IS is ...

Yikes, July looks ugly. Hopefully, that was an aberration and not the new normal.

It's a direct result of the price changes.  This is the new normal, since Istock claims the price changes are "forever". 

If I only looked at the download graph I would think I had a windfall month! 

Quote from: cthoman on August 09, 2013, 11:10

Yikes, July looks ugly. Hopefully, that was an aberration and not the new normal.

It's a direct result of the price changes.  This is the new normal, since Istock claims the price changes are "forever". 

If I only looked at the download graph I would think I had a windfall month!

That's what I was wondering if it was from the pricing changes. That's pretty disturbing. Maybe, the volume will eventually make up for it, but the initial results on your sales look bad. If money is their main objective, this wouldn't seem to be too positive for them either.

when a leading company start losing his top suppliers and employees it's the sign of an imminent downfall.
months, maybe years, but the cracks become more and more visible.

i remember when everyone in the IT dreamed about being hired at microsoft, now they all dream about google, apple, facebook, samsung ... microsoft or nokia or IBM are seen as secondo or third rate.

IS is on the same path and it's gotta be hard to get back on track, once a customer leave for greener pastures it's lost forever in most of the cases.

will they learn the lesson ? i don't think so .. there's an unbelievable arrogance in their announcements and newsletters, they really think they know better.

Lots of bad karma at IS.   

when a leading company start losing his top suppliers and employees it's the sign of an imminent downfall.
months, maybe years, but the cracks become more and more visible.

i remember when everyone in the IT dreamed about being hired at microsoft, now they all dream about google, apple, facebook, samsung ... microsoft or nokia or IBM are seen as secondo or third rate.

IS is on the same path and it's gotta be hard to get back on track, once a customer leave for greener pastures it's lost forever in most of the cases.

will they learn the lesson ? i don't think so .. there's an unbelievable arrogance in their announcements and newsletters, they really think they know better.

Xanox@


,,,for IS - unless they do something radical, but what ? slashing prices even more ?
[/quote]


...all they have to do - is to .......

I was aware my sales at IS had increased, and money had decreased, but looking at the graphs side by side really brings the point home better than words... 

My own graphs are almost identical in shape. At least we can enjoy the rueful irony that IS are actually losing more than 4x the money that we are.

I'm guessing that IS really had little choice, but to take the painful medicine, in order to stay in the game.  Unfortunately they probably haven't performed the operation skilfully enough to have the effect that they really need. 'Main' collection files are now cheaper than they need to be whilst the majority of exclusive files, at 10x more for a Medium image, appear over-priced relative to the Main collection. I can see buyers hoovering up the Main collection images (which at these prices does nobody any good) whilst ignoring the more expensive ones. That'll probably lead to more exclusives handing in their crowns ... and so on.

I think the future is going to be much worse for Istock though. I (stupidly) uploaded about 100 new images to IS a couple of months ago. Since then those images have garnered about 15 sales for a total of about $10. That works out at about 5c per image/month. Yes ... I really did say 5c/image/month. Most of the images don't appear to have appeared on the PP yet but the few that did have earned a paltry $5 more. I find that incredible. If the insultingly low royalties, on pathetically low prices, weren't enough disincentive to starve IS of new content then surely the lack of sales will be. I can't imagine why any independent contributor would bother to upload to IS again.

By way of comparison the 100 images uploaded to SS at about the same time have earned well over $200.

....... I wonder if that's because with all the savings on nonexclusive files buyers are able to spend more on exclusive content, are other exclusives seeing a raise in RPD?

You're welcome.....glad to help out.   

istock will win this game not now but next year when half contributors will dropp one or two royalty levels

are other exclusives seeing a raise in RPD?

No, my July RPD was 20% down on the average of Jan - June and my August looks similar. Of course, my actual dls are down to such a level as to be 'statistically irrelevant' probably.
Here's my stats as an exclusive. To put in perspective, my January started at half the $$ of my BME. So my sales and $$ are shooting down, despite many of my pics being demoted to main. I guess buyers see 'only from iStock' and assume they're more expensive. The few which have sold as main were seasonal, unusual/unique in subject and would have sold at S. Plus I'm definitely not happy about quite a number of promoted images which didn't deserve to be made S+, and are now dead.

For once I agree with Xanox.  This looks like a company in its death throes, even despite their snagging Yuri.

well, actually iStock is not a total disaster, not at all, but they're competing with an agency like Shutterstock which keeps delivering and proved they really know what they're doing.

technically, SS hired a very good software team, a very good management team, and they had a clear long-term vision from day one and a very aggressive marketing plan.

all these factors combined make them the industry leader and rightly so.

i can't see how IS can possibly make a U-turn anytime soon considering it won't be long before yet another re-org will be launched inside the company and that means more confusion and more employees leaving the company, including the few ones left who have experience in the industry.

we don't know and we can't exclude that Getty's plan was to destroy IS or at least to keep it at bay, but looking from the outside it looks like a sick company micro-managed by people that downplayed how hard is to sell images in the actual cut-throat market.

after all IS has been pumped so much in order to raise the whole value of Getty Images when they sold the whole company, IS was probably the jewel of the crown with impressive net returns and growth expectation, once the sale was done they faced the hard reality and now they're reaping what they sow.

solutions ? not many, the product is still good but the buyers are decreasing constantly, how do they plan to earn buyers' confidence back after backstabbing both buyers and photographers for years ?

once a company earns such a bad reputation it's game over, see how hard is for microsoft now to sell anything having to do with Windows on mobile platforms, see how hard Yahoo is struggling to survive, and how Apple keeps losing market share as they stopped innovating after Jobs' death.

what we're witnessing now is that web-based companies can raise very fast thank to the internet but also crash and burn equally fast, Facebook is next on the list and will join the long list of former market leaders like MySpace, Friendster, Digg, that now are worthless.

if we look at their example, they made all the mistakes IS is doing right now, not listening to users, redesigning and launching new half baked web sites, doing a big mess and failing to notice the competitors were about to crush them in 6-12 months.

istock's future is probably to be relegated into a market niche along with Photos.com and Thinkstock.

They're probably still doing OK because they've got rid of the upload limits.  They're still getting a huge supply of images from people that don't care about making money and I don't think that will stop.  They'll lose more buyers that liked their smaller collection that had higher QC but they'll gain ones that are attracted to the bigger cheaper collection.

Most contributors are going to see a commission cut, as its almost impossible to keep up with the RC levels.  Some will leave or stop uploading but they will be replaced by those that don't care.

The only good news for non-exclusives is that SS seems to be doing well but now it feels like being 80% exclusive with them and that's not comfortable for me.