MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => iStockPhoto.com => Topic started by: Karen on May 22, 2014, 13:21
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Thinkstock ads disappeared from Getty
Now it's only Getty, iStock and Photos.com
(http://i.imgur.com/22RfYOW.jpg)
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Interesting. Seems to confirm a lot of the speculation that TS was a bust.
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It is a very good move if true. If only they had done this 5 years ago but...anyway. It is so much easier for branding, they will save tons of money while increasing brand awareness and exposure.
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The thinkstock site is still up and offering plans and pricing, so perhaps this is a slow goodbye.
For those indies who were on StockXpert when it shut down - and thus are in the Hemera collection currently on Thinkstock but not iStock - will there be any easy way to have those images continue selling?
Given the stories about iStock accepting almost anything these days, earlier worries that iStock would reject images StockXpert had accepted are perhaps no longer applicable, but it'd still be a lot of work to upload images again.
I had become exclusive at IS when StockXpert was shut down, so I didn't have work migrated to Hemera. Has it been making money via Thinkstock?
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TS is selling more than SS for me, I'm worried because IS itself hardly sells anything.
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I rather think you are jumping to conclusions when you have very little evidence indeed. TS must have a very considerable turnover to deliver the returns that it has been doing. Perhaps they have just decided not to push it on Getty because they've found it is counterproductive to push GI customers over there. Their marketing logic has been very mysterious for a long time.
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I rather think you are jumping to conclusions when you have very little evidence indeed. TS must have a very considerable turnover to deliver the returns that it has been doing. Perhaps they have just decided not to push it on Getty because they've found it is counterproductive to push GI customers over there. Their marketing logic has been very mysterious for a long time.
Marketing logic? WHAT logic??
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I had become exclusive at IS when StockXpert was shut down, so I didn't have work migrated to Hemera. Has it been making money via Thinkstock?
Not for me. StockXpert/Hemera has more than 10x the images of iStock, and yet it produced 1/10 the income on Thinkstock over the last year. That's down from 7x a year ago. No idea why there's such a large disparity.
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That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.
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That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.
I need to say something that many may agree with and others won't. When Thinkstock wasn't here, I made, say, $250 a month on Istock. In comes thinkstock. Today I still make $250 a month at Istock, and another $150-$250 a month with Thinkstock. While some of us (including me) tend to cheerlead for things to fail for bully agencies, I would prefer to keep thinkstock (assuming it's going away). If they kill TS, I doubt I will see an increase of the same amount on my monthly income. So I see the elimination of TS as a bad thing for me revenue wise.
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That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.
I need to say something that many may agree with and others won't. When Thinkstock wasn't here, I made, say, $250 a month on Istock. In comes thinkstock. Today I still make $250 a month at Istock, and another $150-$250 a month with Thinkstock. While some of us (including me) tend to cheerlead for things to fail for bully agencies, I would prefer to keep thinkstock (assuming it's going away). If they kill TS, I doubt I will see an increase of the same amount on my monthly income. So I see the elimination of TS as a bad thing for me revenue wise.
Maybe your figures relate to the time when everyone was forced to join TS. I've been in it since the start of 2010. Four years ago TS was 20% of my earnings from iStock. In cash terms it has remained pretty steady ever since then, but the repeated attacks on independent income by iStock since then mean that my earnings from the main site are down about 60% and as a proportion of iS earnings TS has risen to about 40%.
If TS is scrapped, I see no particular reason to expect that it will lead to an increase in iS earnings. Maybe there will be a shift from TS to the new subs - I'm not sure what that would mean for earnings - or there might be a further shift to SS or DPC. Overall, it probably wouldn't do me any good at all and it might mean a significant further cut in earnings. So I'm with you on this.
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That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.
I need to say something that many may agree with and others won't. When Thinkstock wasn't here, I made, say, $250 a month on Istock. In comes thinkstock. Today I still make $250 a month at Istock, and another $150-$250 a month with Thinkstock. While some of us (including me) tend to cheerlead for things to fail for bully agencies, I would prefer to keep thinkstock (assuming it's going away). If they kill TS, I doubt I will see an increase of the same amount on my monthly income. So I see the elimination of TS as a bad thing for me revenue wise.
Maybe your figures relate to the time when everyone was forced to join TS. I've been in it since the start of 2010. Four years ago TS was 20% of my earnings from iStock. In cash terms it has remained pretty steady ever since then, but the repeated attacks on independent income by iStock since then mean that my earnings from the main site are down about 60% and as a proportion of iS earnings TS has risen to about 40%.
If TS is scrapped, I see no particular reason to expect that it will lead to an increase in iS earnings. Maybe there will be a shift from TS to the new subs - I'm not sure what that would mean for earnings - or there might be a further shift to SS or DPC. Overall, it probably wouldn't do me any good at all and it might mean a significant further cut in earnings. So I'm with you on this.
I have too. Been with Istock since 2007. And I agree with your statement fully. It will be a pay cut for most of us.
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That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.
It's a very good move for Getty.
It will simplify everything from buyer's perspective, increase iStock exposure and save operation costs.
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In the current climate it would be foolish to believe that any change at any agency will increase earnings for us. They're all playing the same game: offer more for less to capture new buyers and simultaneously trim royalties to inflate or underpin their profits. We lose on both counts.
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The thinkstock site is still up and offering plans and pricing, so perhaps this is a slow goodbye.
For those indies who were on StockXpert when it shut down - and thus are in the Hemera collection currently on Thinkstock but not iStock - will there be any easy way to have those images continue selling?
Given the stories about iStock accepting almost anything these days, earlier worries that iStock would reject images StockXpert had accepted are perhaps no longer applicable, but it'd still be a lot of work to upload images again.
I had become exclusive at IS when StockXpert was shut down, so I didn't have work migrated to Hemera. Has it been making money via Thinkstock?
Yes, still makes me money. I was at 500$ at Stockxpert when they closed it, it was a big shock for me. They continued to sell the collection via Hemera, but in 100-150 $ range for me, even today.
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Interesting. Seems to confirm a lot of the speculation that TS was a bust.
Closing Thinkstock and adding subs to iStock was long expected
as part of a new Getty strategy to compete with SS on subs market.
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I don't think the "ads" on the front page are a good indicator. There are just three slots and currently they are using them for two brand new products (iStock subs, photos.com print) and a current event.
Yes, I am sure Getty is pushing iStock subscriptions right now and most likely will shift focus from Thinkstock to iStock over time. It doesn't make much sense to have two different subscription offers within the family (didn't make sense with Thinkstock and photos.com to start with) but I'd assume it's a long term process over the next few years.
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I am sure Getty is pushing iStock subscriptions right now and most likely will shift focus from Thinkstock to iStock over time.
A few years back it would have been long term process but not in current market conditions.
Getty have no time to waste - they are loosing buyers to SS everyday.
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I don't think the "ads" on the front page are a good indicator. There are just three slots and currently they are using them for two brand new products (iStock subs, photos.com print) and a current event.
Yes, I am sure Getty is pushing iStock subscriptions right now and most likely will shift focus from Thinkstock to iStock over time. It doesn't make much sense to have two different subscription offers within the family (didn't make sense with Thinkstock and photos.com to start with) but I'd assume it's a long term process over the next few years.
You're forgetting that TS contains a pile of non-iS material, some of it wholly owned by Getty Images. If they restrict subs to iStock they stop making money from old stuff they had lying around on their hard-drive. Sometimes a multiplicity of brands can boost overall market share
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You're forgetting that TS contains a pile of non-iS material, some of it wholly owned by Getty Images.
Didn't they already dump it to iStock?
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You're forgetting that TS contains a pile of non-iS material, some of it wholly owned by Getty Images.
Didn't they already dump it to iStock?
I don't think so. But I might be wrong. They sent some stuff to iStock but it was premium priced, I thought there was a different stream going to TS.
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It doesn't make much sense to have two different subscription offers within the family
Why do you think that ? In other areas of business it typically makes sense to own competing brands. Potentially it means a greater market presence. Shutterstock run competing subscription brands for example. Indies do it too.
And if you can run two different brands off the same backend then why not ?
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TS is where I get almost all my sales from via IStock. I would say most IS contributors are in the same boat, we all wait for TS payments to roll in each month. Therefore it appears that TS is ticking over quite nicely whereas IS hardly generates any sales.
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TS is where I get almost all my sales from via IStock. I would say most IS contributors are in the same boat, we all wait for TS payments to roll in each month. Therefore it appears that TS is ticking over quite nicely whereas IS hardly generates any sales.
I'm not in TS, but I've read that new files get seen and bought there, whereas that's a rare event on iS. iS subs is using the same search engine, so new files will be doomed for iS subs too.
iS even removed the 'newly accepted files' feature from the site. It was perfectly possible to sell directly from the queue, before a file had even entered the database, so another indication that they deliberately want to suppress new files (so that they can say 'they don't sell', and in the case of exclusive files, demote them to Main). That's my conspiracy theory, anyway; but the reality will probably be worse, as usual.
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Getty's new strategy is to boost competition with SS,
to keep exclusives on board and to minimize operation costs.
In addition to Thinkstock closure, I guess they will mirror all exclusive content on Getty site and will bring the old canister system.
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Well, iStock and photos.com have disappeared from the main page now, and are hidden in small type at the bottom along with Thinkstock, so I suppose they are closing them all..... if the logic here is right.
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Well, iStock and photos.com have disappeared from the main page now, and are hidden in small type at the bottom along with Thinkstock, so I suppose they are closing them all..... if the logic here is right.
I think that must vary by country? What I see today is two "tiles" on Getty's front page for iStock's subscriptions. One up top with photos.com and "Female Rising", and one further down in the section titled "Featured. Collections, events and tools that bring power and depth to creative ideas"
Thinkstock is listed under "Other sites"
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In the UK, it's the same as BT describes, iStock, TS and Photos.com are at the very bottom of the page, under 'other sites', in tiny writing. It's otherwise all iStock, but with a section for the BBC Motion Gallery.
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"Curve" "Connect" and "BBC Motion Gallery" are what they are advertising over here.