Quote from: adijr on December 11, 2010, 15:31

Quote from: sjlocke on December 11, 2010, 11:24

Quote from: gostwyck on December 10, 2010, 18:38

It might take another year or two but I reckon SS will eventually emerge as the dominant microstock agency. Who do you trust the most to win out in the end __ Jon Oringer, serial entrepreneur and founder of SS, or Kelly Thompson, COO of an H&F subsidiary?

Color me unexcited at the thought of a subscription model dominating the market.

I'm mostly an outside viewer in this circuit, but here's my opinion of istock's most worrisome trend: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/istockphoto.com+shutterstock.com/#
Of course the price model is different and so on, but if that trend continues for a long time, almost none of the details will matter. In the end, I think these statistics will dominate any discussion about current details.

Anyway, carry on...

This is the SiteAnalytics graph referenced above:


Someone will need to come in and interpret the figures, but here are Alexa stats for iStock, FT, DT and SS for the past six months:

Worryingly, there's no evidence on either graph of "half of the year's sales being made in the final four months", as intimated by KKT in that fateful announcemant.

Also, if you manage to come up with a niche that few to none have discovered, that is the key to initial success. 

Provided it's one that iStock buyers want to buy (and preferably other contributers can't easily copy).
I can assure you it's no good having the only photos for a particular keyword if no buyers are interested. Sometimes niche images need niche outlets.

Large market in the U.S. for this type of run and gun family photos. Income levels for people using this service is between 20,000-30,000 US. Yep photographer is a Walmart/ Sears employee with little to no photo skills other then 1-2 hours of training on how the company does business. I've seen in some places where the camera was bolted to the floor!! Sit the Kid down, turn him to the left, say cheeses, hit the shutter, sell them a package for 29,95US, done next!

OK, fair enough, your area is totally different from mine. My camera club decided that they were going to try to sell photos of that nature (studio already set up, quick hair comb and primp, shoot and out - one pic �5) at a craft fair a couple of weeks ago. Not a great success - the only people who 'bought' were friends/family of club members, who sort-of 'couldn't say no'. We probably needed some 'hard sellers' pulling in the punters. The general response was along the lines of, "I've got a camera, why would I pay �5?", which is what I'd have expected. Generally there is almost no market for family photographers around here except for weddings and graduations; I hear the latter is falling too, as people just photograph each other at the graduation ceremony.

Quote from: rubyroo on December 07, 2010, 06:47

Thanks so much Sue - you're so incredibly helpful!   I will have a good read of those links.  Sorry to hear you're getting so many fruitless viewings because of those search issues.  Wow, that 'otter' searcher made a huge effort to eliminate redundancy, didn't they?  

Everyone gets "bad" searches with mixed words.

That's bad for the buyer.

The whole point is every word in the search is matched with every word in your keywords, caption and location.

and pseudonym

Would you want it to NOT match words that were searched for? That would be silly...

As I've said before, I have Caucasian musicians playing Japanese drums. I decided the fact that they were Caucasians could be relevant (positively or negatively) to buyers, so I put it into main keywords, but a search on ethnicity throws the images up on a search for Japanese ethnicity, and I can't avoid it.
For all I know, African Elephants might show up on a search for African ethnicity.
(checks)
Hey, that check is surprisingly clean. Most of the images are actually of African people. I wonder how come?

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I don't know how else someone would make a search work, except finding the words that a person is searching for? Maybe one of you can explain that to me?

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If you want only accurate searches, don't fill the fields with extra keywords or close matches or concept words. Hey wait, the same thing happens on all the sites except IS, but for some reason people never stop hammering Alamy for having a 100%, find every word asked for, search.
[unquote]
I'm only saying a good CV, including keyword phrases, would be much better.
The first time I noticed this problem was when an image of mine of the "Queen Elizabeth National Park" in Uganda showed up in a search for Queen Elizabeth, Uganda, which was presumably looking for HM's visit there not long after I left. This would waste buyers' time and p*ss them off. In fact, doing a search on Queen Elizabeth Uganda doesn't have any of HM in the first 3 pages (360 files) and the fourth page just has the wheel going round and round for well over a minute.
To be fair, if they'd gone into the advanced search and entered Uganda, "Queen Elizabeth" as a phrase and NOT National Park, they could have saved a lot of time finding nil result.

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Here's the answer:
The image will be returned for a search of any of the words and in any order or combination unless a customer searches using quotations. In which case the search will look for the exact words in the exact order within the quotes.

But doing All of Alamy research, I've discovered that you can't second guess which order a searcher will put two words in (unless they're a logical phrase).

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Quotes " " or ' ' or [ ] do nothing within keywords at this time. Only in searches.

What do you mean 'only in searches'

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Do not use commas in keywords as they are ignored and do nothing.

True, but I use them anyway, in the hope that one day they will be used, in a proper CSV manner.
Though I sometimes leave them out of essential keywords if I run out of space.

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Alamy makes it clear that word order and proximity do make a difference in results displayed to someone doing a search. Without getting all complicated. If the search is for London Bridge Thames, every image that has the words London or Bridge or Thames will appear in the results. ALL MATCHING WORDS! But when you see the search results, the images with all three words in the keywords, will appear first, two words second and one word, last.

Not only that, within the group that have all three words matching, the keywords that have the three words in the correct order, will appear before Thames Bridge London, for example. It's really quite simple if you look at it from a logical perspective.

If only you could second-guess which order buyers will put their searches in.
AlamyMeasures can only help so far, as it can show that one order is more likely, or that so far the order I'd have searched on isn't the one most people search on Alamy.
And as over half of my sales have never been zoomed, there are a lot of searches which aren't even being recorded in AlamyMeasures.
That only shows how the Big Buyers search.
Is there any information as to what percentage of overall sales are made by those buyers whose data appears in Alamy Measures?

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Computers don't think. They aren't smart. They don't reason. They have no intuition and can't guess what someone was really were looking for...

All they do is respond to what humans enter into them, A bad search will give poor results. A good search will give more useful results. But please don't blame the computer, it's just doing what some human has asked it to do!

That's why it's good to help the dumb computer by giving them a smart CV.

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Creating a poor search to get poor results, proves nothing, except that we can create bad data intentionally.

I know it's just a dream. Apparently CVs cost a fortune, and since apparently most contributers haven't gone back into their keywords and added "..." and [...], which is allegedly why these recommendations haven't been implemented (I admit, I haven't used [...] a lot), I guess they wouldn't go back and DA their existing keywords, which would be onerous in the extreme for those with huge ports, I guess the dream of an Alamy CV is just that.
Pity, that.
Anyway, it gives me something to amuse myself over a nice cup of tea, trying to work out what someone really wanted when I get a strange search.

I'm quite cokka with Alamy today, as I got a sale yesterday for $500/$300 to me, so I'm just holding my breath until it clears.
 

. in fact an admin accused me once of going back and forth. the thing is, every issue is different and I tend to approach each issue individually. I don't think it's black and white.

That's perfectly logical. I'm exactly the same, some things I love about iStock (the CV, though it's not perfect yet, but it would be better if everyone used it correctly) and some things I'm not so keen on.
Glad I don't get phone calls from admins. Emails are quite enough. I guess they know they'd never understand my accent, especially when stroppy.
;-)

Quote from: cclapper on December 10, 2010, 08:13

If I only want to shoot part-time, I accept the fact that I'm not going to make the same amount of money as someone shooting full-time. That's my choice. But to impose goals on me like I were an actual employee of Getty just goes a little too far for my taste. And if I don't meet those goals, my images get sent to the back of the best match, regardless of how successful they have been in the past?

this 'target' mentality is pervasive. A couple of years ago, a large UK organisation, mostly staffed, funded, and supported by volunteers started setting targets for their 'volunteers' and 'supporters groups' for increasing membership and raising money. That led to a rapid downshift in their position in 'who I will try to help'.
Added: but our local support group just refused to accept the target! We don't even fill in their stats sheets now.

I am one of the demoted to Photographer's Choice even though I have uploaded almost 50 images to the Photodisc collection.

Work hard, and they'll still kick your a*se.

I'm guessing it applies to those of who were actively submitting. but I don't know.

That's what I assumed, but it certainly isn't clear. As always.

Quote from: ShadySue on December 09, 2010, 06:17

Quote from: sjlocke on December 09, 2010, 06:06

I'm certainly not trying to come across as an expert on the details of the change.  However, the first post in the thread is pretty clear on the changes.

This is slightly further down: "E-mails have been sent directly to those who will continue to be able to upload unique content to Getty Images."

That's certainly what I read. So why wouldn't they email everyone else to tell them about the changes? Not everybody hangs about the forums. It's pretty bad when someone, who has been submitting to Getty for a while, only finds out when he finds his portal closed when he goes to upload. Even a "we don't want you any more" email would be more respectful than that.

Because they have never been that respectful or businesslike.

And like I posted on the SS thread, I see that the email which was sent out to the 'chosen sample' had to be replied to within a week. Are they so lacking in imagination that they can't foresee people being away from the internet for a week or more? (e.g. travelling, in hospital, too busy...)

A number of the biggest contributors to microstock sites have their own agencies / collections that they sell and market from their own site or through other sites. 

Oh yes, sometimes even when ingested into the iStock supposedly 'exclusive' Agency programme.

Stacey: "according to our understanding of the agreement"
Sean: "If I understand it correctly"
Eyedesign "That's how I understand it"

Says it all.
Why oh why oh why don't they employ someone who can write these things in clear English? So many of istock/Getty's contracts and agreements are unclear and open to interpretation. Or even get the Clear English Society to look their stuff over and write it better?
Remember, if we, whose first language is more-or-less English (with a Scottish/American/Canadian/woteva) spin have difficulty making it out, how much more difficult must it be for people for whom English is a second or third language.
It would be interesting to know whether the translations in to the 'community' languages are equally unclear.
H*ck, I'm unclear even who should be getting the emails - is it only those who are already submitting in good numbers and successful with sales? Do the others have to be reading the forums to get the news? I certainly haven't got an email (accepted but never submitted, partly because of the tax thing, partly because the e-paperwork was so very confusing, partly because of the very broad range of what they consider sister/similars in natural history.)

@ Stacey:
The issue isn't personal, not is it about who uploads what.
It's a matter of how iStock have changed the goalposts, and so often and in so many ways over the past year.
It's about the lies they've told us, and the weasel words, and the backtracking, then attacking us from a different angle.
It's about total disrespect for the people who provide them with a living.
It's about the persuading independents to become exclusive earlier in the year, then shafting them. It's they I feel most sorry for in this whole debacle.
It's about whether we'll ever be able to trust 'them' again, and how else they'll screw us in future.
It's about in-clubs who get shoe-in to Vetta while equally good or better images are rejected and it's purely subjective - in one case by an inspector who has even fewer downloads than me, and in another case by an inspector who has only just learned how to keyword to iStock standards.
It's about how BM2, which was designed to reward good keywording, has been totally gazumped by Vetta and Agency.
It's about how, when I posted on the Vetta thread asking for Vetta images to be doubly checked over for keyword accuracy, JJRD posted within a very short time to say that that would NOT be happening. However, wiki-ing has helped.
And ultimately, given all of the above, whether it's sensible of anyone to 'work their butt off' to supply exclusively to istock, whether their option is to become independent and/or supply RM.
Oh, and off-thread, they have now changed the goalposts* with regards submitting to Getty, but as far as I can see, it's only been talked about in the Getty forum, not even in the exclusive one.
*to be honest, I never understood what the goalposts were, and was one of the 2/3 of people who apparently were accepted to submit to Getty, then didn't do it. I was astonished by that figure to be honest. You'd have thought they might have done some contributer market research to find out the reasons. And I see that at least one iStock/Getty contributer via the iStock deal first found out about it when he found his portal closed.
So many promises. So many pie-crusts.