Quote from: weirdvis on September 13, 2010, 07:23

Peter, you have your work cut out...  

I really don't appreciate all of the sarcasm and the intonation that I am stupid.

You need to check around a little. Currently, my images, after they reach a certain age, automatically go into the FREE section at IS. There used to be an opt-out for that, but it magically disappeared a while back. I only found out about this after checking the FREE section on my own. Then I had to delete them all. Now, I have to check periodically to make sure there are none there.

You should be ashamed of yourself for making me look like a total idiot for asking those questions after what just happened at IS. If you think I am going to blindly trust ANY agency right now, you're the ignorant ones.

There is a free section on IS? When do images go there? Where do I have to check?

Quote from: borg on September 09, 2010, 16:09

In the most basic terms that means that iStock becomes less profitable with increased success.

I've never heard that any company can become less profitable with increased success...

The people who wrote "Getty wants more money" are right, but here's their logic, which I understand but like you, can't agree with on the whole. It's flawed math as well.

The more that we make sales, if someone is an exclusive, the higher percentage the artists get, so more sales means lower percentages for Getty. However, as you pointed out, increased sales also mean more profits, even if they are at a lower rate. So their unsustainable rhetoric is pure BS. They make up the difference on volume! The problem is that people are making money and selling images (hey interesting concept, isn't that what we're supposed to do and the original claim?) but because they are reaching the higher canisters over time, Getty's cut is going down. Remember they are getting more sales volume, more income, just that they are forced to share a little higher percentage.

Independents don't count for anything, There are few exceptions, but IS and Getty couldn't care less if Ind. stay or leave. At 15% it's obvious that Getty isn't trying to enhance artists interests with potential profits. The message they are sending is, you can leave or stay, we don't care enough to pay you more than 15%!

Think about it for a minute. If independents were of value to IS, they would be encouraging us with income potential, not driving us away with lower commissions.

As much as I disagree with their proposed changes, the little bit of truth in their message is that IS's cut (of exclusive authors' work) is going down over time no matter how much volume they produce.
There could even be the case of the volume of an author (or a group of authors) decreasing but their share still be going up.
And this is because cannister levels and therefore commission percentage is based on total download numbers and thus on history - and not on current performance.

And exactly that they are changing with the proposed model - you will be promoted only if your current volume goes up, irrespective of your history.

I could accept such a concept as a good means to promote active contributors who continue to provide quality work. But where they failed completely (besides communication) is setting the goalposts.

And the cut for non-exclusives is in no way explainable by the same logic, as there has never been any chance to increase your percentage.
If they implemented a similar scheme for non-exclusives starting at 20% and giving us the chance to move up, there would have been a lot of cheering from the independents...

Stockfresh Alamy Graphicleftovers

Zoonar Yaymicro Featurepics


none of all these is a big seller unfortunately.

I've been this mulling over trying to work out what the longer term effect of all this might be on Istock and their bottom-line.

Personally I am going to be dropping from 20% down to 18% __ that's a 10% hit for me. However Istock themselves are going from 80% to 82% of my sales and that's only a 2.5% increase for them (barely noticeable you might think).

Although many smaller-selling contributors are taking bigger hits than me there are also a great many heavy sellers who will not be hit at all __ and so again the overall increase in Istock's revenue is still going to be comparatively small.

Yes, Istock will be helping themselves to a bigger chunk of Vetta sales and also exclusive EL sales too, but even so the contributions from those will be fairly small compared to overall sales.

My guess is that Istock's overall gain will probably be no more than a 3-4% increase in total revenue. Ok, because the overhead has already been paid for then the net profit figures should be much more impressive __ but at what cost?

Istock would only need to lose 3-4 buyers out of every hundred they currently have and the whole debacle becomes financially neutral as far as the overall profit goes. When you then cost in the truly massive loss of goodwill from both their customers and their contributors, the potential number of exclusives ditching their crowns and the huge boost to competing agencies .... is it ever really going to be financially worth it?

It seems to me that Istock are taking a gamble of truly staggering proportions with fairly minor potential gains to their bottom-line ... and a mind-numbingly large downside if it all goes pear-shaped.

I believe the impact on contributor's current commission percentage is just part of their goal. The other part is really spoken out clearly in their "not sustainable" message: They don't want more contributors (current exclusive bronze / silver / gold contributors) to increase their share in the future.
Without these changes many of these would have climbed up the ranks (and increased their commission). Slowly but surely.
Now they have the tools (yearly fixing of the necessary performance numbers) to make sure that does not happen. That is the part of their storyline where they actually are telling the truth - they want to change from a system where (exclusive) commissions rise simply by time passing by to a system that keeps them down.

Zoonar.

They pay from 50% to 80% commissions.
According to one of their owners they are profitable with that - although their volume is very low compared to any of the big 4. Nice showcase what kind of commission can be "sustainable".

It's not bad management. It's desparate or greedy management depending on the person. Depends on which type of person you believe Kelly is.

Kelly may be telling the truth that this new model didn't come from up above. But what did come from up above were probably some insane revenue and profit goals. "Kelly, here are your goals. You are expected to meet these for 2011." So Kelly came up with this model to either keep his job (desparate) or get a big fat bonus (greedy). Unfortunately after he spent 9 months of going through the numbers he realized some drastic changes had to be made to meet those goals.

- He changed to a performance model. Not enough. Still short of goal.
- He cut commissions a little. Still short of goal.
- He cut commissions more. Still short of goal.
- He raised performance goals. Still short of goal.
- So why did he cut the extended license bonus? He had to. Every little bit counts

H&F/Getty set the goals. Management are making decisions based on the goals.

I tend to disagree. Acting out of either greed or despair is bad management.
Good management includes to stand up against unachievable performance goals coming down from company owners - even if it means you're getting yourself in trouble.

I agree that what you describe is a very likely explanation of what is happening though.

I'm pissed with the iStock announcement as much as the next person and I am 100% sure it will hit me in the pocket, but for me the bottom line is nett revenue and even after the pay cut the nett revenue on iStock per image download is still higher than on their nearest microstock rival which is Shutterstock.

I like the DT pricing structure and I can make more per download on a like for like image size than any other microstock agency, however DT don't have anywhere near the sales volume that iStock do, and from what I've seen they do not market even to a fraction the amount iStock does.

This thread is a prime example of why I don't support canvassing buyers to go elsewhere, because nobody can agree where that should be, and a lot of people are suggesting they go to a site where we'd make less per download !

I'll support any viable and practical action to get iStock to rework this commission cut, but please excuse me if I don't jump on the knee jerk bandwagon that will in the end cost me more.

Looks a little bit like a vicious circle to me.
IS has the sales volume because the spend so much on marketing. That's why their costs are so high that they have to cut our commissions to stay sustainable (pretending for a moment that there is a bit of truth in their argumentation).
If other sites want to compete seriously, what can they do? Spend more on marketing to win back customers from Istock. And finance that by cutting our commissions...

To break that circle we will have to stop licencing images for too low (whatever that is) commissions. Easy to say (and easy to do for people like me who don't depend on their stock income) but a lot harder to implement.

But in the long run, if a majority of contributors now accepts these reductions, the circle will simply continue...

That has got to be the most self-interested moronic comment I've read in this whole debate. Why would anyone contributing to IS want people to go elsewhere and thus damage the artists income?

I am not damaging my income if buyers go elsewhere. I am (i.e. my images are) elsewhere.
Istock / Getty are damaging my income (come next year) by lowering the already lowest commission in the industry by another 25%.

I'm going down to 15%, maybe if the last quarter is only huge record months I could reach 16%.
Therefore I will have to deactivate my portfolio as I do not intend to sell at these conditions.

But I'm really surprised by the outcome of the poll: There is one non-exclusive contributor claiming to stay at 20%? That would mean (assuming an average credit price of one dollar) they currently make around $280.000 from Istock alone? Wow.

I don't think I should say anything about the commission cut, since it is so well discussed. However, it is interesting to see a change in canister levels similar to that of Fotolia. This new level system is more friendly to new contributors, but still far from supporting new talents. I think the agencies who set up static levels for canisters (like previous istock, fotolia and shutterstock) are still back in 2005 when these limits seemed hard to achieve. Now several contributors reached the limits just because they are participating in MS from early on. It's not that they are so talented, its just that they have started earlier. Fotolia have already realized that the canister levels are not useful without constantly rising the bar, so only those who are talented will stay on the higher canister levels they deserve. However they have implemented this very badly because they set up the levels so high that new talents might not even start after seeing the levels set up for the ones who were with fotolia in the past five years. Istock has made a step further, and dropped the original canister system to a more democratic one, which also supports new talents on some levels. My only problem with their system that they still require you to wait a year to increase your canister level. An ideal system would use the past year as the basis for the canister level instead of using the year boundaries. I would be happy to see this level system to appear on other sites.

I would generally agree that moving from lifetime achievement to achieving goals in a moving timescale is a good move to better support new talent.

The only thing is, that they coupled this move with a pay cut. If they simply had retained the old commission values as basis and offered something on top for achieving certain goals, all would be fine.

Already done! I'm not just a contributor but as of this year a rather large subscription buyer (240 credits/day!) and I'm sure I'll look elsewhere now to make my next large purchases.

Make sure you let IS sales people know about that move and why you are doing it...

I'm not affected at all, so I don't really care.
But I do have one question: Do EL prices stay the same or are they lowered (to what) as well? That would be something I could not accept...

My only complaint is that they still have the $0.25 subs commissions.  I don't get many of them but isn't it time to pay us at least $0.30?  We get much more from several sites now and I want to see the gap between subs and PPD closing, not increasing.

The reason why I still have not opened an account with canstock. Once they change their commissions I'd certainly give them a try...