You're wildly underestimating TS/PP, Jim. It's now on a par with IS for non-exclusives and they have a huge mountain of wholly owned stuff in there as well.

"Midstock" is the term used for a stock pricing policy that causes agencies to fail.

Whahaaay!

The interesting thing is that any iStock contributor receiving a reasonable number of downloads could easily calculate what their average royalty per download has been over a period of 6 months or so, factor in their royalty percentage and come up with an average price paid for the use of their images. I haven�t seen that kind of reporting and I would think such a number would be useful for the people participating in this group.

I've got to think this number is very portfolio dependent and these numbers may or may not be representative.

Based on 941 iStock downloads in 9 months of 2013, I think the buyers have paid, $22.52 per sale. The contributors cut is his percentage times $22.52. This does not include partner and GI programs.

With Partner and GI included for 8 months of 2013 and an exclusive contributor, I think buyers paid $18.10 per purchase (based on 1221 sales). The contributors cut is his percentage times $18.10 - albeit, the outside programs have there own different percentages than does iStock proper. This paragraph is a whole lot more complicated, than this broad brush, due to the different payment plans and the amount of allowable images in the various outside plans.

.

Before the price reduction in June the buyers of my images at Istock were paying just under $10 per download. Now that figure is down to about $4.20.

I'm getting to $9.88 before the price drop and $4.22 after, so I can confirm your numbers from the meager number of downloads I am having.

OK here is more speculation.
It is interesting that the average gross sale price for a Non-exclusive image seems to have been around $9.88 for the first half of the year and around $4.22 after the price drop. I�m going to use those numbers for some calculations.

We have been told that total Midstock revenue was about $300 million in the last 4 quarters ending June 30, 2013 and that the bulk of Midstock, if not all of it, comes from iStockphoto. Getty has also told investors that 70% of the Midstock revenue is generated by exclusive images.

That means there was $210 million in revenue from Exclusive images and $90 million from other images.

If we assume all the $90 million was generated by iStock non-exclusive images and divide $9.88 into $90 million we get about 9,109,312 total downloads.
If we assume an average price of a credit at $1.50 and an average price of $60 per download there would have been 3.5 million Exclusive downloads.

But some have argued that $1.50 is too high, so assume an average price or $1.20 per credit and that would drop the cost per download to $48 and result in 4.375 total download.

Add the Exclusive and Non-Exclusive downloads together and we get 13,484,213 total downloads for the year. I have estimated that the total downloads for the period was right around 10 million. I might be underestimating that much, but I don�t think so.

Gostwyck thinks that Thinkstock revenue could be included in this Midstock category and that it could be as high as $40 to $50 million. I have trouble seeing how they could argue that Thinkstock is Midstock, but I guess they can give it any name they want. I accept that Thinkstock revenue is much higher than my earlier estimate ($10 million).

Assume that Thinkstock is $45 million and it makes up half of $90 million in �other� revenue. That leaves the other $45 million for iStock Non-exclusive. In that event at $9.88 gross revenue per download that would be 4,554,656 Non-exclusive downloads. Add that to the Exclusive downloads and we get a total of 8,929,656 total downloads for the year. I think that is fewer than the actual number of downloads.

But, if we assume that Thinkstock is included and total revenue generated was about $30 million instead of $45 million (remember this was from July1, 2012 through June 30, 2013) that would leave $60 million in Non-exclusive iStock sales. Divide by $9.88 and you get 6,072,847 downloads. Add that to the 4,554,656 Exclusive sales and you get 10,627,530 total downloads. What do you think? All these numbers could be off, but maybe they supply some perspective.

The other interesting thing is how the price drop might affect the revenue numbers. If the average price dropped from $9.88 to around $4.22 and the downloads remained the same the revenue generated by Non-exclusive sales would have been:

9,109,312 total downloads at $4.22 each would generate $38,441,297, not $90 million
6,072,847 total downloads at $4.22 each would generate $25.617,424, not $60 million
4,554,656 total downloads at $4.22 each would generate $19,220,648, not $45 million

Getty will have to sell a significant number of additional Exclusive images or see a significant increase in Thinkstock subscriptions to make up for the revenue lost from lowering the price of the Non-exclusive images unless the Non-exclusives are seeing their downloads increase from 30% to 50% as a result of the discount price offer.

I predict that Getty saw another decline in Midstock revenue in Q3 2013.

I don't think it needs any complex maths to see that halving the price of independent files is going to have a serious effect on the income. Even if we only account for 20% of their sales, it still means losing 10% of the revenue, which is a huge hit for any company.
The only way to make sense of it is to assume that they thought it would pull in more than enough additional customers to plug the earnings gap. It is true that my sales have risen about 25% on the price drop - but is that due to new customers flooding in, or is it just raking some existing sales off exclusives?
You only have to look at the August and September iStock earnings threads to see that very few exclusives are feeling the love that should have come with an influx of new buyers - in fact it looks more like a straight transfer of sales from them to us not only with no new buyers but very probably with a loss of buyers (maybe abandoning quality control wasn't a brilliant idea).
It would not surprise me if it turned out to be a very, very bad quarter indeed for Getty's midstock. Happily, I'm not an investor living on promises of jam tomorrow.

I still based the average sale on the Large (default) file size and that�s how I came up with $48.

I don't have a summarized statistic on this but I quickly went through my monthly numbers from 2012 and before: Only about 3% of my downloads were bigger than Large, the other 97% were more or less evenly distributed across XS, S, M and L. This would indicate that the average download is probably a bit smaller than M.

This has not changed much over the course of the past years. It only changed with the price drop for non-exclusive files: I am now seeing a higher number (10-15%) in XL and larger. Probably lots of customers are choosing a bigger than needed size because the price difference is insignificant for non-exclusive images.

Quote from: Pickerell on October 10, 2013, 08:55

The problem with the $25 number is that means there would have taken 8,400,000 downloads to generate $210 million and that puts total downloads counting non-exclusive at 13 to 14.5 million which is much higher than the analysis of 192 of the leading iStock contributors would indicate.  (See: http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/istockphoto-download-trends). I still think my download analysis or around 10 million is fairly accurate. I would like to see more exclusive contributors weigh in to this discussion and let us know what their average sale is.

My numbers show that buyers paid between $25 and $30 per image.  Taking 192 members and extrapolating for everyone just may not be that accurate.

I'm Exclusive.  My numbers are very similar to those of tickstock - based on my royalty percentage, buyers have paid an average of between $24.49 and $30.77 per image for my sales, this year, not including ELs, PP or GI.

To MichaelJayFoto

I didn't mean to ignore you. The post I was referring to was the first post on this thread. I am somewhat digitally challenged. I haven't figured out yet how to copy sections of a post and include them in my post. Please forgive me.

I didn't mean to ignore you. The post I was referring to was the first post on this thread. I am somewhat digitally challenged. I haven't figured out yet how to copy sections of a post and include them in my post. Please forgive me.

Press the quote button on the post you want to quote and delete the parts you don't need for your response. 

Seriously, I don't feel ignored. I highly value your insights and the amount of work you put into figuring things out. I am happy to provide the small data points I have access to.