Quote from: SLP_London on February 25, 2015, 08:43
I also thought I had finished with the Tax interview (several times), but keep receiving same email. So what is a TIN and where do I get one, in the UK? Haven't had this issue with any of the other sites.

I'm getting the same message. The only further info I can find on this is here:

http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Claiming-Tax-Treaty-Benefits

So, as a South African, this should be easy. All I need to do is give them my US Social Security Number. How hard can it be?

Pffft.

I seem to remember that some of the other sites also wanted this tax number . . . at first. In the end they all gave up, right?

I've sent iStock a query back to the same email address from whence it came, asking them for information on how to obtain this TIN number. The iStock forums don't seem to offer any useful information on how to obtain the number either.

Hoping iStock / Getty give up on insisting on the number like all the other US - based micro agencies have.

As an aside, a twisted thought just entered into my head . . . that somewhere, some microstock contributor in a "rogue" state just got their camels and family tent blown to * by a missile fired from a drone paid for partially from their own photo submissions.

Quote from: Pixart on February 12, 2015, 17:49
GREAT POST,  but it hasn't been 10 years, I think maybe 4 or 5.

Good point - the number of years may well be incorrect. According to the SS forum date I've been contributing to them since 2005. Was "Dreamstime" still a contributor to iStock back then?

Either way, they have spent a long time rejecting images that otherwise sell.

Perhaps primitively, I've traditionally viewed SS, IS and DT as the three main players. So it came as some surprise to me that Adobe chose to buy FT for a truly staggering amount of money.

If Adobe spent that much money on buying a stock agency asset, they must be gearing up to turn that into real value for their business over the next few years. That must be a game changer, one way or another, for the whole stock industry.

But why did they buy FT and not DT? Surely DT is the "better" agency to own. Surely Adobe would have done their due diligence before dropping $700-million on a stock agency asset? So what did they find?

Had a chuckle when considering a glaringly obvious DT failure . . . that they have spent the last 10 years a bloody long time insisting on a mad "similars" policy.

They have refused many truck-loads of high-selling images and substantially reduced the value of the only thing that has any value to a big player like Adobe - the images in their database.

If their daft policies have been annoying for us, consider how pissed off buyers get when they can only find a quarter of the portfolio of their favorite stock artist. Then consider how much money DT has lost itself in revenue for refusing such images. They have lost so much more revenue than all of us combined - because they have lost the biggest slice of the all the sales.

DT is one of the prettiest girls at the ball, but she has bad teeth resulting in rotten breath. Everyone keeps on saying she should see a dentist, but she stubbornly refuses to accept her problem. Now the prince has visited the ball and it's too late, he has chosen the lesser maiden with reasonable dental hygiene.

As far as I can tell, the whole industry is in a state of flux. Somehow I feel that the elephant just entered the room and it's already having an impact. And for DT, the horse just bolted and they are at least five years too late to close the stable door.

Donated.

Does anyone know if 123RF is no longer allowing the conversion of sales balance to credits?

The site instructions at http://www.123rf.com/guidebook/c03s10.htm reads "The 'Convert Balance to Credits' link enables you to purchase online credits with your earnings based on the available package prices."

However, I'm not getting a "Convert Balance to Credits" link at the bottom of my profile. Just a line about "You have submitted your ID for payment verification. "

Have they hidden the conversion process or removed it altogether?

Moving Wordpress sites can be a bit of a performance. See details on the Wordpress codex on how this should be done.

However, with a bit of planning, you probably won't need to.

We host all our sites on Hetzner. www.hetzner.co.za - They have servers in Germany. It's possible with Hetzner to build your site on a staging domain. Everything works and can be tested on this staing domain. Then, when the time comes to go go live, simply point the domain to this server or apply for the full domain to be trasferred.

In the Wordpress general settings, simply change the Wordpress url and Site url to the proper domain and all should work just dandy.

Of course, other ISPs will probably have something similar too - I just don't have much experience with other ISPs.

Edited message: MSG - please take my image down in the post above. I think I asked nicely, but the request has been ignored by the poster above.

I've sent a message to admin - but I don't think anyone is "in". If there is a forum admin who can make a call to action - please do.

I'm not sure that many of you have been to Cape Town? There are many more reasons why a stock photographer would want to move to Cape Town other than an exchange rate - which is a pretty bum way of measuring the cost of doing business all things considered.

My transfers seem to work flawlessly for SS but is patchy on DT and others? Then again, my keywords are patchy when uploading to some sites anyway directly from my own ftp. Does anyone know for sure that it's Photoshelter's fault?

Where I live, having an online service that can send via ftp - dodgy keywords or not - is an imperative.

I think everyone is waiting more or less patiently for you to understand what you have read.

"are not suited for the kind of high production cost images we produce" - does not mean microstock is dead. It means that Yuri believes his work that is produced by a team of people at a high cost is better suited on agencies elsewhere.

Of course, it would help if the agency you are moving to actively wants your work and is willing to negotiate a special deal for you . . . which is what everyone, probably correctly, suspects.

By contrast, many of us don't produce high production cost work, much less have large agencies beating a path to our doors.

After the dust settles, business as usual.

For me, that's in around 5 minutes from now.

Quote from: Xanox on May 18, 2013, 09:31

Quote from: fotoVoyager on May 18, 2013, 09:17
Can someone remind me how to set the ignore feature?

please bring me respect, unlike you and many others i've correctly predicted the outcome of microstock in the long term a long time ago.

now you dont want to hear the ugly truth, well dont shoot the messanger, you can only blame yourself if you bet the farm on micros and put all the eggs on istock.

it's funny that those like me are called "trolls" both here and on RM forums.

Ja, Yuri's been eating the mid-month salti-cracks for a long time now. Kinda struggling along. "Get a real job" they said.

Leo, you may want to look at what Graphic Press don't seem to be concentrating on anymore - their partnership with Photoshelter. Photoshelter can be a bit pricy, but the power of their back end site is amazing. Finding a way to link with what you have would make your offering even more powerful.

Or better - getting them to develop a whole system for stock photographers which works like the interconnect rate between telcos. Photoshelter has the size and power to turn the whole stock business on its head . . . but I get the feeling they burnt their fingers with their last agency experiment.

WRT Photo Shelter - their best offering for stock photographers has nothing to do with selling images, but rather the sending of images to stock agencies directly from their server via FTP. I just upload to Photoshelter - use their excellent keywording system and send the files on via ftp to multiple sites simultaneously. Saves a whack on bandwidth and time.

Do you know a way to do this via Wordpress? I can't seem to be able to find a ftp plugin that will do this - move images from the wp media gallery via ftp to multiple agencies. Does your system offer this? If not, please, please modify a "backup" ftp plugin to do this.

I like your offering too - but maybe you want to get some of the premium theme developers over at Theme Forest to give your look and feel offering a full makeover. Or see these guys if theme tweaking is not your thing: https://www.tweaky.com/

I've just contracted them to convert a .psd file to a Wordpress theme for a client. Not sure how great the results will be yet.

Serban - do you read this forum at all?

Do you guys get the concept of how designers actually work? How long is it going to take before someone realises that designers actually like and want similars!

Let's say you have a brochure to produce, and you find one appropriate image to use on the cover. Let's say it's a picture of a business person standing in a forest with a hard hat.

Great, you have a cover picture for your brochure. Now what about the other pages?

On other agencies the designer will find the same businessman. The forest is the same, the lighting is the same. Only this time his hard hat is in his hand. Then his hand is on his chin. No, wait, there is a better one, he is scratching his head, thinking. That's perfect for the second inside page. Then more "similars". Now of a new model, a woman perhaps, doing the same thing in the same forest.

"Yipee!" thinks the designer. "There are a whole lot of "similars" upon which we can build our client's brand and campain. Similars we can use on the website too - not the same, but similars which have brand association. Let's download the whole lot," they say.

Just not from DT, because, there is only one or two of a series of 20 that DT will actually accept. So they download all the images, or a lot of "similars". Contributors know designers like to do this, because we sell at other agencies where downloads of batches of similars happens frequently.

Your daft "similars" policy is costing you and your contrbutors $$$. Worse, you are limiting your product offering to customers - who can always go somewhere else to get all the images (cheaper) from a series you have been offered, but refuse to make available.

Quote from: gillian on March 30, 2013, 23:10
a rule made in one country for the world?
yah. great.

This is not the way the media works in my country either and it flies in the face of some core ethical considerations as to what a journalist is. A journalist, or photo journalist for that matter, is supposed to be just like everyone else. No special considerations. No special badges. No special treatment.

Seem to remember something about that in journalism class 102.

The fact that event organisers don't get that concept because they feel they need to "manage" the media better is understandable. Not so for the agency pretending to represent the photojournalist.

RM from here on in, I suspect.

Quote from: fotografer on March 29, 2013, 09:33
Would be nice if we could upload as usual to SS with the option to send it to Offset if the reviewer thought that it was suitable.

I would have thought this was the critical component to the business plan. Microstock made short work of traditional agencies with far more experienced contributing photographers with much more money for production.

The top 10% of microstock imagery (not necessarily by sales) has  to be escalated out of the system to a premium service or we will just do what we have always done . . . look at what these "experts" have produced and remake it. If the premium service won't take the work, it goes back to the $1 shops that will stock it.

The only reason why SS could succeed where Getty failed would be because they command sufficient power from within the industry to escalate suitable images out of the microstock system with an exclusivity agreement.

Guess it's all speculation at the moment, but would it not make sense for the new venture to scoop the best 10% of images off the top of their existing SS contributions?

Linked to some kind of exclusivity deal for chosen images the results would effectively stop premium content going to SS downstream competitors. That way the new agency would be as much about entering a new market and giving it to Getty as it would be about restricting SS competitors.

The part that truly baffles me is not that contributor action resulted in a low number of deactivations, it's that iStock has let the relationship with their suppliers plummet to the point where many simply won't upload to them anymore.

That, in an industry where the contributors are also customers or have the power to refer customers?

I don't know how many "quieter" contributors out there have done the same, but I stopped submitting to iStock more than a year ago. There was really no need to deactivate files – they are simply not getting any fresh content.

As mentioned in a post above, looking at a comparison between IS and SS on Alexa tells the story well. Surely it's not that hard to figure out that their downward trend will not cease unless iStock takes a 360 degree turn in how they treat all their suppliers?

So, are these the lessons one can take away from this?

- Never, ever, ever (ever) sign an exclusive agreement with anyone in business. Really never, ever . . . ever. The fact that you are working for yourself is risky enough - increasing your risk by having only one income partner is just plain stupid. Somewhere in all of this is the Universe saying: "I told you so".

Request to the (old) new guys

- To those who take over from iStock after their now inevitable fall into obscurity. Stocksy or whatever -  FTP and an easy upload system so we can bulk send our images straight from Photoshelter. Oh, and a flat structure - thanks. No silly canisters and pyramid contributor schemes.

Can't help thinking that with all the problems with Getty/iStock/Google it's time to start looking at RM again. The "stack em high, sell em cheap" strategy only works if there is a method (agencies) in place to collect pennies and pay out the dollars.

If that business model is destroyed by a Google ultra efficient at finding large stock images without watermarks, or a greedy bunch of corporate socipaths like Getty, then surely the only option is to reverse the flow again with RM by limiting the distribution by price? Less images out there means less opportuinty for theft. RM images - or a similar licensing model, must be a lot easier to protect.

Stock imagery won't go away - if value from RF is degraded the licensing model will just change it's form again.

For me, the management of the two sites has been completely different from the start. On the one hand you have a site dedicate to hierarchy (children's coloured cannisters, forum hammers, exclusives vs non-exclusives).

On the other, you have a flat hierarchy (functionally no forum administrators, no visible signs of contributor "superiority").

On the one hand you have a site culture which abhors dissent so much that contributor's comments have been removed at the slightest provocation. Or worse, banning for the contributor.

On the other, you have a more relaxed, open to criticism culture, and therefore management style.

On the one hand you have a management which encouraged a "cult" like "who yay" corporate culture. On the other you have a hand off management approach.

Could SS turn out to be as "evil" as IS. Sure, it's possible. But they would need to have a complete turn-around in corporate culture and get a great dollop of management paranoia before that happened.

To answer the question properly anyway, one would need to have a precise definition of what "corporate evil" is anyway.

A few years back it may actually have paid to go exclusive with IS. A lot of independents did not do that, even if it threatened to make initial short-term financial sense.

Now that sales are under pressure at IS, it appears there are those who believe independents have caused buyers to leave - since their images can be found cheaper elsewhere.

Nevertheless, if most independents had only seen the short-term, gone exclusive and given IS almost complete control over the supply chain, where would we all be today?

Based on experience to date, would IS have handled ultimate power over bulk of the supply base with respect and fairness? Or would they have completely screwed everyone over with single digit royalties and a wholly one-sided suppliers contract?

Given the obvious answer to this question, independents and the other agencies they supply are not in any way the enemy of the exclusive supplier. They are, more likely, the only reason exclusives make anything worthwhile off their stock contributions at all.

I've been concentrating on my existing business and have not really uploaded much over the past two years. Despite this, sales in 2010 grew by 24% anyway when compared with 2009.
Even without uploading, the first three months of 2011 went just fine - still better than the same months in previous years despite no new uploads.

After that, maybe a lack of fresh content started to take its toll and sales stayed low until starting to upload content in August this year (about 200 so far). August sales were better than any other August, and September was reasonably close to a high September 2010.

Despite more or less consistent uploads since August, sales this October dropped sharply - due mostly to an epic fail October at IS. I need to go back to August 2006 to find a worse month from IS (down from $219 in October 2010 to $42 in October 2011).

As for reasons why sales seem to be falling at IS, there are probably many.

All I know is that I used to refer my clients to both IS and DT to select their own images for sites, or brochures or magazines. Now I refer DT only.  It used to be easy to refer people and then just buy the images on their behalf. At a dollar, or two, or five - I felt it was a bit of an extra "service" to my clients that they would not get from another provider. Today though, odds are my clients would choose a Vetta or an agency image which could easily cost $100 or more.

The result is that I don't refer anyone to IS anymore for choosing images. For me, it's a simple question of complicated pricing structures. Perhaps other "buyers" are also finding this large variation of image pricing a problem when referring their clients?

To me, IS is simply not a micro anymore. It's not really a traditional agency either. Perhaps it can't figure out what it is, and as a result, neither can their customers.

Perhaps companies made successful on a wave of crowdsourced suppliers should also not underestimate the tremendous amount of goodwill they can lose when ramming new contracts down the throats of their suppliers . . . suppliers who so often also turn out to be their customers!