This sort of articles is misleading.

You can be a full time professional in anything, even selling 16x16px icons or mousepad on Zazzle or DeviantArt.

It's all about numbers and production costs, and selling in the right channels.

Of course you can be a Pro microstockers, as you still can be a Pro RM shooter, wedding, sport,
food, etc

But you can't pretend to make a living shooting a few good pic here and there.
Even if you are a top seller, how long will it last ?

Do you really see yourself living off a few hundred top selling images in 20 years from now ?

People who are unable to make huge numbers of images will sink before or later, blaming
competition or whatever other new buzzword in the industry.

But let's face it, stock is and always remain a numbers' game.
Claiming that all you need is quality is BS as that's only a small part of the game
and not even the most important factor if we really look at the full scenario.

Slow photographers should just leave any hope in stock and microstock, of course there are exceptions,
but without a couple thousand good photos you're simply going nowhere nor in RF and certainly less
in RM, there's people in RM with a portfolio of 70K images and yet they're not making millions, others
with 500 pics on iStock making a living, one thing is sure nobody will teach you their "magic recipe"
to live with stock.

Subs are certainly to blame, i can't see any other way for the leechers to grab 1000s of images
from stocks and it can't be a random occurrance that most of the images come from Shutterstock.

Well, if the stock sites aren't doing anything about this ,than maybe it is pointless. How can you stop it? I went through the first 10 pages and found a bunch of my images, not about to start emailing everyone, would take forever. They would probably just show me the finger anyway. Best solution is to protect your future and don't sell Subs, or live with it ,because it's not going to stop unless the sites get involved. Not even sure if that will help.

you CAN stop it.

once you throw the spam out what do we have ? 20-30 big sites with tons of links
and dozens of well known and less known "storage sites", then you have 10 or 20
torrent "trackers" sites with the same stuff shared on BitTorrent.

all together it's maybe 100 sites and if you shut them down they're gone forever,
and don't tell me about china or india, these guys are all hosted in EU or US.

agencies are not moving a finger because they can't even know for sure
how much is the damage done, and they also know that sueing teenagers
sharing pirated photos will cost them more than what they can eventually
gain.

this guy seems to be the author of the SS pack discussed above , he has a lot more on his web site :

http://fahmy.tk/

even if you shut down rapidshare and megaupload they're sharing many files also on Torrent networks,
take a look at these shutterstock packs here :

http://www.demonoid.com/files/?query=shutterstock

(try also searching for "istockphoto", "corbis", or just "stock")

what's shameful is these guys are doing it fully in the open air ... warez always existed even in the early 80s
but you had to search for it, get hold of physical copies, pay the shipment and the floppies, now with the internet it's literally 2 clicks away, fast, and free.

it can only get worse as people stockpiling with subscriptions are obviously abusing the system.

Quote from: cclapper on March 27, 2010, 07:12

Just for you, Paulie. No, no one has ever actually complained about me not putting the quoter in before. I thought most people read the whole thread. You could put me on ignore!  

Too bad this thread has been derailed by the bulls*it. It's pretty important.

I really prefer not to ignore people. I would rather try to work with reasonable people. But you responded exactly as I figured you would.

i can admit i'm 50% troll, but i'm also 50% non-troll so either people deal with it
or they better ban me right away.

ignoring people is for guys who have no sense of humour and take the internet
way too seriously.

if we were to meet face to face we would probably be all friends, but let's face it
this is the internet and none of us know each other in the real life, we're not real
friends, we don't even live in the same continent nor we speak natively the same
language, the only thing we have in common is we're stock photographers.

take forums with a grain of salt !

I never ignore anyone automatically.  It's much more fun to ignore optionally.  

.

 .

There are many websites that provide cracked software, copyrighted movies and music for download, stock images, e-books...and everything is free. These websites are widely used by more than a half of the world and I think deleting them from google search is not a real solution. Most people have those website in their bookmarks and they don't use google search to find them. In just few clicks I found this....and I found many more..

http://www.dl4all.com/graphic/

right, so let the leechers steal our photos and thanks for the biscuits.

good !

let us know how it goes !

CardMaverick,

What you wrote is the biggest BS i've read since a long time.

The diatribe about server-side vs client-side has been discussed since the stone age,
you really discovered nothing new nor you're enlighting us with shiny new ideas on
alternatives of selling stock.

The rats posting hires stock files on Flickr or zipped on Rapidshare are people that wouldn't
ever buy photos anyway so where's the real loss for us in the end ?

Our clients are the ones browsing photos on stock agencies, not the random ones on flickr or web sites,
despite it can eventually give you the odd sale from time to time.

Of you course you've full control only when selling a network service or owning your own agency
but what's your point then ? should we throw our Nikons to the dogs and join a photo-pirate ring monetized
by ads banners and affiliate links ?

There's already a branch of the black-hat spamming community doing this since a long time, spamming stolen photos to rank on google images. hard to track, hard to take down, spreaded in millions of .biz and .info domains ...

And yet, it's still nothing new so your point is moot.

No idea if this was already discussed but i found out that there's a lot of "stock photo packs" released on Rapidshare, they're mainly vectors and hi-res pics taken from iStock and even a couple packs from Getty :

http://www.rapidsharegfx.com/stock/

http://www.rapidsharegfx.com/stock/2560-stockbyte-by-getty-images-sd122-seniors.html


How to deal with this ?