1. Svetlana (i have no idea who you are), can you please show people here the pictures you used as boycott advertisement? then everyone will see why i called it circus.

2. what i'm still trying to convince people is please check the background of "leaders" of this "boycott". don't be manipulated by WAREZ people. make your own business decisions. don't be a "herd" for those who wants to be sheppards now.

The logic behind the boycott still seems perfectly sound to me.  I'm curious about why the organisers set to work on it because it is always good to know about motivations. But the fact that selling credit size packages at subscription type prices is going to be bad for everybody doesn't seem to be in doubt.

I sell a tonne to bloggers and this hasn't had any effect on my sales at all. Tempest in a teapot.

So you are directly contradicting the "fact" proclaimed by Oringer (and iStock) that microstock images are only sold for advertising and not for blogging, but you're not worried?   Maybe your customers haven't cottoned on to the fact they're paying for free content yet.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on May 10, 2014, 12:19

Quote from: michey on May 10, 2014, 10:47

Recently for test On SS i uploaded almost every shoots of food at 1.4 with the sigma 35 1.4 and i had not any rejections.

That's impressive. What size files did you upload?

21 mega-pixel of the 5d mark ii, nothing impressive  http://www.shutterstock.com/it/pic-188649884/stock-photo-cupcakes.html?src=9EfMUzNJ8JIDU84rIJxkVQ-1-15
but no agency created me any problems, considering it was daylight through a window

OK, it really does surprise me that you got that through. Maybe the fact the OOF area is so "in your face" appealed to them. Who knows?
PS: We can start fighting now about whether daylight is better than flash, if you like

[But, on reflection, what mystifies me more than anything is how you got 301 keywords when the maximum allowed is 50 .... at least, in English]

BTrousers makes valid points but ignores the reported observation of sales stopping when the cap is reached.

A pattern I've noticed is that there is a slow stream of sales from the start of the European day until shortly before the US market opens, then there are a couple of hours of decent sales as the Americas kick in before it all goes quiet again. A few more quite often turn up overnight, probably when Australia and NZ are starting a new day and then the whole thing repeats.

I have the impression that designers tend to download material early in the working day getting everything ready for use that day, rather than downloading consistently throughout the day. It's always seemed to me to be like that. And that pattern could well create an appearance of a a rush of sales followed by a cut-off when you hit your "cap". 

@ Pixel8 - it would also make sense for a site to award points to different portfolios according to where they sell, so if one supplier had strong sales in South Africa but weak ones in America, it might be helpful to buyers to promote that work in searches coming from Africa but to give it a lower ranking in searches coming from America.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on May 09, 2014, 13:01

Quote from: lisafx on May 09, 2014, 12:25

I bought a number of cheaper lenses starting out, including Sigmas.  Some of them were quite good, like the Sigma 20mm 1.8 prime.  However, their quality control is spotty. You can get a wide variation of quality and have to rely on luck to get a good copy.  Also, Sigma customer service is famously bad.  Since I started shooting L glass I have gotten consistently high  quality lenses and tack sharp pictures.  It's worth the extra price to me.

I guess it's worth mentioning that the L-class lenses I've got, which are my stock lenses, cost about 2% of my total stock earnings. If I hadn't been in as early as I was the figures probably wouldn't look so good, but in any professional photo business the difference between a $1,000 and a $1,500 lens is not really significant.

What's more, if I had been a bit more careful all those lenses would have been good for 20+ years, rather than the 10 that seems to be the point where I abuse them too much.

Microstock a lot of years ago was 6 mp cameras and crappy images. If we have to follow your tips, the next year everyone will have to buy a medium format camera and a 7.000$ lens to shoot for microstock and for 0.10$ each image.

You don't have to do anything, but I don't understand why you appear to be so angry and negative about L glass.

If you want my advice about cheap glass I can recommend the 58mm f3.5 Micro-Nikkor from about 1970, which will set you back about $50, the 20mm f4 Zeiss Jena Flektogon and its 35mm f2.4 sister, though I think those are both a bit overpriced on the second-hand market now, the Pentacon 135 f2.8, the Zeiss Jena Sonnar 135 f3.5 and the Sonnar 300 f4.  I've used all of those for stock at one time or another.

It seems to me that what Ethan has discovered is statistical averages, not a cap on earnings.  If you have a large number of sales - which I guess he does - from a large number of files being bought at random by a large number of different people then you will tend to find that the daily averages are very close.  The larger the average number of sales, the smaller the percentage difference from day to day is going to be.

In Ethan's case he reports that he sees a variation of around 10% in daily sales (there is a 10% difference between 4.5% and 5% of his portfolio) If his sales are around 100 a day or more I think that would be perfectly normal.  I strongly suspect that he is disregarding the odd day when he sells 4.0% or 5.5% because he regards it as a rogue result when something went wrong with the "cap". Or maybe he sells 1,000 a day, when the average would be much tighter - say 4.7-4.9%, and the outliers are at the 4.5 and 5 level.

This averaging effect has always been one of the great things about microstock. If you get thousands of sales a month you will have a pretty good idea of what your earnings are going to be next month - which will be pretty close to the figure for this month and last month.

Take a look at Alamy. You know your sales aren't being capped there because one month you might get 10 sales and make $800 and the next month you might make one sale and get $40.  Now extrapolate that "non-capped" result to SS: one month you get 10,000 sales and make $8,000, the next month you make 1,000 sale and get $400.  Would that mean that SS was not fiddling the results? No, it would mean the exact opposite. Because as sales volume increases the variation decreases so if you average 5,500 sales a month it is very improbable that 10,000 will be in one month and 1,000 in the other; it is, however, very, very likely that 5,500 plus or minus 5% will be in each month.

I'm not good enough at maths to do any proper mathematical analysis of this (and it's probably necessary to know how many sales a day there are rather than just that there is a 10% difference between high and low totals) but we're probably all familiar with the Bell Curve and the fact that the more data points you have the tighter the shape of the curve will become.

In short, if the day-to-day variation in sales is very small, then the chances are that it means you are selling lots of licenses and doing very well, so things average out over a very short period of time. It doesn't indicated that you're being swindled.

In any case, why would SS want to "cap" successful artists? It's in their interests to let buyers see work that people like, not to hide it away from them, and a portfolio selling 4%+ of its entire content every day is very successful indeed. According to the figures they've just published, on average less than 1% of the content is sold each day.

And, while I think of it, the apparent lack of ODs and ELs is likely to be a reflection of the low volume/large variation effect that you also see with Alamy rather than a real change in their frequency.

Quote from: Ron on May 09, 2014, 02:35

Quote from: luissantos84 on May 08, 2014, 16:01

- Quarterly paid downloads increased 33% to a record 29.7 million
- Collection grew 41%; exceeds 35 million images and 1.7 million video clips

Doesnt that mean the pie is getting smaller for us?

Yes, but not much smaller. Many people posting about this on MSG have fretted over a huge flood of new contributors and submissions. An increase in supply that is several or even many times larger than the growth in demand. Apparently that is not what is happening at SS. I guess we will have to think up new excuses if our revenues drastically decline?

Au contraire, Michael. The difference between 41% and 33% is eight percentage points, not 8%, it's actually a 20% drop in earnings per file.  In order for Mr Average to maintain his earnings he would have to increase his portfolio size by 20% in a year.
I increased my portfolio by about 12% last year and my earnings in the first quarter were down 8.5%, so my entire decline is explained, quite precisely, by the decline in earnings per file.
The message I take home from the data is that I need to grow my portfolio by almost 100 files a month just to stand still.
On the positive side, the collection is now so big that if SS can keep growing its customer spend at that rate then in a year or two the situation might reverse, with earnings starting to outstrip the increase in the collection. If that happened, then earnings for individual portfolios would start to rise even without new material being added, which would be very nice indeed.

I bought a number of cheaper lenses starting out, including Sigmas.  Some of them were quite good, like the Sigma 20mm 1.8 prime.  However, their quality control is spotty. You can get a wide variation of quality and have to rely on luck to get a good copy.  Also, Sigma customer service is famously bad.  Since I started shooting L glass I have gotten consistently high  quality lenses and tack sharp pictures.  It's worth the extra price to me.

I guess it's worth mentioning that the L-class lenses I've got, which are my stock lenses, cost about 2% of my total stock earnings. If I hadn't been in as early as I was the figures probably wouldn't look so good, but in any professional photo business the difference between a $1,000 and a $1,500 lens is not really significant.

What's more, if I had been a bit more careful all those lenses would have been good for 20+ years, rather than the 10 that seems to be the point where I abuse them too much.

I used in the past really cheap lenses like samyang 8mm and the canon 18-55 is(100 bucks)  never had a problem with acceptations. You are not working for vogue or playboy, you are selling image for 20 cents, the only problem is to have a nice subject-composition ,  good lights and shoot in raw.

Yes. I heard from an impeccable source that a Nokia phone is the perfect camera for stock.

Quote from: tickstock on May 08, 2014, 14:48

I didn't realize we could license our images as RF on iStock and on our own site as RM?  Are you sure that's allowed?

I don't know about from our own site, but there's nothing to stop us entering into RM agreements with private buyers. I guess it might be considered morally dubious if they found you on iS and you entered into a private agreement with them, and I've never done that. In fact, the only time someone contacted me via SM to suggest same, I contacted CR, and didn't even get a 'thanks'.
Some might think so many of their actions have been so morally dubious it hardly matters; others might enjoy the moral high ground.

Sue, I'm shocked! That would make you a faux-exclusive!! I'm sure iStock would never tolerate exclusivity being undermined like that!
Not by you, anyway.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on April 11, 2014, 21:31

studio shots with SS are not a problem, but for outdoor (non people) shots they are really strange and inconsistent. Coming from iStock exclusivity back to SS I had them reject shots (beach, landscape) that were in flames on IS for focus or composition or incorrect white balance (usually that would be sunrise or sunset shots when the light isn't neutral).

These were 21MP shots from L glass and they were in focus, well composed and with correct white balance. I can't explain what SS's review process is or why they do what they do.

I sometimes resubmit with a note - recently pointed out that a shot was pre-sunrise, hence the color and they accepted it. But it wasn't any sort of mystery that required an explanation.

I don't complain because they don't seem to have any interest in changing anything they do.

L glasses means nothing, they have chromatic aberrations and distortion as every normal lenses, overall if you consider lens like the 16-35 or the 17-40...
Consider polarizers destroy a lot of good pictures.

Yes, it does have unavoidable optical aberrations (that can be corrected in software) but L-glass is about as sharp as you can get for the focal range it covers. Assuming any CA has been dealt with, any L lens should be able to produce pictures that will pass inspection - that might not be true for cheaper lenses.

Don't all the sites have something about the "agreement being governed by the laws of the State of New York/State of California/Alberta" etc?

Whether or not that entitles them to sell something in the EU that they wouldn't be able to sell if the contributor agreement was governed by EU law is something I have no idea about at all.

One advantage of a wider aperture is that the extra light helps the camera to grab focus more quickly. I have no idea whether the difference would be of any real practical value between these two lenses and I've never tried them. Obviously, if you were to add extension tubes or a teleconverter you would move closer to the limit of the camera's AF system and the advantage could be more important.