there are different sources, not just the complicated earnings threads, confirming that exclusives are losing sales and indes have gained sales since the change. But there in NO evidence that the change has brought back any buyers.

Data are available if you care to look.

There is no complete or normalised data. There are only a few anecdotal personal posts - not data. Snippets of information at best. The rest is speculative interpolation.

But more than that - what are you trying to determine about the strategy in general ? How can you have any sense of whether or not it is working when you have no idea what the aim is or what kind of time frame is involved ? For all you know Getty may be expecting to sell fewer images via iStock. They may be expecting to sell fewer images in general. I am sure that what they are doing is also going to be about trying to shape the market - that may mean losing sales in some quarters.

Some people are reporting fewer sales but broadly equivalent incomes. We cannot call that data either. Though I know that I much prefer to sell fewer images for more money.

FWIW - I am completely neutral on this - it is all just interesting. If I thought that the sky was falling in I would say so. And I am a big fan of one or two of the other sites - because I love photography - I love looking at really great work. I also very much support the idea of there being alternatives. But my sense over the past 6 months is that Getty is playing a long game and that they know very well what they are doing. I believe it is a significantly different company than it was during the H&F era.

��SS has said from the start that it is their explicit policy not to accept exclusive content��

For most of their history they were not in a position to require exclusive images because they were the number 2 earner.

I believe that there is a sustainable future for small agencies and collectives which exist on their own terms offering exclusive content and which shun the idea of even bothering to try to compete in a world of subscription etc. Sustainability IMO is partly about only needing to earn enough to continue comfortably - without ever expecting to make millions or billions and without ever needing to satisfy the ever escalating expectations of investors or shareholders. In much the same way as there is a good future for independent coffee houses and the people who sell organic vegetables at the market.

But SS etc are something quite different. For them image is a commodity in a world of agencies which are ultimately run and owned by big finance. They care about satisfying the expectations of their investors - and trading the future earnings of the businesses is as important as selling images. That is not a criticism. It's one version of an inevitable way in which things seem to happen.

The US market might have reached saturation, i.e. most web designers and regular customers are getting their stock from somewhere, but there is a huge, huge world out there, that can still be discovered, anything outside of the English language group and especially countries moving up.

I do not believe that there is any reason to believe that the world outside of North America and europe is likely to adopt a web model which mimics the evolution of the online world of the early 2000s. I do not believe that there is another boom going to happen.

Today it is not only that the market is saturated. The web business boom of the 2000s was funded by credit which is no longer available. There is much less business today. Also - businesses and official organisations and voluntary groups are today far less likely to require paid web content. Partly because the social media has, for many, largely replaced the need to maintain an old fashioned website - and the content they do use today is now far more likely to have been shot on an iPhone and shared for free by their customers or employees. Nobody is going to pay for social media content.

Bloggers and news sites today are far more likely to be using free or syndicated content - often supplied by the companies they are writing about. Subscription, specifically, is also undermined by social sharing and the legitimization of Pinterest - which some agencies see as a marketing opportunity. Sites like Pinterest undermine subscription.

Then there is still a huge number of people who prefer to steal than to buy, conversion of even a small group of thieves would significantly increase sales. this is a part where agencies could even work  together.

I do not believe that there is much evidence that any significant number of would-be subscription customers are currently using stolen content ? I do not believe that thieves are, for the most part, potential customers. This is not the same as music or films.

Now it is a service war, who will be the amazon or ebay of the industry.

It is not an industry on those sorts of scales. The question is which will be the biggest and brightest site with the cheapest subscriptions or all-you-can-eat licensing deals with Facebook, Yahoo, MSN or whatever the next mass market thing is. Those new licensing models depend upon tracking technologies but also undermine subscription as it has existed during the part decade. I believe that these sorts of deals, and free, are going to eat into 2000s style subscription models.

What I think I am saying is that I believe that the market for more expensive content is much more likely to be sustainable than a market for cheap content.

the lack of any negative reviews gives me pause and suggests you are using a service to bury them.

slightly /ot: The whole business of internet reviews is becoming a big issue - and especially the way in which negatives are buried with positives via Facebook login. The reviews of products tend to be much more reliable than the reviews of companies in my experience. Some of the best known *trust* sites with the biggest traction even allow the companies reviewed to pay to audit their own negative reviews. Some of the worst companies have the best reviews. It is becoming rather like the systems under which many companies now effectively have to pay a whitelisting fee to ensure that their email is delivered - i.e. that it does not end up blacklisted.

I recently started up with a company that lets me set my own prices, pays 70%, and generates daily sales (and no, I'm not saying which company, so don't ask). I'm setting all prices at $12-$18 and people still buy my stuff. So how could that be possible if customers are expecting lower and lower prices all the time?

Creative Market (www.creativemarket.com) feels very different from most stock site and sells itself as an online market-place where sellers open a little shop. Much more like Etsy really. Everything there (fonts, themes, vectors, renders etc) has a sort of handmade feel about it. It feels much more like a bunch of boutiques which is why I think higher pricing probably works there. I do not think that style of market place would suit stock photography.

I can also look around this site and see very few people reporting the kind of earnings that support the istock exclusive poll result.

What kind of earnings support that result. How much money ? How many $ ?

I find it very hard to guess what people are earning. I find it impossible to know whether we are comparing like with like when people talk about increases and decreases in sales.

At the height of the boom I was making about $1 per image per month. Currently I am averaging about  0.65c per image per month I think. That includes Alamy. Increasing the number of images I have at Alamy has marginally increased my income but has also reduced my per image income.

i had a domain and hosting with GoDaddy for a few of pages I put up about a property I was selling a couple of years ago.

I did not enjoy the GoDaddy experience - although it did work okay. Navigating their site when I needed to do any sort of administration was confusing. I found the menu system and administration tools to be very irritating - with lots of distracting logos and they seemed to be continually trying to up-sell me on other services.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on October 26, 2013, 08:58

Quote from: bhr on October 26, 2013, 08:49

Getty Images Partners with Pinterest - Getty Blog

Pinterest Closes Another Copyright Hole, Inks A Deal With Getty Images, Will Pay A Fee For Metadata - Techcrunch

"Pinterest will pay Getty Images a fee for this rich metadata, which we�ll share with contributors. "

Enjoy your $.0001 !

Exactly!

I am as questioning as anyone else. But presumably we want our pictures to be shared on Pinterest given that it drives so much traffic. And presumably we welcome any efforts to prevent the images from becoming orphaned from where they can be purchased. So isn't this a step in the right direction potentially ?

Also - do we actually expect to be paid anything for our images being shared on Pinterest ? Other stock sites which get it encourage sharing but are not paying anything AFAIK.

I think most people now get that Pinterest is an important part of the social media in terms of driving traffic.  And personally I love it too.

I'd sell my 1000 images for 50$ a piece in a heartbeat. Give me 5000$ and I will just shoot another 1000 images. Nothing lost.

Have you checked out the 'license our work' link Ron ?

don't think that many photographers are willing to sell their pictures rights for 50$ unless they were significantly lower than that to produce

Well you'd think.

On the other hand - I guess there are lots of different scenarios. It's certainly a collection of very saleable work.

Quote from: luissantos84 on October 09, 2013, 05:45

Quote from: Ron on October 08, 2013, 23:47

You know there is an agency that pays 50 dollar per image to hand over copyrights? Thats 350k. Cheers.

can you tell us which agency? I would sell it yesterday

http://cavanimages.com/

It's a nice collection. Have you clicked the license our work link at the bottom of the page on that site ? Go on ....

Honestly - I think I would pay $50 per image to buyout the rights to selected images of this quality (and the ownership of all similars) too.

ETA: I guess that some of those 8699 images are their own.

I like your pictures Herg. But you have fewer than 350 from what I can see and all of them (I think) RF. So presumably all of these pictures are also available much less expensive at other sites (I do not know if that is an issue and there is no way of measuring). You need more pictures.

But again - I really like your pictures. You have a nice style IMO. And some of your incidental in the garden and farming stuff etc has a good authentic feel about it which should be current. But I think you need to do much much more of what you are doing best. More farming including the incidental details which show the human activity, more real produce in situ. More local. More community.

Wow! Minuses on that post. I guess nobody else has tried to use the site and been totally frustrated. I know the woman on the homepage isn't responsible, but her smiling at my misery doesn't help matters.

I think that people outside of the argument probably miss the complexities of the issues.

First of all - many people probably do not realise that one of the major issues over the past days has been around how poorly the site was implemented - despite the huge amount of money spent on it. It was not capable of handling the traffic and the people put up to talk about that clearly did not have a clue.

Secondly - there is a tendency to see any criticism of Obamacare as if it were a criticism of universal healthcare in general. In truth many people are critical of Obamacare because they see it as a dreadful compromise which will end up best serving the insurance and pharmaceutical industries - and therefore ultimately the finance sector.

When healthcare is paid for by insurance there is a tendency for the price of  pharmaceuticals and treatments in general to increase. Which ultimately pushes up the price of policies. A vicious circle.

Imagine what governments internationally could do in terms of providing universal healthcare if they were to slash their military spending.