With the circumstances are they are at the moment at iStock, being banned seems like a Badge of Honour. It reminds me of that story of Thoreau, who was put in prison for refusing to pay what he saw as an unjust Poll Tax. His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to visit him in prison and asked, �Henry, what are you doing in there?� Thoreau replied, �Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?�

I read your post - didn't realize it had been deleted. I don't think it was rude or way out of line - but then a post of mine got deleted a week or so ago that seemed relatively mild and polite. I don't honestly know if there's any guideline beyond the moderator felt that it should go as to what gets zapped.

Ha ha! I'm banned from the forums. I think I have to sit in a corner, meditate on my sins and drink copious amounts of Koolaid.

I don't buy from Istock anymore for my company, and this exact problem is one of the reasons why.. it's immoral to take 60 credits for an image, and then sell an almost identical one at 5-10 credits, as a buyer it doesn't make me feel that I can trust the pricing, or trust the supplying web site, and I would abslutely hate to be a customer that bought that image at 60 credits, and then down the line spotted an identical image for much cheaper on the SAME web site.. there's something a bit criminal about it..
[/quote
Happens all the time in department stores. There is only very seldom a good, articulatable reason why this pair of jeans/fleece jacket/plain white T costs five times as much as that one. (OK, some at the very bottom of the market won't be wearable after a few washes, but we'll discount them. But even the FairTrade products (an 'artuculatable reason') are now often price-compatible with the rest.)
Anyway, not Vetta, but here's a contributer's view about Exc+. I have series of similars. Like other series, sometimes one from a series sells much better than others. I've made the better sellers Exc+. The customer has a choice - if they can't see any difference, they can buy a cheaper one; if they prefer the more popular one, they can pay a bit more. i have to find some way of making up the money I'll be losing when I turn Gold in a few weeks, but won't bet getting the expected percentage rise.
Anyway, what do you think a buyer would prefer: I used up my maximum Esc+ slots (at the moment, I've used up about 1/4 of my 'allocation') over series, or that they have a choice?

Quote from: ShadySue on November 13, 2010, 05:54

I don't understand at all. Can you give some concrete examples where the "exact same image" on iStock is sold for 20 and 125 credits for the same size?

I don't need to give concrete examples, every image in your portfolio is for sale like this.

Oh, right; you're talking about regular license and extended license. You need to be more precise when talking to those of us who can't second-guess.

Quote from: jbarber873 on November 11, 2010, 08:26

I'm getting lost again. Am I the oligopolistic capitalist, or is that someone else? Because I wouldn't mind being the oligopolistic capitalist for a while. It sounds like fun. Can I buy some $6000 shower curtains? Just imagine

Only if you are the only curtain producer in the world.

What a glorious non-sequitur!

Honestly, the real money is with other companies. And I'm not talking collectively. Individually, I do better every month with SS and DT than I do with iStock, as do a lot of people. Add in Fotolia, the middle tier sites, and the various other agencies, and it's not hard to prove over and over again that we don't need iStock.

I'm sure it's perfectly true that people can make good or better money elsewhere. The monthly thread here and anecdotal evidence isn't very helpful in illustrating that, because it all depends how many images people have at the different sites, and for how long. For example on iStock, stuff that I've loaded since cJan 09 is hardly moving.

Quote from: ShadySue on November 10, 2010, 12:25

Out of curiosity, how many of these pics from Alamy are relevant? (I ask because I generally think Alamy's search is dire, because it doesn't have a CV. To me, the results here look quite relevant, though most seem to be located in Asia, which you'd hav to filter out for your particular article.
http://www.alamy.com/search-results.asp?qt=speeding+moped&ct=&submitsearch=Search&go=1&a=-1&archive=1&size=0xFF

2-3 are motion blurred enough to be used. The rest is evidently not from anywere near Northern Norway. Unfortunately, Alamy pricing (�60) is way too much for a superlocal miniscule online newspaper churning out police report articles. At Istock a comparable image size (sans E+, Vetta or Agency) is less than $8.

I was really just wondering about the search. Thanks for looking!
It seems that no-one pays the stated price on Alamy. Deep discounts seem to be the norm: meeting micro going down as micro goes up.

Quote from: helix7 on November 10, 2010, 08:37

Quote from: RT on November 09, 2010, 19:29

Hard to believe that a company with this much revenue can be so completely useless at the fundamental task of running their website.

Seriously. There's not much that iStock can manage to do right these days.

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They can apparently throw kick-ass parties in Japan

And don't they just love rubbing our noses in it.

I agree with this - and I am largely a buyer - I have never understood the exclusive thing either - would love someone to explain to me how an exclusive photo on istock is somehow more attractive to me as a buyer - the thing I am concerned about is how much an image may or may not have been used not where it came from.

That's a benefit, to a limited extent, of exclusivity for the buyer.
You can see the number of sales every image has, even though nowadays the actual sales are fuzzified a bit.
Some contributors, like me, have never submitted any images RF anywhere else. So the sales you see on iStock are the total sales for these files.
However, you might have to dig a bit to find out whether an exclusive contributor has always been exclusive, or when they became exclusive.

On topic: Uploads are now working again.

Off topic: How often does Amazon slow down to a crawl or go down? I've never managed to 'catch' them. Or Ebay?

Maybe the top IT people from istock are still the same people who started with the company in its infancy and isnt qualified to oversee an operation the size of istock.

Maybe, but CPD is the Name of the Game these days. Also companies are supposed to be Investors in People.

Quote from: ShadySue on November 09, 2010, 07:39

Quote from: RT on November 09, 2010, 07:11

Of course it's a defamation of his character, going bald might be a fact of life but if he isn't going bald and this image portrays that he is then it's defamation.

Defamation refers to character. This ad is misrepresentation (of truth).

Having worked in law I can tell you 100% that from what the OP has stated it would fall under defamation of character because by legal definition it is, and I can also tell you that if this guy decides to persue the matter he will win, and also that he will sue the photographer because he signed a contract with the photographer (the release) and therefore the legal process begins here, now the photographer will have a legal defence because presumably he has a clause in the release that he uploaded to the agency that excludes any defamatory use of the person in the image, so therefore the process moves onto the agency and then down the line until it reaches the stage whereby somebody is identified as having breached the defamatory clause.

Having worked in law, you should know that laws are different in every country, and having different legislations involved in a case complicates things totally.
At the moment, we've got the OP, who is based in Singapore; a model based ; an agency based (we don't even know which agency or which model release or Content Use Agreement we're talking about) and an ad for a company based published
So you are 100% convinced of what you say based on the above total lack of knowledge?

Back up now.