I think everybody is looking at it from the wrong side. A business doesn't have to be big to succeed.  After all, many microstockers with a few thousand images would consider that they are a business success even though they have a turnover of less than $100,000 a year.
If this company spends its money wisely it may well become a success within the terms it judges itself by. That might not mean it becoming a top-four microstock company. And it might not mean that it becomes a lucrative market for us.
Sites like Scanstock invest little and sell little, but they seem able to soldier on, presumably making a modest living for their owners.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 09, 2014, 03:27

Mike, why are you constantly trying to sabotage this effort? It's as if you want Fotolia to succeed in further devaluing the market.

Sabotage? Are you serious? I got people to opt out, after I did so myself. I blogged, tweeted, and posted on facebook about this. I communicated directly with Mat about this in hopes of getting him to understand why this is such a bad thing for contributors. I've been a part of this effort and have never supported DPC.

Furthermore, I've stated all along that I support efforts to change the course of things in this business, as long as those efforts are going somewhere. I still would support any effort to stop DPC if it were even remotely possible to have an impact, but unfortunately this opt-out effort isn't working and it's a waste of time. However I have always (and still do) welcome different strategies to effect change.

I highly resent your implication that I'm trying to sabotage anything, that I want DPC to succeed, or that I want to devalue anyone's work. The fact that your accusations are getting up votes is even more disturbing. Really makes me wonder why I keep coming back here.

Sorry, but that's the way it's coming across. You noted first that the number of files was slightly more at one point than it had been a week earlier and therefore discounted a one-day drop as being irrelevant because, you said, the effort had failed. You added that we should wait a week or so to see where things were going. 10 days later the tally was LOWER than it had been when you came up with that test of achievement, but you didn't acknowledge it.
You tell people that the effort they are making is a waste of time, that they've only reduced tally by 6 million images (when it's 7 million) and that simply will have no effect on Fotolia at all. You dismiss the letters Fotolia has sent to people asking them to reconsider as signifying nothing, you say there is only a 21% difference between Fotolia and DFC, when it is actually 24% difference. And hyou tell everyone that if they do start having an effect on Fotolie they will simply be forced to participate, which is merely speculation.
In short, you underplay every achievement of the boycott campaign and play up every difficulty it faces. If you don't want to sabotage the campaign then you have adopted the most defeatist attitude imaginable and seem to want to share the misery with all those who are still being positive.  It's a real pity when, as has been pointed out, the community is being more active and effective than it has ever been in standing up to this.
I'm sure we all know how heavily the odds are weighted against the campaign succeeding. But we also know that the one absolute guarantee of DPC coming out on top would be for everybody to adopt the negative attitude that you have expressed for the past three or four weeks.

It's not six million, it's seven million. It was six million a week or two ago. Seven million is a quarter of the collection, and probably the best quarter of it. Well to be exact it is 24% (which is not the 21% that Mike somehow calculates).

Sure, Fotolia could make it compulsory to participate but maybe they are afraid they would simply lose 24% of their entire collection if they do that to people who have made the effort to opt out. Maybe they don't want even more bad publicity alerting even more people to what they are up to.

Mike, why are you constantly trying to sabotage this effort? It's as if you want Fotolia to succeed in further devaluing the market.

Can't answer the question as posed.
If there were a subscription deal where there was some country-club like membership fee of $12,000 a year - of which I saw zero - and then images at $1 of which I saw 70 cents, I'd say no ....

Strewth, Jo Ann, do you have to give the agencies ideas they haven't thought of yet?

The perfect transfer sercice doesn't exist, I think. But I 've never had any problems with Paypal, it just works.

And getting cheques works for me, albeit it costs me something like $20 to cash them.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 03, 2014, 14:04

On October 12 I wrote:
Interesting factoid: "Yuri" is showing "greater than 25,000 sales" on 78,000 images since the new identity was created in April. I'm rather surprised to see that one of his top business images is selling in the 10cr-55cr price bracket.

Today that identity has "greater than 54,000 sales", which means that portfolio, which still has 78,000 images has achieved 19,000 sales in 37 weeks. Which is 513 sales per week = 26,704 sales per year, = approx. one sale for every three images over the course of a year.

So if you have 1,000 Yuri-quality images on iStock, you could expect to get about 350 sales a year, or a sale a day. Presumably a lot of them are priced at Vetta levels (I can't be bothered to try to estimate how many are and how many are not) but even so, the return on effort for a top exclusive doesn't look all that amazingly exciting to me.  Perhaps that is why they have to allow him to sell on loads of other agencies as well as being "exclusive" with them.

It suggests to me that all the exclusive's sales are struggling. It looks as if I will sell about one file in two from my non-exclusive portfolio on iStock this year - obviously at a much lower price point than Yuri's.

Sorry, but something is amiss in this calculation. Not being a great stock shooter, not working with great production expenses, best models etc, and so, not having "great quality images", I sell way more than 350 sales a year for every 1.000 photos. And when I say way more, I mean way more.

There's nothing amiss with the calculation and if there is anything amiss with the data then it means that iStock are deliberately publishing low figures to confuse us - I doubt that they would go to that trouble.

I suspect that his collection is almost all Vetta and that the price is putting customers off. If your files are all Vetta then I will agree that something must be wildly wrong with the data.

Edit = Just checked and only a small percentage are Vettas, the bulk are scattered across all the collections with quite a lot in Main and a quarter of them in the second level (signature?).    It does seem very odd that his sales are so low but it also seems odd that iStock would want to understate his sales as that would discourage, rather than encouraging other artists.

I note that the figures I give are in line with Jim's original post, noting that he had managed fewer than 100,000 sales on iStock in more than a year (presumably from his main account).

MAybe his market is simply flooded with similar stuff.

On October 12 I wrote:
Interesting factoid: "Yuri" is showing "greater than 25,000 sales" on 78,000 images since the new identity was created in April. I'm rather surprised to see that one of his top business images is selling in the 10cr-55cr price bracket.

Today that identity has "greater than 54,000 sales", which means that portfolio, which still has 78,000 images has achieved 19,000 sales in 37 weeks. Which is 513 sales per week = 26,704 sales per year, = approx. one sale for every three images over the course of a year.

So if you have 1,000 Yuri-quality images on iStock, you could expect to get about 350 sales a year, or a sale a day. Presumably a lot of them are priced at Vetta levels (I can't be bothered to try to estimate how many are and how many are not) but even so, the return on effort for a top exclusive doesn't look all that amazingly exciting to me.  Perhaps that is why they have to allow him to sell on loads of other agencies as well as being "exclusive" with them.

It suggests to me that all the exclusive's sales are struggling. It looks as if I will sell about one file in two from my non-exclusive portfolio on iStock this year - obviously at a much lower price point than Yuri's.

I also think we are seeing Getty create an "all in one" product so it makes selling it more attractive.

Thinkstock is "all-in-one" - it's got a lot of stuff from Getty collections, and I think even "photographer's choice", which isn't in iStock.

Recently there was a discussion here that people seemed to think agencies would protect them from legal issues.

If you check the terms of the agreements I'm pretty sure you will find that the agencies do not protect us, we protect the agencies by indemnifying them against loss if they are sued over our images. In addition, we empower them to hire lawyers at our expense to protect themselves and to allow them to handle all aspects of the case and we agree to accept any settlement they reach (that we have indemnified them for).  At least, that's how I remember the terms, I don't regularly re-read them.

The protection they offer is pretty much restricted to being cautious over what images they accept into the collection.

Fortunately, these feared court cases never seem to happen.

Quote from: gillian on June 01, 2014, 18:50

I haven't checked in on Alamy in a long time, only to discover 2 sales, one for Nov 2013 and one for March this year. Pretty sure I had checked in at the end of last year, do they take a long time to show sales?

Sales can take a very long time to show.

But they don't adjust the old months' sales data for a late-reported sale, they put it into this month's figures. That's why you can have an RM sale today and when you check the license details it says it is for a usage period that has already expired. If a sale is showing in Nov 2013 earnings then it will have been visible for six months or more.
A sale in the last day or two of the month can be overlooked because if you had a May 31 sale then it won't appear in the May list until June 1, when refreshing the one-month's sales tab and earnings balance tab will only show June's figures (albeit the cash from the sale  will be recorded in the cash balance outstanding numbers).

A weak month, but not disastrous - around the bottom end of expectations.

How are the stats going?

Quote from: Jonathan Ross on May 30, 2014, 19:19

An image does not have to have a release to be accepted into RM, I guarantee you that much.

Baldrick was saying that it seemed to him that an image needed to have releases in order for it's licence type to be set as RM-Exclusive. Which is different from plain RM.

I have a few which I set as RM-Exclusive. But they are ones which do not need releases (i.e. No to both the property and people question). Baldrick's point, if so, must only relate to images where a release would be required. Everything else I have there is plain RM.

Correct. And I just uploaded an unreleased photo of a Sri Lankan tea-picker and - once again - no way to make it RM-exclusive. If I mark it as having a release the exclusive option becomes available.