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Messages - zorba
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151
« on: December 14, 2016, 18:12 »
from the contributor newsletter:
"ADP Copyright Name
In the very near future we will be changing the term 'Copyright' to 'Credit Line' on all Asset Detail Pages. "
do we agree?
Is this fair?
152
« on: December 07, 2016, 14:51 »
Consider Arcurs account on iStock: it's not him uploading, hardly ever. But the total number of high-quality files with standard content increases. His account alone covers quality and quantity. There are lots of other authors with high quality and numbers. We have to do well to compete, not only work and complain. AND we can go back to local market but ... uh... there are millions of iphones and people unable to see differences from your works to other works. It's no more a market for the average photographer. Vector artists are growing: but for creativity there is lots of space!  And footage is required more and more. Even music!
153
« on: December 07, 2016, 14:46 »
Q1 + Q2 2015
Earnings: 198.000.000 $
Download: 69.300.000
Items (June 2015): 57.200.000
Q1 + Q2 2016
Earnings: 240.000.000 $ (+21%)
Download: 84.200.000 (+21%)
Items (June 2015): 92.000.000 (+61%)
- Shutterstock Earning increase 21% in a year,
- Almost all contributors complaining about earning decrease,
- Where do you think the "increased earnings" are?
What sharpshot said, but just to go into a bit more detail... the 2015 figures result in averge earnings of $3.40 per item. The 2016 figures result in averge earnings of $2.60 per item. Small increase in total sales, but large increase in total files.
So that's a 15% drop on the average earnings, and it's not outside the realms of possibility that a similar kind of drop will happen year on year. However, as Shutterstock are making a 21% increase year on year... then for them it's happy days!
at the moment I think selling less than 300 pcs a day it's not a job: it's a hobby. So I'm working hard to sell at least this quantity. I'm not at the par, so far. So I keep working good. When I'll reach the par, I'll keep on working the same, or better, way. It's my business, so probably I'll have to invest some money in something special, like high-level models or simply increasing the number of high-level models or excellent locations ... We all know it's not going to last forever ... but in the meanwhile we have to build something. I know I'm going to learn lots of things in quality standards, customers need, and so on. What I build is for me. Do you remember for how many years the vast majority of people around you used Microsoft Word 97 cliparts for their everyday graphics? It's twenty year they keep using them. And I fear they'll do the same with some "thumbs up" files by Arcurs. If they're good they'll work forever. At least until hairstyle won't change as much as it did in the eighties 
154
« on: December 06, 2016, 13:26 »
Shutterstock is agonizing. ...
I completely disagree. "agonizing" means something different, for me. Not the best earner, at least.
155
« on: December 06, 2016, 13:23 »
So I was working exclusively for the microstock industry. Shutterstock alone was sending me more then enough monthly to pay my bills. Now I see the earnings are like 30, 40 % down comparing to last year, and the new images I uploaded lately, they don't sell at all, and I mean 00000! and their quality is really good, similar or even better to older ones that already sold more than 2000 times.
So I had to get another occupation, I just leave the portfolio there and will see it go to insignificant earnings in record time.  it is pointless now to upload there.
So sad...
the more I work the more I earn, lately. And the better I work. This is my only contribute in this discussion ... hope that helps.
156
« on: November 30, 2016, 16:23 »
I'm just curious if anyone has ever seen their work being used? If so, how did you come across it?
Rachel
I saw myself as a model (I worked with my mentor to try to compensate him for his patience) in a lot of uses of, mainly, the same image. And this always remebers to me that if I do well, this is what happens: no "wow I sold ONE image! yahooo!!!" but "oh, good, I've sold another 200 times the SAME image ...". On the other hand I saw one of my first works in a poster from a national European videogames selling company. That images keeps selling and I don't know where :-) Printed work is really very difficult to find, also because I try to work with strangers, mainly black ("african descent" "black" "mixed race") people: my sales are mainly in countries (as per SS sales map) in which this "descent" started: Africa. I try to create images with multiracial or multi-etnic groups ... but the main group of "races" wins: if there are 2 black people that files sells in Africa. If there are asians: they sell in China, Japan, Mongolia. If I used Polish or Romanian people, they sell there. So... I work with everyone: if local people want to collaborate, I work with them. If they are strangers and are more collaborative: I work with them. So I think I'm not going to see printed works with my files in Russia or China. For everything else I use google images and of course I saw lots of uses. Well ... "a lot" for my numbers :-/ And I'm not Arcurs.
157
« on: November 30, 2016, 16:09 »
joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.
Oh please. Have you ever seen ACDsee duplicate finder? You could simply set what "level" of similarity it has to check against. It's naturally a work for a software or bot. There are also 3d party services and one living in a copyright management world could to that investmet. They simply are NOT investing in copyright infringiment protection and control. They could also make some "secret" fingerprint in their copy of the file to differentiate it from the one of the other agencies. Instead they simply answer "you are not exclusive, we can't say if your file was stolen from our agency". Great. Do something to make this possible! Since we don't do something as a "mass" to protect our rights, and they have substantial profit margin, they simply don't care a sod. They are not an author-driven company. They are a "infrastructure-driven" company. Somethimes here and there they say "oh we love you, we cannot exist without you xoxoxo" ... but they cover their own asses in every legal way. Not ours. They protect themselves from US and from customers. They are not really working side by side WITH us. They simply try not to let us upset too much and to decently reward customers. There is a high level of automation, software, machines. And a very low level of humanity, everywhere. So ... adapt and survive.
158
« on: November 30, 2016, 15:55 »
Anybody experiencing a search-change at SS? because suddenly pictures are selling from my first submission some 12 years back. Its down and out embarrassing they are not even good but terrible!
Surely a change like that and people thats been there for years better prepare themselves for a lousy time indeed.
Not really. I noticed this: it SEEMS (but this is not a verifiable data) that anything has NEVER sold something, sometimes, one time in 2 weeks, even if you don't do anything, sells. There was some time I wasn't uploading anything. Every 2 weeks something I never sold before had a "first time sale". Something that made me thing they try to sell EVERYTHING at least one time. It's been two months since I was uploading 20-35 files a day: I have 6-7 "first sales" since 2 weeks ago. I think there is something in their "stock management" that pushes files with 0 sales "up" to be viewed almost 1 time. My files aren't less embarassing that the new ones. my 2 cents. HTH
159
« on: November 15, 2016, 14:52 »
I read this but can't find:
1) FTP
2) per-image exclusivity : I don't think mr. Mark Getty doesn't diversifies his activities and income sources and really can't figure out that someone says "uh not, no no no bad guy! If you do business with someone else we are no more friends, nyaaaaahhh!"
They aren't paying a granted wage, so why have we to give us for granted? But we of course could give them PART of our work in exclusive at the ASA conditions.
I can't find this in iStock and this is not a so hard "investment" : it's their (free, and this is a broad definition) choice.
What I can't see in the third party collaboration chances are API that work for guys like Bob at PicWorkflow : something that's useful to every contributor that want to make some (additional) investment in high quality work.
160
« on: November 15, 2016, 14:41 »
Hello everyone,
I am a newbie in stock photography and I am realy curious if you can help me with the problem I have on Adobe stock regarding similar images 
how are these images similar...I understand that the background is the same but the product is different and what makes me wonder is why do they reject both of them because of similarity ?
try to use the "note to reviewer" in the next shooting series
161
« on: November 12, 2016, 13:35 »
1st image is nice but no copy space
2nd image under exposed no copy space
3rd image no copy space
4th image composition is weak, no copy space
5th image probably too small because the majority is white space plus its not a good isolation
youv'e seen whats on sale on every site right? There would be about 5% of what there is by your standards
and that's maybe exactly what they sell. Pareto's rule is not always verified, but very very often: "the 20% of the stock images earns the 80% of the money" I think that criticizing people that sells better than you is useless :-) But stock is great for this :-) You can do what you want, sell how much you want, adapt or not :-) I love this
162
« on: November 12, 2016, 13:32 »
I have to agree with the microstockphoto. They're better than the average guy on the street would be able to do, but the average guy on the street usually isn't selling stock.
...
And as a parting 'cruel to be kind' thing to consider.... what if the only reason they sell on other sites is because a few people have needed example images for articles on how not to shoot stock images?
hey, this is exactly the way I sell the vast majority of my 5000 files! :-D the "don't do this" market! :-D Thanks for a little laughter , guys
163
« on: October 25, 2016, 13:44 »
What are the pros and cons to using your real first and last name for your stock photography contributor accounts?
I see bylines in magazines with odd contributor screen names and think they are missing opportunities to promote their true name and identity.
I am considering requesting my screen names be changed to my real first and last name.
Your thoughts?
I did it from the start. But sometimes ago I spoke with an English fashion photographer and she told me that if someone googles you and finds out you are a stock photographer they immediately exclude you from fashion things. Don't know if these are b*s* but since I don't mean to be a fashion photographer I concentrated my "SEO potential" towards my models. If they search for me and don't find me anywhere this IS a problem. If they search me so far they find me thousands of time everywhere and perfectly targeted on what I really do. So... consider these two facts. They are not the whole cake... but some interesting pieces
164
« on: October 25, 2016, 13:39 »
Looks like Getty has continued on the path of making themselves less relevant.
Even If I'm not really a "BIG" it represents 1/3 of my income: it IS relevant.
165
« on: October 25, 2016, 13:36 »
@ Zorba: even if this is an english speaking forum, it's not very polite the way you labelled the .PNG file 
what does it mean GodDogPig seems to make no sense to me
sorry I didn't realize the system would have published also the filename. This is my god and I praise this lord every day but the content of the the file is my main concern here
166
« on: October 25, 2016, 13:34 »
@ Zorba: even if this is an english speaking forum, it's not very polite the way you labelled the .PNG file
ouch sorry, I didn't realize this system published filenames... I thought it only showed the file itself. really didn't mean to show it publicly: only the content was my interest.
167
« on: October 24, 2016, 09:28 »
168
« on: August 01, 2016, 20:35 »
Hallo, sorry for my bad English.
As you all know the excuse for almost the whole of agencies when you find some of your images has been stolen is to answer "you're not exclusive with us: we don't know if your image has been stolen from a customer of us or someone else's customer". And have done with it.
But automated processes on a server are a standard for a lot of works for each and every agency. They add a watermark, clean or check metadata automatically, create thumbnails and mysteryously sellable 300dpi TIFFs (when you give them JPG... is there anyboudy outthere unable to convert a uncompressed JPG in a TIFF?) ... and so on.
Why can't EACH of the agencies insert (and let US contributors check this) a digital watermark? Every agency could have their own, some invisible but impossible-to-remove watermark, or simply a metadata (for stupid thieves: I think there are plenty) ...
They HAVE to do something to protect their and OUR content: we strive, struggle and manage to achieve and fulfill each and every request in quality or standard they ask us. And this is right, I know: it's our part.
But they have to better do THEIR part. It seems they are ready to attack us (read all the legal stuff) for a jot ... but when it comes to PROTECT us and our (contributor+agency) content ... they can't hear a thing.
So: It's time to ask TOP, middle and the first 20 low earners to actively do something (and give us some goals they are going to achieve) about this, don't you think?
I think this post have to be visible in more than one of these forums ... admin? What do you think?
169
« on: July 28, 2016, 17:44 »
Click on your name in the top right and go to portfolio. You can then search by total sales, total commission, average monthly sales, average monthly commission etc.
Oh and make sure you're in list view, rather than grid view, in your portfolio... or the stats won't show up.
thanks!
170
« on: July 28, 2016, 17:43 »
You don't need to combine anything - the monthly totals are on the far right of this page (you'll have to log in to see your version) in the column Monthly total earnings
http://www.123rf.com/submit/commission.php
thanks!
171
« on: July 01, 2016, 14:20 »
so...
we're back in DEFCON 5.
:-)
172
« on: June 30, 2016, 18:43 »
Are we sure that this email is even coming from Shutterstock? I get so many phishing emails from everyone else. This almost sounds like a hack, scam, or whatever. Besides, when did Shutterstock start using titles on their consumer side?
google verifies: it's not spam and is actually from SS
173
« on: June 30, 2016, 17:40 »
Yeah, I'm also posting on Twitter and Facebook and they are saying to contact support. Last email to support took 2 weeks to get a canned response. How could that possibly be helpful?
this is great. I'm going to blog this. and of course I CAN do THIS in a very spammy way. And I'm very motivated.
174
« on: June 30, 2016, 17:12 »
Blithering idiots. I am with them since 2007 and have 21.000 images in my portfolio. "We found something somewhere, fix it or else" is utter bullsh!t. I sent an email demanding a specific list of the "troublesome" images. I never spammed, not even in keywords, let alone description.
definitely.
175
« on: June 30, 2016, 17:09 »
Anyone else got this? Me and some other guys I know just did and I have no idea why...
...
I do my captioning/keywording painstakingly, manually and I don't know of any images where I would repeat any words in titles or captions. Besides, all my images go through normal review process and I didn't even know you could edit them afterwards.  I'll reply to SS and ask them if they can give me an example from my port where I repeat words.
this just happened to me: this is an intimidating and very random letter: there is NO link provided, no list of titles, no files, no evidence; nothing to prove there is a REAL problem. They say they "are aware of". Some examples, please? I'm exactly in your same situation! of course this kind of behavihour makes me think these companies have too much power over my work. They could simply say "you suck". And stop me from earn money, without further explanation. I have LOTS of files. I think they have some kind of not-human automated tool that counts words: suppose you wrote "over and over" ... you repeated "over" twice. This is not spamming. Of course writing "OF" a pair of times in a sentence is possible. This is NOT spam. Instead of spreading FUD they could check phisical spamming (really repeated icons) ... I'm really frightened: and this is not something you have to grow up with a business partner. You have tu SUPPORT them. I've read that letter and felt so sad. Because it seems they are not speaking about something they REALLY checked or spotted. They didn't READ titles. What can I do? What's the problem? WHERE is that problem? SS showed his ... dark side
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