I am very angry with istock for what has happened in recent years, istock doesnt care anymore exclusive artist, lots of exclusives turn to non-exclusive recent years, me too, because of exclusivity has no meaning anymore...

My revenus decrase 4-5 times in recent 2 years while I am in exclusive and now almost 10 times down since I left exclusivity....

I am very angry with istock because I feel like to be fired my job....

I am very angry with istock because istock doesnt care and listen contributors anymore...

I am very angry with istock because our works and efforts serving agencies at very tragic-comic prices and we all lost money...

already I leave exclusivity, I was forced  to do so, because my income was decreasing gradually like it never stopped, despite I raise my portfolio to 3 times... we loose, them loose, look at istock alexa visitors graph, constantly and dramatically decreasing...

I don't understand what is happening to istock, really don't....

Quote from: ShadySue on August 01, 2015, 13:06

Quote from: madman on August 01, 2015, 12:53

already I leave exclusivity, I was forced  to do so, because my income was decreasing gradually like it never stopped, despite I raise my portfolio to 3 times... we loose, them loose, look at istock alexa visitors graph, constantly and dramatically decreasing...

I don't understand what is happening to istock, really don't....

Getty had a dreadful reputation with photographers for a while before they bought iStock.

But also, as the competition were not raising prices from rock bottom, they were on a sticky wicket.
It's like supermarket competition in the UK: the price wars have meant that  what were the better supermarkets are stocking fewer lines to sell cheaper to bump up profitability, and the quality of what they sell is often decreasing to hold price points. For the buyer, it's means it's far more difficult to source things physically, so more and more things which we could easily buy in localish shops until recently can now only be found online, adding postage and packing costs and the bother of delivery.
Similarly, with new files at iStock only getting subs sales, if that, it's not viable or sustainable to supply low-demand, low supply files which used to fare reasonably there, ultimately lowering choice for buyers.

Oh...you should watch all the gardening allotment videos on YouTube, then! Growing your own veggies seems to be a trend in the UK.

There is some serious revisionist history going on here - iStock's troubles did not come about because of price competition from Shutterstock, IMO

Shutterstock has been around since 2004 and has done nothing but increase its prices over time.

iStock was doing fine raising prices and introducing the Vetta collection (which I was initially very skeptical about) at first. Whether you agreed with every decision the editors made or not, you could see that the more expensive images were not the same as the cheaper ones.

Getty and their two private equity owners started down the road to the current mess when they jacked the prices up significantly, introduced the Agency collection and poured a bunch of old Getty stuff onto iStock - suposedly as "exclusive" even though it wasn't - charging even more (most went in as Agency). Anyone remember the flash picture of the bathroom door? The underexposed fruit slices with black bars down the side and so on?

You can't charge premium prices for content without the buyers understanding the difference between the price tiers. Looking at any search results, any buyer would be hard pressed to figure out why things are priced the way they are.

The reason? The private equity owners wanted out but couldn't given the state of the company and financial markets and so larded Getty with debt to pay themselves a "dividend" of over half a billion dollars.

The business was not able to soak both buyers and contributors to pay these leeches without suffering loss of designers, contributors and bucketloads of goodwill.

Getty/iStock have done this to themselves and Shutterstock has eagerly courted Getty's corporate customers, happily taking advantage of every eff up.

Getty then convinced themselves that the problem was price, and lurched into badly priced subscriptions and even worse one price for all on credit sales - driving away any small design firms they hadn't already lost.

If the problem was price competition, iStock would never have been the leader up until 2010/11 as the other sites were always cheaper. The big slide in iStock has only come since then when its primary competitor, Shutterstock, has only increased prices, not cut them.

I think that they have one big problem they haven't figured out. 3 credits versus 1 credit for essentially the same content -search for orange slice, woman gym, new home and you can't see any reason that one image is three times the price of another.

There is some serious revisionist history going on here - iStock's troubles did not come about because of price competition from Shutterstock, IMO

Shutterstock has been around since 2004 and has done nothing but increase its prices over time.

iStock was doing fine raising prices and introducing the Vetta collection (which I was initially very skeptical about) at first. Whether you agreed with every decision the editors made or not, you could see that the more expensive images were not the same as the cheaper ones.

Getty and their two private equity owners started down the road to the current mess when they jacked the prices up significantly, introduced the Agency collection and poured a bunch of old Getty stuff onto iStock - suposedly as "exclusive" even though it wasn't - charging even more (most went in as Agency). Anyone remember the flash picture of the bathroom door? The underexposed fruit slices with black bars down the side and so on?

You can't charge premium prices for content without the buyers understanding the difference between the price tiers. Looking at any search results, any buyer would be hard pressed to figure out why things are priced the way they are.

The reason? The private equity owners wanted out but couldn't given the state of the company and financial markets and so larded Getty with debt to pay themselves a "dividend" of over half a billion dollars.

The business was not able to soak both buyers and contributors to pay these leeches without suffering loss of designers, contributors and bucketloads of goodwill.

Getty/iStock have done this to themselves and Shutterstock has eagerly courted Getty's corporate customers, happily taking advantage of every eff up.

Getty then convinced themselves that the problem was price, and lurched into badly priced subscriptions and even worse one price for all on credit sales - driving away any small design firms they hadn't already lost.

If the problem was price competition, iStock would never have been the leader up until 2010/11 as the other sites were always cheaper. The big slide in iStock has only come since then when its primary competitor, Shutterstock, has only increased prices, not cut them.