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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
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1476
« on: March 16, 2014, 12:46 »
I don't see how that can be right. Towards the end of a roll it would have to rewind 30 frames and then wind them back on when you pressed the the shutter for the next one. My Canon 1v certainly doesn't work like that.
It's exactly, how our old Canon Cams work  We still use the old cams, because we have to shot color slides sometimes.
Which Canon camera is that? Does it wind the film into a second cassette so the film can be protected as it rewinds after it has been shot? I've never heard of anything like that. Like I say, I've got a Canon 1v film camera (that's the last and best film camera they ever made) and it winds the film onto the camera spool normally and then does a full rewind at the end of the roll. It certainly doesn't repeatedly wind it all too and fro. It has a double lock on the door to prevent accidental opening (you have to press AND slide to open the chamber).
1477
« on: March 16, 2014, 12:27 »
Well, it would be a strange angler who went fishing without any bait on his hook.
Exclusives have to understand that the "main" collection is there to suck in the punters on the promise of cheap files. If buyers arrive and everything is more expensive than they expect then they will feel aggrieved. So iStock needs to live the lie a bit otherwise all the customers will go away.
It's a paradox, really. How can you sell at midstock prices while telling buyers that you are selling at microstock prices, without having them notice the difference?
1478
« on: March 16, 2014, 12:11 »
in my job I use Canon, and the reason for it is simply one feature: In the old analog days, the Canon cameras turned the fim back in the cartridge after each shot (other cameras turned it out) Therefore, the already-exposed photographs were safe when the body should opened accidentally.
I don't see how that can be right. Towards the end of a roll it would have to rewind 30 frames and then wind them back on when you pressed the the shutter for the next one. My Canon 1v certainly doesn't work like that.
1479
« on: March 16, 2014, 10:11 »
Double my typical PP sales this month excluding the months they recouped.
Now, is that lucky, or what? I'm 20% below average so I reckon I'm pretty safe.
1480
« on: March 16, 2014, 10:08 »
Philips never went bust, Blackberry is still around, Nokia is still around.
True .... I was thinking more of Kodak, Polaroid, Commodore Computers.
1481
« on: March 16, 2014, 01:12 »
Oh Lord! A Nikonian zealot! Hobo, it's not about an insult to your favourite brand, the issue is that the entire market for DSLRs and cameras in general is shrinking fast as Joe Public hops up and down in delight over the image from his iPad and Nokia phone. In those circumstances, the companies which are more into generalised electronics marketing, rather than being heavily reliant on a single electronics segment (high end camera technology) are best positioned to survive.
It's a bit like independents and exclusives here - the exclusives are reliant on one market and if that all goes wrong they have a problem repositioning themselves. The independents may not have done as well by being diversified but they are better insulated against shocks in a single segment of the market. I don't know which company is more diversified into non-photo areas, though I know Canon does a lot of business machines.
So it's got nothing at all to do with the comparative merits of cameras from different makers, it's about whether or not the fashion for carrying DSLRs is dying among the general public who don't earn anything from their cameras and who form the bulk of the buyers. We've been very lucky that these people have propped up the market for a decade, prompting the makers to invest huge sums in developing the technology (which is, as the article says, technology that most of the people who own it don't use or need).
The problem is that if you invest, say $100 million in a production line to make 1,000 cameras an hour, and the sales volume drops to 100 cameras an hour you've got a huge issue, because you still have to service the debt you incurred building the plant. It doesn't matter whether your name is Nikon or Canon or how good your cameras are, all that matters is what is happening to your income and what bills you are obliged to pay. If you can't match those up then you go bust.
1482
« on: March 16, 2014, 00:35 »
I happened upon this comment in a blog post about the Getty "free" images for bloggers
"Try Compfight (free) or BigStock or iStock. With BigStock, you can sign up for a month, buy 5 images a day and start creating your own library, then use those images as you need them and ditch the monthly fee."
From this article:
http://www.v3im.com/2014/03/getty-images-sets-35-million-images-free-but-theres-a-catch/
So if this blogger is at all typical, they want to spend $69 and grab all 150 images and then leave. Can't be good for Bigstock because they depend on buyers not purchasing everything, but the price is such that even at 46 cents an image they still don't lose. The problem is the low volume - SS is doing well because of the non-subs sales as well as the volume of subs sales.
That's no different from SS, TS or DT, is it? Anyone can buy a subscription and download to the maximum, but I assume they all have a condition making it illegal to continue using the images once you terminate your subscription. Here is the Bigstock legalese: "If you fail to make any payment to Bigstock when due, or if any check is dishonored or credit card charge refused or charged back, your account will be deemed to be delinquent. If your account becomes delinquent, your right to use any Images downloaded at any time shall automatically terminate unless all payments together with any interest thereon and Bigstock's costs of collection, bank charges and credit card processing fees are received by Bigstock no later than fifteen (15) days from the date that your account became delinquent. " So the blogger would be liable to prosecution for continued use of those images (though I don't suppose any of us expect that to actually happen). I'm not sure if the terms mean that you couldn't continue displaying the image on your website or that you couldn't reprint an existing job, but it certainly means you couldn't put it into a new project.
1483
« on: March 15, 2014, 15:17 »
With the "bridge" it is zero effort to keep feeding them but they've failed to make any progress since being taken over - quite the reverse really. It amazes me that when a successfup stock company buys a lesser one none of the "magic" seems to rub off on the poor performer.
1484
« on: March 15, 2014, 15:13 »
The trouble for the camera makers is that they are not in the photography business, they are in the electronic commodities business. That means you sell a huge volume for a short while until the next craze catches on and if you miss the wave then you're more or less out of the game.
Hopefully the camera makers will be able to adjust to the changing market and won't just go bust, so at least some DSLRs will continue to be made, even if in smaller quantities at higher prices. The trouble with the end of a boom market is that there are lots of costs for manufacturers that can't necessarily be scaled back fast enough to avoid bankruptcy.
1485
« on: March 14, 2014, 11:45 »
Obtuse and nasty are the words that come to mind (but congrats, tickstock, you managed to win a couple of very rare minuses from me).
1486
« on: March 14, 2014, 03:21 »
I guess it would be fair to say that it is confusing if even some journalists get it wrong.
You've obviously met a different set of journalists from those I knew during my 20 years as a newspaper editor 
1487
« on: March 13, 2014, 14:49 »
My guess of what happened is that SS made a change that pushed down files that were 3 or more years old. This could be pretty devastating to older established ports.
But the bulk of my files are three or more years old and I wasn't affected (and I'm not denying that something happened that affected some people).
1488
« on: March 13, 2014, 14:48 »
Congratulations!
Happens All the Time
(almost daily for yours truly, but I just don't always brag about it)
You wish! 
Yup. By his own account of how many he sells I know that I sell more than he does, but my three-figure SODs come round about as frequently as my birthday (and it does feel a bit like a birthday when they turn up. Please send me some more SS!).
1489
« on: March 13, 2014, 14:29 »
Gbalex, if you and the others saw this drop a year ago then it coincided with the dropping of crowns over the gdrive affair. Could it be that the resulting influx of ex-exclusives hit some key areas of your portfolio and you lost out because of the extra competition?
I can guarantee you there was no policy decision made to hide the portfolios of long-established, high-paid contributors, because if there was I would have been buried, too (I joined in October 2004 and have always been in the top pay group, ever since they started introducing different levels). I haven't heard Gostwyck complaining, either, and I think he joined in 2005.
So if there is no malice it follows that your problem lies somewhere else, and the only thing I can think of is that some files that had had not previously been visible, either because they were buried or because they had only just arrived, went into competition with your best-sellers and you lost out.
That would be most likely to happen if your sales relied heavily on a small niche that others had trouble getting into, or if you were heavily reliant on a very small group of files for a large percentage of your income, so the loss of pole-position for a handful could hit you hard.
Or you could believe that Oringer picked on your portfolio specifically for demotion while leaving Gostwyck and me alone. But I don't think that is a conspiracy theory that will fly.
I can't see your portfolio so I can't be more specific about why it might have been vulnerable to competition.
Think what you will, it happened in one day. Unfortunately I am not alone and it is not a conspiracy theory.
I never said you were alone or it was a conspiracy theory, I said that there must be a rational reason for it other than the demotion of all top-level contributors. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that a rival portfolio from an ex-exclusive got dropped into the best match one day, was given its moment in the sun and promptly started picking up sales that were previously going to you, and the combination of new files and quick sales cemented those files above yours. Of course, I don't know anything at all about your portfolio so it's just the best hypothesis I can offer for a sudden collapse in sales for a limited number of high-ranking old-timers on SS. Or maybe there was a search shift for certain categories of files, causing older stuff to sink and more recent stuff to rise. Istock did that back in 06 or 07 and a lot of people saw their sales slump 40% or so overnight, I was lucky that time and only suffered a minor hit - so these algorithm changes affect different kinds of portfolious differently. If the target was the "38c crew" we would all get hit the same at the same time. So people approaching the 38c level don't need to expect it will lead to a demotion in search ranking, it almost certainly is not something they target. PS: Which day did it happen on? I'd be interested to see if there was any sign of a shift affecting my sales at that moment.
1490
« on: March 13, 2014, 05:16 »
I have got a $79.69 SOD
But I don't understand to what kind of sale (licence/price) it corresponds.
It's from some partner agency - that's all we know about SODs.
1491
« on: March 13, 2014, 03:40 »
You need to factor in future growth, Artpuppy, but I'm sure you know that. If it doubles the profit this year then the PE falls to 55.
Also, the market doesn't work on the actual profit, it works more on the assumption that if today's PE is 100x and the market is happy, then if profits rise 10% this year the shares will rise to restore the P/E ratio to level everyone is happy with and you will be able to pocket a pile of extra cash if you want to.
I'm pretty sure there are (or were) some huge internet companies that didn't pay a dividend but still had amazing P/E ratios, even though you might hold the shares for eternity and never get a penny back on your investment. The percieved value was in the idea that as long as the company did well you could make a profit from the expectation that if the company did well you could make a profit on shares (and I haven't mistyped that). A lot of high finance seems to be built on the idea that the other guy will be willing to buy a bit of paper tomorrow for more than you paid today, in the expectation that another punter will be along to buy it for even more the day after.
Smoke and mirrors triumphs over substance (and now the stock market gurus can tell me that I'm talking nonsense).
1492
« on: March 13, 2014, 01:14 »
This may have been covered in some of the verbiage above, but bears emphasis - a significant difference with the Dreamstime free image program is that contributors have a choice whether or not to participate, and can do so on a per image basis.
I have put images that don't sell anywhere into the free program. I can disable them from it at any time. I don't know if I have benefited from extra exposure or not, but AFAIK it never seemed to have a detrimental effect on my sales.
I understand, this got a bit off topic but the point I was trying to make was that there is a huge difference between the free images from the Embed program and what most people think of when they think free images (like the Dreamstime program or free images of the week, etc..) that grant nearly full RF rights.
About the Dreamstime program I thought people were getting images put in there because they were automatically opted in: http://www.microstockgroup.com/dreamstime-com/what-is-the-default-action/msg328016/#msg328016 but it really is a little off topic.
For a long time, Getty has claimed to be the "leading source of free images" http://www.sxc.hu/ (Yes, that's sxc "from Getty"). At least it is trying to promote iStock (and it looks as if it hasn't been updated for years). I suspect DT copied that since early on, when StockXpert was in business, Serban was dead against giving away content.
1493
« on: March 13, 2014, 01:01 »
Gbalex, if you and the others saw this drop a year ago then it coincided with the dropping of crowns over the gdrive affair. Could it be that the resulting influx of ex-exclusives hit some key areas of your portfolio and you lost out because of the extra competition?
I can guarantee you there was no policy decision made to hide the portfolios of long-established, high-paid contributors, because if there was I would have been buried, too (I joined in October 2004 and have always been in the top pay group, ever since they started introducing different levels). I haven't heard Gostwyck complaining, either, and I think he joined in 2005.
So if there is no malice it follows that your problem lies somewhere else, and the only thing I can think of is that some files that had had not previously been visible, either because they were buried or because they had only just arrived, went into competition with your best-sellers and you lost out.
That would be most likely to happen if your sales relied heavily on a small niche that others had trouble getting into, or if you were heavily reliant on a very small group of files for a large percentage of your income, so the loss of pole-position for a handful could hit you hard.
Or you could believe that Oringer picked on your portfolio specifically for demotion while leaving Gostwyck and me alone. But I don't think that is a conspiracy theory that will fly.
I can't see your portfolio so I can't be more specific about why it might have been vulnerable to competition.
1494
« on: March 12, 2014, 15:12 »
Something seemed to happen to the search in January, but February sales were back to normal. Adjustments to searches are a normal part of things. I think SS has said it constantly tweaks its algorithm but it generally seems to happen in subtle ways that aren't immediately apparent (unlike iStock which has severely punished successful contributors with huge search shifts at least twice).
I'm not aware of any signs that SS deliberately tries to undermine my sales just because I'm in the top pay level.
1495
« on: March 12, 2014, 07:57 »
The market reflects what the public feels comfortable with. Not long ago we were cutting and pasting little line drawings into adverts (1980s) and the customers were very pleased. Then computers and scanners made it possible to create cheap colour separations and decent photography became the order of the day (late 90s) because suddenly advertisers could afford stuff they hadn't been able to afford before. Then microstock came along, and the sort of quality that had only been available to the top corporations became available to everyone, so everyone wanted top-notch images in their ads. Now that is old hat, but advertisers can connect with "yoof" by using the same sort of images that they swap with each other.
It's not about "image quality", it's about what's "in".
A mobile phone will probably never have the capabilities and quality of a DSLR, but it may create the sort of image that is fashionable and good for promoting someone's business.
Unfortunately, that strikes at the very heart of a photographer's self-belief, which is built primarily on a foundation of gear-envy.
1496
« on: March 12, 2014, 05:55 »
I am certainly not exclusive and would never do something so dishonest. Why would I come on here and mention it if I did ? As soon as I got on SS in Dec 2011 I requested to become unexclusive. Looking at my profile I can see the option with both my sounds and image contributions to become exclusive.
Looking at my last regular large sale I get $1.16. The same regular large file in 2013 earned me just 40 cents. Having said all that I got a great sale day at SS yesterday so that's a positive step. More of that and it will certainly beat IS
Well, you've got me completely confused. $1.13 for a L (four credit) sale is normal. If you got 40c for the same sale last year then at that particular moment you ran into some 10c credits, which happens. But how on earth did you get a string of approximately 75c sales on 1 credit XS downloads? It just doesn't seem possible. Or have you misidentified M sales as XS? By the way, if you look at the poll results on the right, you will see that you are unusual in doing better on iS than SS, on average Shutterstock generates three times the cash for indes that iStock does.
1497
« on: March 12, 2014, 05:01 »
Fretting about SStocks share price gives us something more to fret over which we have no control over. Does anyone in the businessreally think the shares are NOT overvalued? A weeks stockmarket trend does not tell us anything.
It's hard to say if they're overvalued when you look at the insane prices Getty keeps changing hands for. And now people say Getty may instantly double its value by just saying "oh, we're not a boring stock agency, we're an exciting internet service company", or something like that. To me it looks as if Getty is just a mountain of debts struggling to find a way to stay afloat until reality kicks in, but Wall Street seems to think it's a multi-billion dollar asset full of fabulous and ever-increasing value. I guess that's why I'm not a big businessman, since where they apparently see solid reality I feel like I am looking at an illusionist's trick (but, yes, my ill-informed judgement would say that SS shares do look expensive considering what they were supposed to be worth when the company floated).
1498
« on: March 12, 2014, 01:35 »
All that chart means is that investors have got cold feet over Getty's latest giveaway. It doesn't mean SS is doing any worse than it was a week ago, just that stock market traders are having one of their panics. I doubt if any of them know more than we do about the market and where it is headed (and we've certainly been talking it down for a week, I bet that has an impact, too).
1499
« on: March 11, 2014, 12:10 »
"Terms of Service" might as well be in a weekly email. The lawyers have assured the agencies they can do anything they want with "their" images, as long as they cover their behinds by amending the TOS at the same time.
This latest Getty thing is just the beginning. One by one, agencies will try to monetize that supposedly huge group of people who "will never pay for an image" by using free images to generate ad revenue. They've realized that if nothing is paid for the image, nothing has to be paid to the photographer. They've also realized that while contributors may not like these deals, they won't leave, because traditional sales continue. How much the free images cut into actual sales is impossible to predict.
IMHO, people who think SS won't get into this game are whistling in the dark.
You reckon Getty is destroying the entire market, then?
1500
« on: March 11, 2014, 11:00 »
Well, then what is going wrong with the people that are working hard and seeing their income fall? One contributor reported recently adding 5000 new files and falling sales.
because in the long term individual stockers can not compete with the image factories, our only chance is to specialize in a few niches.
Aren't the image factories eating themselves? I don't bother checking what they are doing but I am under the impression they have a formula and list of subjects that they keep doing over and over again in the hope of hogging the market - eventually, all that does is protect existing sales from rivals without generating new ones.
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