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Messages - BaldricksTrousers

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1201
Dreamstime.com / Re: "Confidential" email from Dreamstime
« on: May 28, 2014, 09:36 »
How can they expect people to agree to allow free usage of their images and not even explain how this would ever lead to any revenue?

1202
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Thinkstock disappeared from Getty
« on: May 28, 2014, 09:13 »
Well, iStock and photos.com have disappeared from the main page now, and are hidden in small type at the bottom along with Thinkstock, so I suppose they are closing them all..... if the logic here is right.

1203
Adobe Stock / Re: Fotolia D-Day (Deactivation Day) - May,1
« on: May 28, 2014, 04:04 »
Changes in the number of images on DPC today (Moscow time):

  Date and time            Images on DPC   Change
18-05-2014 17:09:01    21,775,858    -11,583
18-05-2014 14:09:00    21,787,441    5,016
18-05-2014 11:08:58    21,782,425    -1,795
18-05-2014 08:08:59    21,784,220    -909
18-05-2014 06:08:58    21,785,129    -1,033
18-05-2014 05:08:53    21,786,162    -558
18-05-2014 03:09:00    21,786,720    -1,297
18-05-2014 01:08:56    21,788,017    1,679
18-05-2014 00:09:00    21,786,338    -289

It good to see DPC going down again. Someone here said that we lost the battle cause DPC is going up. Well, that changed now.

It was under 21.7 million a few days ago. Just because today it's down, on a longer timeline, it is in fact, up.

Doesn't matter if it goes down just for a day. Let's see how the next few days go.

10 days have passed and it is back below 21.7 million.

1204
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Did subs just start?
« on: May 27, 2014, 21:36 »
I've got 15 subscription sales credited for the 5th, but when I look at the new Image Subscriptions tab I have 15 sales for the month scattered across various days.  It looks as if they have totted up the total and shoved the whole month's sales in under one day, regardless of the actual sale date.

1205
"Bobo - in most of the world, Paypal doesn't work in its entirety, I still use it for routing payments to ebay (which it does seem to do worldwide) but receiving cash is another matter."

OK, I accept that people have problems, I must say that as far as receiving payments in Europe it's fine, and if I do any custom work for clients worldwide I always specify payment via PayPal and don't have problems, and get money into my bank account virtually instantly.

I think it works in the US and EU, it's beyond that it gets patchy.

1206
I've had problems with Paypal freezing my funds because they suddenly decided I should provide extra documents that didn't exist.  I had a major fight to get them to release the funds. But most people who use them don't get such problems. Payoneer hasn't caused me any trouble yet - but I realise that any of these payment systems could do something funny any time, maybe due to a new regulatory rule in some distant part of the world, so I don't keep too much money loaded on the card.

Bobo - in most of the world, Paypal doesn't work in its entirety, I still use it for routing payments to ebay (which it does seem to do worldwide) but receiving cash is another matter.

1207
General Stock Discussion / Re: Another scumbag?
« on: May 26, 2014, 16:05 »
IT's working find for me on Firefox
(I am, of course, flattered to have emerged as one of the World's  "best photographers" not just once, but many times over.)

1208
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Thinkstock disappeared from Getty
« on: May 26, 2014, 13:41 »
You're forgetting that TS contains a pile of non-iS material, some of it wholly owned by Getty Images.
Didn't they already dump it to iStock?
I don't think so. But I might be wrong. They sent some stuff to iStock but it was premium priced, I thought there was a different stream going to TS.

1209
http://www.photo-travels.org/

Some of my photos there. A whois lookup says the site is registered to a person in Gdansk, Poland, who is also a nature photographer with work on SS, 500 px, FAA etc.  I've asked for details of how to use someone else's photo for posters and postcards, we'll see what the reply is.

1210
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Thinkstock disappeared from Getty
« on: May 26, 2014, 12:24 »
I don't think the "ads" on the front page are a good indicator. There are just three slots and currently they are using them for two brand new products (iStock subs, photos.com print) and a current event.

Yes, I am sure Getty is pushing iStock subscriptions right now and most likely will shift focus from Thinkstock to iStock over time. It doesn't make much sense to have two different subscription offers within the family (didn't make sense with Thinkstock and photos.com to start with) but I'd assume it's a long term process over the next few years.

You're forgetting that TS contains a pile of non-iS material, some of it wholly owned by Getty Images. If they restrict subs to iStock they stop making money from old stuff they had lying around on their hard-drive. Sometimes a multiplicity of brands can boost overall market share

1211
Payoneer and paper cheques.

1212
The keywords are included in my uploaded files. They need rearranging in the three (well, two, usually) boxes.
Are those keywords at least in the same order when you edit them? I never analyzed that, but if they are, it would at least speed up the process of cutting them, since my keywords are ordered by importance already.

Yes, they are.

I did upload several thousand files to iSTock without using DM. The main advantage it gives is that you can queue the files and just let them run instead of having to process each one individually as it finally arrives ... it's awkward but it can be done.

1213
I've used DM around 20 times in the past month, and I still don't like it any better (for uploading, it's useful for other things). I appear to be in a minority on that, though!


I have wondered if all the people who like DM don't realise that it kills half the keywords unless you go and disambiguate them all in the keywords tab, because it doesn't show keywords as an error needing attention.

1214
You just reminded me that I've got 100 sitting waiting at Alamy, so that's my afternoon ruined!  But how much effort is it worth making?
Interesting question with sales and prices falling.
However, that's more a question of whether it's worth uploading there. Once that decision is made, if I go to the bother of uploading them to Alamy, there's no point in not keywording them so that they'll be found.

The keywords are included in my uploaded files. They need rearranging in the three (well, two, usually) boxes. The question is whether it is worth trying to add all the derivatives, which is a lot more time consuming. I might have "beef" "vindaloo" and "curry" but not "curried", for example. So I could do well in a "Beef vindaloo curry" search but not in "Curried beef" search, whereas in "curried beef vindaloo" I might still be fairly well up the list. But what if having more keywords tends to dilute the weighting of each word? In that case the loss of search placement in "curried" might be compensated for by a better position in "curry"? In any case, the loss of sales from missing, that word would probably not be equal to the effort.

The thing is, all the other keywords are there because I set the files up for distribution across the board - it's only the stemming that involves extra effort.  I do have some files that are just for Alamy but not a lot - perhaps because I feel it isn't worth the effort.

(I think he means that iStock pretty much force you to install Deep Meta because it's even worse without it - though not actually a lot worse because you still have to mess a lot with the DM keywording to avoid having piles of keywords deleted.)

1215
You just reminded me that I've got 100 sitting waiting at Alamy, so that's my afternoon ruined!  But how much effort is it worth making? In 100 pictures I've got maybe 40 different subjects. If I spent 10 or 11 minutes per subject sorting out (adding) plurals etc. that will take about seven hours - an entire day's work. At my sales rate I might expect one sale per year from 100 images, let's say the extra work doubles that (which it probably won't) - then I make an extra one sale per year, which at current rates is probably going to be worth about $30-40. That's a pay-rate per hour of maybe $6 (4), if I'm lucky but quite likely $3 (2) or less.

Which is why I don't bother about the stemming or to delete duplicates that appear as a result of phrases not being read.

1216
iStockPhoto.com / Re: RC 'targets' reduced?
« on: May 25, 2014, 05:35 »
Right, thanks. I must have forgotten about it, I was thinking that it might mean they planned to start applying the "levels" again, which would be a step backwards for a lot of people (including me, the way sales have been this year).

1217
I upload to Photoshelter (a paid-for service) and FTP the whole batch from there. That doesn't solve the iStock problem and sometimes DT fails to read the keywords or descriptions. I do 123 manually because the FTP there has been flaky.
One advantage of Photoshelter is that you can use the site for your own direct-sales, as long as you can set up a merchant account to take credit card or Paypal payments, it also acts as a secure archive for images. But you do have to pay.
If you want to use my referral link I think it gives you a discount if you decide to join up and I'll get a one-off $5. http://www.photoshelter.com/referral/PA5CX7F75K

1218
iStockPhoto.com / RC 'targets' reduced?
« on: May 25, 2014, 04:33 »
It looks to me as if iStock has quietly reduced the RC targets. My stats page shows 11,000 as being the 17% threshold, whereas the link to how the system works shows 12,500 as the 17/30% threshold.  I've no idea when this happened, quite some time ago I suspect.

1219
Adobe Stock / Re: Fotolia D-Day (Deactivation Day) - May,1
« on: May 25, 2014, 03:17 »
.

1220
The absence of people from locations makes them look very "microstocky" in my opinion. I don't know if people look for that sort of work on RM these days.

1221
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Thinkstock disappeared from Getty
« on: May 23, 2014, 06:46 »
That's great news. I hope they close down Thinkstock and move all subscription customers to iStock.

I need to say something that many may agree with and others won't.  When Thinkstock wasn't here, I made, say, $250 a month on Istock.  In comes thinkstock. Today I still make $250 a month at Istock, and another $150-$250 a month with Thinkstock. While some of us (including me) tend to cheerlead for things to fail for bully agencies, I would prefer to keep thinkstock (assuming it's going away). If they kill TS, I doubt I will see an increase of the same amount on my monthly income.  So I see the elimination of TS as a bad thing for me revenue wise.

Maybe your figures relate to the time when everyone was forced to join TS. I've been in it since the start of 2010. Four years ago TS was 20% of my earnings from iStock. In cash terms it has remained pretty steady ever since then, but the repeated attacks on independent income by iStock since then mean that my earnings from the main site are down about 60% and as a proportion of iS earnings TS has risen to about 40%.

If TS is scrapped, I see no particular reason to expect that it will lead to an increase in iS earnings. Maybe there will be a shift from TS to the new subs - I'm not sure what that would mean for earnings - or there might be a further shift to SS or DPC.  Overall, it probably wouldn't do me any good at all and it might mean a significant further cut in earnings. So I'm with you on this.

1222
Adobe Stock / Re: Joining fotolia ?
« on: May 23, 2014, 06:26 »
You can't choose to be on DPC but not be on Fotolia.

Just for information, since I quit Fotolia my wallet has felt a few score dollars lighter each month, but that's nothing compared with the weight off my shoulders from not feeling frustrated and angry about the way they treated me.

1223
General - Top Sites / Re: My first Getty sale
« on: May 23, 2014, 05:55 »
My mistake - it wasn't April 1, it was the monthly column for January.  That sale was previously present as something like a 16c sale that nobody was able to explain rationally, but iStock insisted that it was right. Then it vanished. Now it's reappeared but has been reduced to 1c.  This is a worrying indication of ineptitute in iStock's accounting processes.

1224
Adobe Stock / Re: Joining fotolia ?
« on: May 23, 2014, 05:43 »
I doubt if you will get any dispassionate answers to that, given the heat under Fotolia at the moment.
I guess you would make more money if you did join them but you would constantly be in danger of running into one of their "clever" arrangments.
If you do decide to join, try to do it from their European site (or even the Japanese one) to get the most favourable return.

1225
General - Top Sites / Re: My first Getty sale
« on: May 23, 2014, 04:37 »
I think it's a click-view payment rather than a download of some kind.

Well, that's obviously a fabulous revenue stream that I've been overlooking, then!

Show me your image and I'll click it for you  ;)
I love it when you talk dirty!

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