Oh, brother.  A Mac costs a little more than a comparably equipped PC, assuming you can find one.  And for that you get well integrated hardware and software, as well as a set of applications that run circles around the Windows competition.  You also get the benefit of a Unix/Linux workalike under the hood, which I love.

As for the iPhone, it's rather more than a phone.  In fact, most of the time I spend on it isn't for calls; it's for web surfing, tweeting, tracking location, getting weather reports, identifying overheard songs, finding restaurants and a hundred other functions.  Not so much a phone as a practical handheld computer, and one, like my Macs, that's worth what it cost me.

Quote from: PERSEUS on January 07, 2010, 14:23

Quote from: disorderly on January 07, 2010, 14:12

Except... with the huge image backlog I have at iStock, it's not worth trying to resubmit.  By the way, the tattoo in this case is tiny, taking up the ring position on the model's ring finger.  Here's the 100% view of the offending area.

i am not a regular with IS, but if i recall, if they say MAY RESUBMIT it takes approval much faster when you CORRECT THE REJECTION REASON. at least it happened to me a couple of times.

I had a resubmit for possible trademark reasons (it wasn't but it was easily removed) accepted today, jumping some of my other in-queue pics by a few days.

Does no one read?  My reason for not resubmitting is to not waste a second upload slot on the same image when I have so many others waiting to upload.  With only twenty upload slots a week, I'd rather move on to another image from another shoot.  It's not about where it would end up in the queue, but about how many I can have there.  And resubmits do take up those precious slots.

I've had some stupid reviews from iStock before, including several that told me off for using an on-camera flash, when the shots were actually taken with studio lights.  But this one's extra special.  I will quote it in full:

We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your submission, entitled Brunette ( http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/11540140/2/istockphoto_11540140-brunette.jpg) for addition to the iStockphoto library for the following reasons:

++Letter on finger++
This file contains legible information such as names, signatures, license plates, phone numbers, identification numbers, etc. Due to concerns relating to privacy and related property rights, we cannot accept this file unless this information is removed, or a property release is obtained.

A property release.  For a tattoo on the model's finger.  What in the world am I to make of that?

I've sent a query to Scout, which will take a month or two and probably leave me just as confused.  It's times like this that I'm glad of my independence.

I got two as well.  A nice surprise.

SS	23.5%	-21.8%
iS	19.9%	-15.6%
BigStock	13.6%	+71.7%	BME
Ftl	10.8%	-8.0%
DT	10.4%	-13.1%
SX	10.3%	+45.4%
123	8.8%	-46.0%
CanStockPhoto	1.1%	+28.8%
Cres	.9%	-55.4%
Veer	.8%	-35.7%

Graphic Converter (Mac) - keywording; also for building web catalogues

Assuming for a moment that this discussion is anything other than academic, wouldn't it be easier to either start a new agency or acquire one and let the contributors become stockholders in the new firm?  That way they could make money either from their sales or from the value of their shares.  And entrusting decisions to a management team will work better than waiting for a consensus to form.

Of course, that leads to the first big hurdle: making that agency a success against much larger and well entrenched agencies that are already in place.  That'll require marketing, and that takes money.  Unless submitters are willing to front the expenses of a startup, someone else will have to be found.  That someone will expect equity, which takes away from the submitters' share.  And we're back to a set of big questions: is there room for another agency, how will it differentiate itself, and how will it find a large enough customer base in an already crowded market?

PowerDroid,

The lower (blue) line is revenue for the month.  Due to seasonal variations, it bounces all over the place.  I don't track RPI and haven't since I started shooting with models two years ago.  That's because my RPI dropped like crazy with studio work, even as my bottom line revenue increased.  Shooting isolated objects or scenics or other subjects, I'd get a small number of shots in a day and have (I hoped) a high RPI.  But shooting with models, I can get as many as a hundred usable shots from an hour session.  Individually they don't sell terribly well, but as an aggregate they do.  So even as they lower my RPI, they do good things for my bottom line.

Hank

I tend to get pretty cranky when I read the perceived wisdom of a new microstocker, full of pronouncements based on a couple of months' sales of a couple of hundred images.  Part of that reaction is general crankiness; I've reached that age, after all, and enjoy the privileges it confers.  But part of it is my own experience after doing this for a while, and my own understanding of the proper use and limitations of statistical methods. 

It's generally a bad idea to extrapolate from small data sets.  That was brought home to me today, when I saw that my balance at BigStock has nearly doubled since the last time I'd checked.  Lo and behold, this doubling was the result of a single extended license sale, the equivalent of between 40 and 80 regular sales there.  That was enough to vault BigStock from 7th to 3rd place for December, and to make a mockery of any attempt to estimate my sales for the month.

Fortunately, I've figured out a better way to look for revenue trends.  Instead of looking solely at sales by month, I've adopted a 12 month moving sum.  The idea is that for each month I add all the sales for the past year, with November including everything from the previous October, October going through the previous September and so on.  Not only does this give me larger numbers of sales, so a single or even a few surprises won't affect the total much, but it compensates for seasonal variations; every figure includes a result from every month of the year.  So assuming sales tank in December, or during summer holidays in the Northern Hemisphere, what I'm seeing are the success of my growing (and partially aging) portfolio, the microstock economy and perhaps the economy as a whole.

The attached graph shows two trend lines.  The blue line tracks monthly revenue, the red shows revenue for the year leading up to that month.  Blue shows an increase in revenue, but it's hard to tell with all the variation in customers' buying habits over the course of the year.  The red line makes the trend more obvious, and shows where my portfolio was gaining real traction.  Of course, I could also track the size of my port or other events that would explain the trends.  But the important thing is to eliminate as much of the noise as possible and concentrate on what's happening over the long haul.

I hope somebody else finds this interesting.  It does require of course that you have enough data, which is why my graph begins around my first anniversary with Shutterstock and iStock.  Before that point, I just didn't have enough information to form an insight.  Oh, and apologies for not including any scale information.  There is such a thing as oversharing, right?

I wonder.  If he's selling everything on, why wouldn't that transfer the purchased license as well?  Requiring a purchaser to relicense all the imagery in all their brochures and websites and the like seems an unreasonable burden to me.

I can see the Brits' point.  If you're advertising a miracle cure for signs of aging, shouldn't you have to limit yourself to the miracle cure?  At what point does it go from advertising as usual to outright fraud?  And this is separate from the question of what all this editing does to our perception of beauty and growing old gracefully and body image in general.  Both the fashion world and mags like Playboy (Maxim for you youngsters) have a lot to answer for in that regard.

I went for a stacked graph.  One interesting fact jumps out: that I haven't seen a significant new player since StockXpert in 2006.  Everyone else was already in place the year I started submitting.  (Whether you consider SX a major player is another topic for a different thread.)