Yes, received mine as well 

If you want a simpler start, why not gather up 20-30 high end iStock contributors, and invite each one to add 10 (and only 10) of their images to a "Best Of" lightbox.  That way you don't have to pick and choose which images to accept...you know they will all be great.  Then start pushing the Lightbox through all of your social networking channels.

Accept another 5 images from each member of the contributor list every month to keep it fresh, and push those new images hard through social networking.

If you can get enough designers watching the lightbox, you might be onto something.  It would probably take a few months to gain traction (if it worked), but it would be 100% free and nobody would have to design a website.

How far away is that from this ?

Ok, less restrictive and the social networking marketing thing is missing, but else...

Anybody has seen positive effects from those lightboxes?

Well, at least there seem to be a few exceptions to the rules.

They included one of my pics (http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-11375965-long-eared-owl-asio-otus.php) in their "compelling critters" lightbox.
I'm not exclusive, the file isn't brand new (uploaded Dec 2009) - and honestly, I don't understand why they chose it. It's a nice enough shot, but to include it into a lightbox featuring "The very best animal portraits on iStock as selected by our team of editors." with a total of 164 files - I certainly feel flattered...

Though I have to say it hasn't resulted in any sales yet..

I've got version 1.1.3 installed but the toolbar does not update Istock earnings. It also still shows the "old" greenish icon for Istock. Oddly though, on my other computer at home I remember it worked yesterday and showed the new blue icon.
I'll check tonight once I'm home...

A little bit above 8 MP.
My Canon 30D produces 8,2 MP and needs a tiny little bit of upsizing.

You can easily calculate:
They want 24 MB uncompressed, i.e. 24 x 1024 x 1024 = 25.165.824 Bytes.
As an (uncompressed) 8-bit Jpeg needs 3 Bytes per pixel, you end up with 25.165.824 / 3 = 8.388.608 Pixels.

And as camera makers normally mean exactly one million pixels when using "Megapixel" (wheres in computers when talking about kilobytes or megabytes you are using powers of 2, so one kilobyte = 1024 bytes, one megabyte = 1024 kilobytes) , your camera would need 8.4 MP so you don't have to upsize for the 24 MB uncompressed size.

I just use the default price, $6.  As they don't sell smaller sizes and pay a decent commission, I don't mind using a lower price than some sites.

Same for me. I thought about changing to $10, but haven't found an option to change it for the whole portfolio - and I don't want to click through every single file. Maybe if I ask their support they can do a global change...

Quite the opposite for me. I already have more sales than in July and almost as much as I had in June.
Only thing that worries me is that the majority of sales is subs or XS now. My RPD is down to the lowest level since August 2007.

(although my observations are not based on a port comparable to some of the others here, so statistical relevance is close to zero...)

I'd say:

• LCV
• Incorrect lighting / overexposed
• Focus problems
• Although hard to say with this size, I do believe I see some noise and artefacting

 

OT (in the Off Topic board  ):

How a country like the US can still heavily rely on almost all payments using paper checks is beyond me...

You'll never have such a problem here in good old Germany, we simply don't use checks any more, they are gone for decades now.

(doesn't mean we don't have scams, they just don't work the same way...)

Quote from: dirkr on August 12, 2010, 03:19

I have to disagree (to the statement bolded above).
As contributor I can make more on a site that sells for half of Istock's prices - when they give me 50% comission, as still some sites do.
If Istock wants (independent) contributors to stop supporting cheaper sites, they must raise comissions. Simple.

So if you had the same 500 images at Istock and Featurepics, you would earn more at Featurepics?

No, certainly not.

But if (big IF) buyers would move to Featurepics due to their lower prices, I would make more.

That's why I think it doesn't necessarily hurt to offer images at a lower price point.

1. On Fotolia you should be able to see "Sold via third party channel" or something like that. I hope it's still there. This was discussed in some Fotolia forum thread about a year a go.

Yes, it does show something like that. But with FT's gazillion different partners there is no way of knowing where such a sale originated from.
I personally had that happen exactly once, and this obviously was from Pixmac (see below for explanation).

2. I don't think you'll be able to see it on Dreamstime. But I'll ask Serban...

No, nothing can be seen on DT. It shows up like any other sale. I had one at Pixmac for my DT portfolio, that showed up at DT as "sold with 2010 credits".

3. We take all the images that FT and DT offers via their API. We update that every day (every 24 hours) and there's no way how to choose which images we take and which not. So if it's sent over API we have it. In some cases the updating may be broken, so there might be delays in the sync. But if you spot any significant differences and if they have any logic in it, just let me know, because I want to have complete data not a portion of that. If you upload to DT and FT at the same time, part of the images might be set as duplicates, but together it should be the same amount of images. If not let's investigate the case and fine the cure.

Ok, now to how you find your own pics on Pixmac.
Do a search (on Pixmac.com) for any of your topics / pics using less common keywords. Take a look if  you can find one of your pics, then click on it. (I could easily find the same pic twice with such a search, one is from DT, the other from FT).
The detail page has your name with the distributing agency added to it as a link below the pic (e.g.  Dirkr  (dreamstime)).
Click on that link, it will show all your files on pixmac from that agency, together with the number of sales (for me one on each agency) and a list of best sellers (so I could easily identify the sold pictures - the one of FT matched the one where I got the special sales notice on FT for).

In my case that results in 628 pics from DT (where I have 832 online) and 609 from FT (where I have 634 online).
This shows, that there are a lot of duplicates (explanation might be, that I keyword in German for FT and in English for DT - if the duplication detection relies on keywords it must fail  )
In addition (if you look closer) both prices and sizes are different for the same file from FT or DT

4. You'll be in our subscription (which most of you don't like) and you'll be in our API chain of partners as eg. http://www.ccvision.de/de/microstock/ but currently our focus is to generate serious sales. As we've started with paying for uploads as any other new agency did and found out that we were not able to satisfy contributors later on with sales.

So our general target now is make the fastest site in the market (we're almost there). Make it easy for the buyers (I'm sure we are already leaders in this). Make the site localised for several markets (we have 15 people locally already in several countries). All that together with some other ideas that we're launching soon should make you guys a bit more satisfied. Because that's what I've been doing for those two years (just check the forums here for my nickname and you'll see what has changed during that time)...


Vita

In general I would welcome your effort to generate more sales. And I am not totally against the concept of distributing files I have already online to partner agencies.
What troubles me is the lack of control I have over this distributions (not really your problem, but maybe you can talk to FT and DT about that). Ideally I would like to have a list of all available partners with their exact conditions and an opt-out possibility on a case by case basis.
With FT I get nothing (no information, no opt-out), with DT close to nothing (no information, just a global opt-out).
That certainly is bad.

And one more thing: You are giving prices on your website (for direct purchase without use of credits) which are well above the FT / DT prices (e.g. the smallest size is advertised at $3.88). If these are sold, I will still just get an XS download at Fotolia, netting me �0.28. That is less than 10%.

So in light of all of this, would you recommend taking down all our pictures on Pixmac as distributed from FT / DT and uploading directly to Pixmac? And if so, what would be the conditions (couldn't find that easily on your site)?

Go with the advice given already:
Join the big sites if you want to make more than a random dollar every other week.
Be prepared for a lot of frustration (rejections, no sales and such).
Organize your workflow (especially keywording offline to allow you to upload to more agencies without having to do it all over again).
Expect that you will need several hundred photos on more than just two sites to reach your goal.

Good Luck

Actually that's what happens to those buyers that installed the PicScout plugin for FireFox. The app does image recognition and it will put a blue bullet on every shot on Alamy that is on DT too. With a link of course. "Best Buy" automatized, and there are more sites like that in the making. The PicScout stunt made a major row on the Alamy forums, I heard. It has the potential to destroy Alamy for those stockers that upload the same shots to Alamy and microstock.

So actually uploading your micro portfolio to Alamy is a good way to increase exposure  Finally those files may start selling on DT 


...with the added benefit of the occasional Alamy buyer without knowledge of such tools...