Just watching tonight's Rachel Maddow Show, and was fascinated to learn that a clean coal grassroots organization is drawing its grassroots membership from the iStockphoto collection.  Yep, it's twoo: all their members are stock images!


Apologies for anyone who finds this too political, but it does raise interesting questions of appropriate use.

I've been collecting a model release for every shoot.  It's been nice not having to scan and manage multiple releases for the same model, especially given the number of times I've shot some of them.  Probably just as well that most of my photos at other agencies will never make their way to iStock.  Just think of the time I'll save thanks to their upload quotas.

Quote from: Nemo1024 on August 20, 2009, 05:40

And it's even not just ticking off or on each of the images, it's also the need to wait for the stupid confirmation box after each tick!

Why "each tick"?

There is control panel option to opt-out or opt-in with Partner program for whole portfolio...

Because some of us may be willing to offer some less successful images at bargain prices (bargain prices even by microstock standards) but have no desire to give away everything.  Exclusives who opt in are only opting in for older images; nonexclusives either opt in everything or go through the tedium of click, wait, wait, click, wait, wait, repeat ad nauseum.

Back in February I had a series of photos rejected by iStockphoto because the model used a post office box instead of a street address on her release:

++We are sorry, buit iS standards do not allow a PO Box to be used for a model's address. Please upload a new release with a physcial address for the model. Thank you for your understanding++

I mentioned this problem in a thread on Model Mayhem, prompting a friend to call iStock and raise models' privacy concerns as a justification for their using PO Boxes both on releases and, where permitted (and most states do permit), on their driver's licenses.  He was informed that iStock will now accept PO Boxes:

Hello Alan

Thank you very much for your message.

Yes, your models can use a PO box for their address on the model release form.

Please note, model releases are for internal use only. iStockphoto does not provide these releases to the public, customers who download your images will not get copies of the releases. Privacy laws prevent us from making this info public.

Please let us know if you have any questions.


Sincerely,

Tina
iStockphoto LP
Contributor Relations

Just in case anybody else runs into this issue.

I've been checking my (lack of) sales every morning.  Bringing up the Approved pages, I do a search for "$0.00".  Safari gives me a match count, so I go through each page and note any page with fewer than 20 matches.  Takes less than a minute.

Only you can make that call.  Their upload process is pretty easy when it works, and I get the occasional payment.  Not worth a lot of time, but if you're bored, why not?

They just haven't updated that page yet.  Click here.

I'm not thrilled, although it's less of a kick in the teeth than other sites' reduced commissions.  (You know who you are.)  It means I'll go from monthly payouts there to bimonthly; annoying but hardly the end of the world.  And I do understand the effect on their expenses of reducing the number of payments.  Last time I checked, PayPal charges businesses $1 for each payment sent via Mass Pay.  That has to add up.

Thanks, Steve.  Had no idea they added that.  My revenue is 36% US / 64% non.

(Recalculation based on ELs deleted; these number are from July, the ELs are August.  D'oh!)

I've had a few photos accepted from my G9.  It's the camera I keep in my laptop bag for situations when the big camera might not be appropriate.  One example from a quick trip to Florida for a friend's wedding:

A question on the Micropayment Yahoo group got me thinking about agency performance in a different way.  The member reported a sharp drop in sales at Shutterstock and Dreamstime this year and wanted to know if others were seeing similar results.  To be a little scientific about it, I compared the past twelve month's sales to the previous period: September, 2008 - August, 2009 (extrapolated to a full month) vs. September, 2007 - August, 2008.  What I saw surprised me a little.

Here's the thing: Shutterstock did 62% better for me this past year than the year before.  Dreamstime did half that: 30% year over year.  But iStockphoto was the shocker: a grand total of 1% better this year than last.  All that time and energy uploading just to stay where I was.

Of course, part of the difference is that I'm able to grow my portfolios at Shutterstock and Dreamstime (and others) as fast as I can create new images.  On September 1, 2007 I had fewer than 1700 images at Shutterstock.  By 9/1/08 I was up to nearly 3000; now I'm over 6300.  (I submit the same images to Dreamstime.  Any difference in port size is down to DT's review process.)

By comparison, iStock's upload limits have held me back in a major way.  My iStock port was under 1000 on 9/1/07, just under 1600 on 9/1/08 and around 2300 today.  Given the way images age and the vagaries of search algorithms and other factors beyond my control, the best I can expect is to tread water there.  And I doubt somehow identifying my best and most salable images for upload would change that result all that much.

Which is all food for thought.  Measuring incremental effort against potential gain, looks like there's a lot more value in generating more content for Shutterstock and then feeding it to the others than there is from the two hours a week I spend uploading and disambiguating on iStock.

I don't track RPI and don't consider it a useful metric.  Two reasons: first, some images age, either because of improvements in resolution and quality (I've been submitting for four years, and the technical requirements have changed dramatically in that time) or because the subject itself starts to look dated; and second, because the number of images I can get from a shoot varies dramatically with the subject. 

A day of shooting architecture or landscapes or isolated food may yield a half dozen submitted images, where a studio shoot can produce up to a hundred different poses in different outfits with different backdrops.  Those hundred may give me considerably more sales than the half dozen, even though the RPI tells a different story.

Instead of RPI, I track a moving twelve month sales period: September 08 - August 09 vs. August 08 - July 09.  That reduces seasonal variables and shows me how my growing portfolio is really doing.  That shows a steady increase in sales, although it does of course require a full year of data before you can compare.

I wouldn't read too much into it.  I'm still seeing quick and mostly positive reviews.