Quote from: cthoman on June 24, 2013, 12:16

Quote from: WarrenPrice on June 24, 2013, 11:50

Public or not ... I still don't know this to be a fact.  How did you calculate an answer?

It's opinion, but it has been stated that SS pays around 25-30%. I would assume most contributors would think that they deserve more than that. But, that is just an assumption. Like was said above, it's hard to predict what everyone is thinking. It can be very surprising what they are thinking (especially after seeing that poll).

Opinion certainly does not equate to "We All Know."

This is a very silly semantic argument. I'm out.

I'm sure there is a more specific number in this report somewhere, so if anyone knows what it is, please share. But anecdotally, I can say with great certainty that SS pays us no more than 30% of what they take in from sales, and in all likelihood it's more like high 20% numbers at best.

I think they said customers pay on average $2.10 per image (I'd have to look it up again and it might have increased in the latest report), so I guess you could calculate your percentage from your average RPD. I'm usually around $0.6 per download, so I guess mine is around 28%.

Looks nice. You may want to fix your FAQ, so it doesn't mention MyStockVectors.

Companies do pay yearly fees for microstock subscriptions...so paying a flat yearly fee for software isn't implausible. The biggest headache is justification...every company I ever worked for required justification and it almost always comes down to the value that is provided versus costs. And they always want at least a couple of alternatives. This is a good time for alternative software to build and market...they won't dominate, but Adobe has allowed room for competition to come in a take a piece of the pie...previously there was very little room.

Justification is always necessary with every expense, but the cost isn't very much. I pay for my monthly subscription cost in a day, and I'm not a very profitable business.

cthoman I think that if an agency really believe in your work, will never ask for money to get your illustrations.

It's really a difference of paying them on the front end or paying them on the back end. I don't mind paying upfront if the payoff is there. If the right site came along offering that I wouldn't turn it down. That was my point.

At this point (for me), it is less about them believing in me and more about me believing in them. They have to sell me on why I should be part of their agency. Most of those sales pitches aren't very good though.

Colourbox is the worst in the business, hands down. On single image sales of vectors they take $12.50 from the buyer and pay $0.46 to the artist. It amounts to a roughly 3.7% royalty rate.

Adding insult to injury it sounds like they've got plenty of money to hire new people and expand their own business internally, but no time to address the ridiculous royalty structure.

Absolutely horrendous.

How do they have any images? I wonder about contributors sometimes.

Pirated in just one day.

http://fstoppers.com/adobe-photoshop-cc-has-already-been-pirated-in-just-one-day

That's kind of surprising, although I suppose it is a target for hackers because of CC. I downloaded the new suite on Tuesday from Adobe. It seems nice. Not too many changes. I guess I'll have to check out the new features this weekend.

Quote from: cthoman on June 20, 2013, 09:06

Create a ton of great images that can only be found on your site or a few trusted partners.

"if you build it they will come"  I am not sure if this is true in the digital world of today.

Promotion is the key to any business ( and the main thing I suck at)

Connecting with buyers and potential buyers of your images should be the goal of your marketing campaign.

It's been what has worked best for me. All the other stuff is great to try too, but content seems to be king.

Maybe that's true, but we don't even know what that amount is.  The payment we get is just an arbitrary amount, with no relation to the "price" of the image, however one might choose to calculate that "price".

I meant more from the perspective of what they pay a month for the subscription. That's a pretty fixed amount of a couple hundred dollars or whatever the going rate is.

I think the problem with this is that subscriptions are the lowest return in micro, but subs buyers aren't really low priced customers. They are coughing up a decent amount of money every month, so they are spending more than the walk ins.

They just aren't necessarily YOUR customers, so you may or may not see the returns on their savings. That really isn't the customers fault though. They are just buying what is being made available to them by the contributors and the agencies.

I'd research how it affects your status with the search engines.

So since when did SS start selling "EXCLUSIVE" files?

SS has never and always said they will never have "EXCLUSIVE"!

That's have exclusive content. If they sold an exclusive rights license, that is different. The whole post doesn't make a lot of sense though. They can't sell something exclusive to one customer without knowing where else the file is being sold. It would be meaningless.

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I'm just going to assume this said, "Yeah, you know me".