstock crowd is they analyze everything in real time. give it some time, like six months or a year before you set about the doom and gloom path.

JFP · « **Reply #2 on:** June 21, 2013, 06:01 »

Nothing related tot he micro stock crowd here. You mean we should write off thousands of files already on istock and hope that it will work again?

Mantis · « **Reply #3 on:** June 21, 2013, 06:07 »

Quote from: shudderstok on June 21, 2013, 00:32

the whole problem with the microstock crowd is they analyze everything in real time. give it some time, like six months or a year before you set about the doom and gloom path.

You're wrong on this one. My sales are way down since P+ was removed. I'd say that's a talking point. While you are "possibly" correct in that some of our files may find their way into the Signature series, for the next XX months they are in the fecal series. We're FORCED to keep taking revenue hits on the chin because of the space monkeys who keep saying yes, no, maybe, no, yes, i dunno, maybe, sort of, ok, yes, no, wow, didn't expect that......and on and on. Their track record is enough to make a clear statement of doom and gloom, at least from the Istockian point of view. How can you NOT infer that?

Noedelhap · « **Reply #4 on:** June 21, 2013, 07:09 »

It's way too soon to tell. Analyzing your sales performance after a single week is pretty useless, better look back on it after six months or so.

sgoodwin4813 · « **Reply #5 on:** June 21, 2013, 07:32 »

For me regular iS sales seem to be good at the beginning and end of each month with a drop in the middle. This month from June 13-20 I had zero sales with finally one today for 22 cents. Even for my small portfolio and taking account of a drought in the middle of the month that is unusual.

Regular iS sales have dropped for me each month this year, with last month being about half of January. So far this month it is about 1/3 of last month and the worst since my first year of microstock in 2009. I agree it's a bit soon to judge results from the recent changes but so far it looks abysmal and the long-term trend is down. PP sales have been strong and about on par with what I usually get from DT or FT so that has been keeping iS at #2 overall but so far this month regular iS sales have basically died - I have made more at BigStock and Depositphotos than iS, which is a first and one I am not happy about. I hope iS can turn it around and get back to decent sales, but so far the changes don't seem to be in the right direction, at least for independents.

KB · « **Reply #6 on:** June 21, 2013, 07:41 »

My sales have done exactly what I thought they would do.

In the 7 full days since the collection change, my sales are down precisely 50% from what I had been averaging.

The only similar stretch of poor sales I've ever had since I've been on IS was at the end of last year (22 Dec through 1 Jan).

wds · « **Reply #7 on:** June 21, 2013, 08:04 »

Sales are way down since the Collections introduction. Aggravating and frustrating. Even if things recover in a couple of months, events like this can drive you down to the next lower royalty level and therefore impact you for well over a year. In addition, iS has eliminated the self nomination of files into P+/S+ and they seem to have a very high bar for the + collections...on the order of 1% of new submissions getting into +. This may also drive down long term revenue for contributors.

steheap · « **Reply #8 on:** June 21, 2013, 08:22 »

I was thinking the same thing. This month was OK (but not great) but the last week has been very slow:

Downloads are perhaps down a bit compared to last week, but earnings are quite a bit down. Not a very large sample size, but the loss of the Photo+ collection seems to have hit me.

Steve

luissantos84 · « **Reply #9 on:** June 21, 2013, 11:57 »

maybe its time to upload another 1k Steve

Monkeyman · « **Reply #10 on:** June 22, 2013, 17:01 »

June will probably be my worst month since I became exclusive three years ago. Can't really say if there's any difference after the restructure though.

dingles · « **Reply #11 on:** June 22, 2013, 17:49 »

Pretty average sales for me so far. Not enough time to really say good, bad, or same.

lisafx · « **Reply #12 on:** June 23, 2013, 19:00 »

My sales are about on a par with the prior two weeks, but the $ are significantly down. P+ was a significant income booster when they introduced it and continued to be, right up until a week ago.

Since I chose my P+ files by DL/month, which seems pretty logical, I am surprised that they didn't keep them in the S+ collection. As much money as I'm losing on those sales, Istock is moving 81% more.

mlwinphoto · « **Reply #13 on:** June 23, 2013, 23:13 »

First full month being back to indie status and about on par with when I was exclusive in terms of the # of DL's, but revenue is down....fortunately it is being made up elsewhere. Have no idea what influence, if any, the collections change has had.

cobalt · « **Reply #14 on:** June 24, 2013, 02:54 »

My sales seem to have gone up in volume, but the drop without P% evens that out.

At the moment it looks like everybodies nightmares are coming true. Last year when they briefly introducing the new price slider, the exclusives were scared of what is happening now: their regular content is not visible at the lowest price point, only their non sellers are left to compete with first class indie content.

And the higher price bands seem to have become unreachable, very few images are placed in Sig+ upon upload. So you can no longer plan and shoot specifically for that price band. It also means hardly any images will go to Getty, basically getty rescinded their generous invite to istock exclusives.

And Vetta has become a dumping ground for all kinds of strange things. Like someone wrote - it is the artist that is deemed "Vetta", not the quality of the file.

The original Vetta collection was a real gem, I can't believe they just killed years of work this way. They should have at least kept a lightbox with the best Vetta files for the customer to browse through.

And even the indies are not happy, because they lost the 15% of files they could place in P+.

Overall it looks like all the regular istock uploaders will take a big hit in their earnings and just the Getty preferred artists that will benefit.

Looking at it all, I am glad I went indie, I would not be able to handle the stress of this situation.

The only good thing is that they made all the changes in the summer and the site itself is still working. So maybe they will bring in the human factor and move files around.

Anyway, back to shooting and uploading.

pancaketom · « **Reply #15 on:** June 24, 2013, 10:10 »

My worst nightmare would be they drop commission percentages even more and lower prices and sales take off like a rocket stealing buyers from all the other sites but the photographers just get screwed from all directions.

I am guessing that the Getty powers just can't help but tweak things for the short term benefit so the wholly owned content and pseudo exclusives from Getty will go to the high priced collections and the other stuff will get put in main and transferred to PP as soon as possible.

My sales don't seem to have changed (pathetic and random as usual), but getting 50% less for every sale does hurt since everything got moved from P+ to main.

It sounds like they tweaked the search again. It probably was pretty decent until they realized it would never do and started tweaking to push the usual suspects - wholly owned content, pseudo exclusives, other crap from Getty.

wds · « **Reply #16 on:** June 24, 2013, 16:07 »

Quote from: lisafx on June 23, 2013, 19:00

My sales are about on a par with the prior two weeks, but the $ are significantly down. P+ was a significant income booster when they introduced it and continued to be, right up until a week ago.

Since I chose my P+ files by DL/month, which seems pretty logical, I am surprised that they didn't keep them in the S+ collection. As much money as I'm losing on those sales, Istock is moving 81% more.

I'm not sure any significant number of independent files made it into S+.

KB · « **Reply #17 on:** June 24, 2013, 17:13 »

Quote from: wds on June 24, 2013, 16:07

Quote from: lisafx on June 23, 2013, 19:00
My sales are about on a par with the prior two weeks, but the $ are significantly down. P+ was a significant income booster when they introduced it and continued to be, right up until a week ago.

Since I chose my P+ files by DL/month, which seems pretty logical, I am surprised that they didn't keep them in the S+ collection. As much money as I'm losing on those sales, Istock is moving 81% more.

I'm not sure any significant number of independent files made it into S+.

Perhaps that was a typo on Lisa's part, as it seems to me that the natural progression for those P+ files would have been to the S collection, not S+.

Incidentally, as an example, about 1% of the S+ files under 'business' are from independents. But only about 2% of S files are, so not much better. If you believe what they say, though, many of the P+ files will get promoted sometime in the future.

MicrostockGroup Sponsors

Author Topic: Post Collection Changes Sales Performance (Read 5003 times)

davidgoh

shudderstok

JFP

Mantis

Noedelhap

sgoodwin4813

KB

wds

steheap

luissantos84

Monkeyman

dingles

lisafx

mlwinphoto

cobalt

pancaketom

wds

KB

Related Topics

Sponsors

Microstock Poll Results

Sponsors