Quote from: Noedelhap on September 02, 2015, 19:28

DP is pure filth.

I honestly don't understand their reasoning. Can anyone explain why they need to reduce royalties while increasing their prices?

"Thus, we expect to compensate authors' losses caused by reducing commission rate payments to keep the earnings of partners at the same level."

Does that mean they first lowered our royalties, and then increased their prices to "make up" for contributor's losses?

LOL, I hadn't realised how crazy that sounds! Yeah why would they do that for a net gain to them of zero!

It sounds crazy, but it wouldn't be a net gain of zero for them

Hypothetical example:

Original royalties: 44% of $10 = $4.4 for us, $5.6 for them
Lowering of our royalties: 34% of $10 = $3.4 for us, $6.6 for them
Increase of price: 34% of $13 = $4.4 for us, $8.6 for them

Quote from: Noedelhap on August 27, 2015, 04:18

Quote from: hatman12 on August 27, 2015, 01:17

Are non-exclusives seeing any solid growth in subs sales at istock?

No. If anything it's a decline.

PP and Istock Subs are two different things. Hartman ask about subs 

I'm exclusive and my subs are flat from about couple months..

Oh, he meant the credit and image subs? Basically non-existent here.

My fourth month on Istock (June 2010) I made more money than August 2015. It's that bad.

Death to the Stock Photo is a total load of bs from two photographers using lots of cheap buzzwords to pretend they have some amazing new concept.
Break barriers, forge a new path, swap awesome ideas, make incredible stuff. Challenges. Rich digital experiences. Living your passion. Blah-dee-blah. Forget about making a living, it's all about creativity! I bet they're not materialistic at all...oh, wait, they ARE making money. They claim the money is being spent on funding the creative photographers who in turn make more free work. So basically they're an agency like any other, with a team of hired photographers, except their marketing strategy is 'money isn't going to be what makes you all happy!'

I just noticed one of the founders has written a book. I bet she's going to give copies away for free, because she loves being all creative without getting paid, no?

Not really smart, to put it bluntly. You need to wait at least 6 months to a year to make any significant analysis of your sales before deciding to go exclusive. Fotolia doesn't seem like the best agency to go exclusive anyway. Especially with a small port you're better off staying independent.

Also, leaving your extended prices at 30?? Then you'll be earning only $10.50 for an extended sale! Set it to 100 credits instead. You won't be receiving lots of extended sales anyway, but at least you won't not selling it too cheap.

All three have an uninteresting composition. They don't look sharp/in focus. The out of focus plants in the foreground are distracting. The last two photos look like average snapshots taken in your own garden.

Quote from: Noedelhap on August 21, 2015, 07:40

Craig says in the video on his latest blog post that they were also hit by a Google penalty. Does anyone know why? Can't find more info about it.

And this is a reason to not pay on a regular basis?

I don't know, he mentioned a patent troll lawsuit and a Google penalty hit, but the latter must have been some time ago. Thing is, it's not clear to me why they were penalized.

You could try writing to support.

iS drops exclusivity.

Even though that wouldn't affect me directly, if this happens, countless new indies will appear on the other sites, further diluting our sales there.

Looks like they've opened up again. FTP not working yet, but the site uploader does.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on August 01, 2015, 15:27

Quote from: Holmes on August 01, 2015, 14:43

...what do you think of the current state of IS/getty and future prospects. it appears the futzing has stabilized for the moment. (did i really say that?)

I think that they have one big problem they haven't figured out. 3 credits versus 1 credit for essentially the same content -search for orange slice, woman gym, new home and you can't see any reason that one image is three times the price of another.

And they still have the should-have-been-rejected content that came from off site and flooded the collection with rubbish - two examples (no surprise they haven't sold since 2013):

http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/close-up-of-orange-slice-25406435
http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/juicy-green-apple-25406521

There are smaller problems - the site regularly not working well and some really odd choices with the "new" interface versus the "classic"; inspection standards that I hear let just about anything in (when they used to have some of the most exacting standards, at least for technical excellence); no inexpensive sizes for blog or web use any more.

Why would you shop at iStock if you were a buyer? You have so many other choices that are a whole lot easier to deal with.

You think that's bad, have you seen what's happening with illustration search results? Type in certain key words and you get results like these:-

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19999283/iStock-spam.jpg

Page after page dominated by a growing minority of contributors. You can have 2 to 3 pages, 100 per page, taken up almost entirely by one contributor. The same simple symbol uploaded several times with very minor changes, or the same set of icons rearranged into different shapes, or ten minute doodles. None of these would have been accepted a few years back. And to add insult to injury keyword spamming means half these images shouldn't even turn up in the searches.
Why is iStock allowing this to happen? Is this part of some clever master plan to bring in more buyers? When a buyer is presented with such results are they going to think "wow, iStock have really upped their game", or are they more likely to think "what the f.... is going on here?" and then leave to search another site?
This type of spamming seems to have exploded since a few months ago and what's worrying is that it's not just newbies but veterans who used to be identified as inspectors and admins on their profile so I'm wondering if iStock is actually encouraging this for whatever reason.
It's pointless spending extra time creating anything decent if it's going to end up buried under all this stuff in best match.
When, a little over five years ago, I first thought of joining stock image sites I spent a lot of time researching and reading reviews and forum posts. Back then iStock was by far the most respected site, held in the highest esteem with the most stringent acceptance standards and quality control. It was with great pride when I was accepted and would boast to my artist peers who were always impressed, some having tried and failed several times to get accepted. Now I never mention iStock by name, it's more of an embarrassment, increasingly being referred to as laughingstock.

Oh wow, that's some horrible search. No wonder sales are down the drain.
I too notice lots of new contributors (signed up this July) with bucketloads of simple icons (created in 5 minutes) that indeed would never have been accepted 5 years ago. Worse thing is, these newbies are getting sales. It's feeding the beast all over again, quantity over quality. Or I must be doing something horribly wrong.

I don't think you can temporarily deactivate single images on Fotolia without deleting them from their servers. But you can delete it one image at a time. You only have to re-upload it again if you change your mind, so you'll lose whatever search placement that image had.