Quote from: Beppe Grillo on June 15, 2014, 07:24

Please, don't shot me! 

I would be curious to known if somebody not having opted-out for DPC has noticed some increase in sales [?]

Not really. About the same. The problem is there's no way to tell if a sale came from DPC or Fotolia. I know some subs came from Fotolia after the raise, but all the rest could be from either site. You'd think they would make it so you could see what kind of impact it's having if they want you to stay opted in.

My sales seem to be down a bit but my credit sales are up, so my earnings per sale are up about 50% - which ends up being pretty neutral. It's not a large enough sample to be really meaningful, though.

It might have been the difference between US and English date recording - i.e. dd/mm/yyyy vs mm/dd/yyyy.  Sometimes it leads to confusion - April 8 instead of August 4. It's particularly irritating when cheques are dated in this way as it can cause banks to think they are expired.

Here are Yuri's 2005 thoughts on SS's Royalties vs Image Quality

Snip

This sites image standards has to balance with payout prices for quality pictures.

As it is now, criteria for getting images approved have accelerated to a much stricter level but the payout is the same as before.

Development in picture quality standards should guide payouts pr picture!

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=54821&highlight=#54821

But that was a fundamental misunderstanding of the free market. Price is driven by scarcity and demand, not by quality. It's only when high-quality items are in demand and scarce that their price is high. Internal competition among suppliers made very high quality work available in large volumes - larger volumes than the market can stand, going by the falling return per image.
Someone mentioned the concept of "too big to fail", but that will never be relevant because it only applies when failure would cause extreme damage to a national economy. Stock is never going to do that. In any case, in my view no image factory should ever go bankrupt because all the production costs are paid in advance and earnings trickle in later, so if the factory is sensitive to trends it can scale its operations up or down depending on how the market is developing. Even if it has to cease production altogether it would still exist as a shell, receiving residual income. It would only go bankrupt if it kept on paying to produce work even though it wasn't selling fast enough to cover costs, which could happen if the management refused to recognise changing realities.
Three years from now, the image factories may have stopped producing because of falling ROI, but their catalogue will still be earning for them.

Jo Ann, I would guess that the buyer sees the total price, not the photographer's share. But it's only a guess.

Thinkstock sell editorial.

http://www.thinkstockphotos.co.uk/image/stock-photo-riding-electric-motorbike-on-street/474146377

That's a very good point.

MediaVN, have you checked for sales from Thinkstock and whether it has been sold via "image subscriptions" or "credit subscriptions"  in the link on the left side of your uploads page. I don't think either of those appear in the ordinary sales list.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 10, 2014, 05:27

That's actually a positive for us.  It must be eight or nine years since I first pointed out that as the return per image falls the incentive for the creation of new images also falls, making it less attractive for competitors to enter the field.  At some point, the market should stabilise as the flow of new images starts to dry up. Maybe we are approaching that. I'm certainly feeling less of an incentive to upload than I used to.
.....

I don't think it is going to happen. It is too easy to grow earnings as a beginner. It's difficult to explain without a diagram but the problem comes a few years later when the decline in sales of older files out paces the new files you are adding. It's a product of the shelf life of an image. New people will keep joining the market thinking that the increasing income will last forever and be caught in the same trap. I don't know if there is a solution.

That's an interesting point, but it does depend on newbies seeing a return for their uploads. I just had a look at iStock and I had more than 100 approvals in April from which I've had three downloads. That's $3 or thereabouts in a couple of months from a week's work. It's no wonder I don't feel motivated. Shutterstock is considerably better, of course, but I think it is the only one that is.

The thing is, it's not enough if we (the contributors) support fair agencies by uploading to them. We need to either get the buyers to support them, too, or withdraw our images from any "not fair" agencies so that the buyers have no choice but to turn to the fair agencies. This is a much, much bigger challenge than opting out of DPC/leaving Fotolia and letting other contributors know what's going on.

That's right. And if "not fair" means "pays less than 50%", which I understand to be the criterion, out of all the agencies I supply I think I would be left with Alamy (and opted out of PP there) and - perhaps - Scanstock photo. That would mean surrendering 90%-95% of my income.  Nobody who is serious about trying to make money from their images can afford to do that.

The EL offering wasn't a concession. That was in the works for DPC before this even became a hot topic here.

Sorry, Mike, I honestly don't want you to think I'm attacking you, I'm not,  but what evidence do you have to support this alleged "statement of fact"?  How could you possibly know that what you are saying is true?

Quote from: stockmarketer on June 03, 2014, 09:25

I'm starting to think it's GAME OVER. 

Pretty much my thoughts this year. I've been with SS, my biggest earner, since 2006 and I was able to increase my earnings up until this year. So far it looks like it will be the first year with a drop in earnings for me. As you, I'm unable to keep growing my port at the same pace the whole market grows. Currently Shutterstock adds ~200-250 thousand images every week. I used to have very few images with no sales. Now, at least half of my new images get no downloads whatsoever (and mind you this is with almost 300 'followers' ). I can't even imagine how hard this must be for someone starting right now.

That's actually a positive for us.  It must be eight or nine years since I first pointed out that as the return per image falls the incentive for the creation of new images also falls, making it less attractive for competitors to enter the field.  At some point, the market should stabilise as the flow of new images starts to dry up. Maybe we are approaching that. I'm certainly feeling less of an incentive to upload than I used to.

I'm a bit concerned in case Dollar Photo Club is behind some of the earnings decline in the last few months. It's impossible to know, of course, but if it is starting to undermine earnings it is potentially disastrous.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 10, 2014, 04:05

It looks as if sales have collapsed in Yuriland.

My sales have also collapsed at IS. Could I have somehow found my way to Yuriland too?

Maybe Yuriland is the new reality for all of us.

George is right - I made the same mistake yesterday until I checked one of my own files and confirmed that iS use the American way of dating, so all the files in that port showing at this moment were uploaded on 6-4-14, meaning 4th June 2014, not 6th April.

We can be forgiven for not having this etched on our brains. For editorial files, they have:
Updated on year-month-date
but
Uploaded on month-date-year

Eight sales in five or six days from 600 images is still atrocious.  It would work out at about 0.8 sales per image per year. The data set is too small to be accurate but it provides initial support for my earlier calculation that he is selling around one file in three per year.

It looks as if sales have collapsed in Yuriland.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 09, 2014, 16:57

...If Stockfresh ever did become even a modest success, the owner's past record suggests they would just sell it off and pocket the cash...

Would you say that about any company run by someone who previously sold a stock company? Stocksy? Or any company run by someone who previously sold any other company? Seems like a harsh rule.

Good point, but also rather missing my point. If I were looking at trying to support a site for political reasons, yes I would. If I were simply trying to make some more money and thought the site had a chance of doing that then I wouldn't bother thinking about it.
The lack of investment in Stockfresh to attract buyers suggests to me that the owners aren't really interested in running a stock site any longer.
As for Stocksy, is anybody convinced that it won't be sold on at some point? That doesn't mean that it won't produce a worthwhile return on effort in the meantime, or, indeed, continue to do so if it is sold.
It's also a dangerous business building up "fair" sites. If I remember aright, back in 2005 Fotolia was the fairest of the fair. The first site that was going to be totally fair to photographers and stop the rip-off commission. It was the site you had to join to start the fair-pay revolution. And what happened as soon as Fotolia gained unstoppable momentum? It became nastier and more exploitative than any of those it was going to save us all from.

I really don't like cats very much, but when a street cat dumped her two two- or three-week-old kittens on my doorstep when the mercury hit 46C a couple of weeks back, and then did a dying queen act on my balcony I let them in. They live in the pile of junk under the stairs. I've got to trap them before my son-in-law brings his Alsation and Chihuahua here in two weeks' time.  It'll be easy to catch the queen, since she is now eating cat food inside an old dog crate with the door rigged to fall whenever I like, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to herd up the kittens.