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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
Pages: 1 ... 62 63 64 65 66 [67] 68 69 70 71 72 ... 206
1651
« on: January 10, 2014, 09:32 »
Going back to the OP, I wonder if uploading an entire portfolio at once is a good strategy: it will then all sink together in the search and you lose the benefit of a steady stream of new uploads encouraging people to look at the rest of your portfolio.
I don't doubt that the lack of an established record of sales will also hurt your search ranking, and if you get one sale from 1,200 files it probable does a lot less to boost the ranking of the others than if you had one sale from 12 or from 120.
I've had 14 sales today from 4,000 uploads - the trouble is that every one of them is a 35c sub, non-sub sales seem to be becoming rarer and rarer and my RPD is dropping accordingly.
1652
« on: January 10, 2014, 09:02 »
So, Sean, is it living up to its billing so far?
11 sub sales yesterday, don't know if that is good or bad. I like the map interface on the home page for sales. Not crazy about using description meta as the title because I have to retype all my titles. The model release manager would be more useful if you could do multiple releases for people. I have to add the date of the release to the name to tell the difference.
I don't know if you can really ever say it is good or bad: it is what it is. For me, sales equalling about 10% of my portfolio in a day would leave me overjoyed, 1% is a pretty good day for me. But then you outsold me more than tenfold on iS. It's a ridiculously limited data set to try to draw any conclusions from but selling at a rate of 10 to 15 times what I do actually does seem reasonable, so my guess is that if you assume you will continue to sell 10% of your online portfolio per day and multiply the available portfolio size by the reported average sale value - which is about 85c, if I recall correctly - then you will have some kind of ballpark figure of what you can expect to earn.
1653
« on: January 10, 2014, 06:18 »
Is now the time to buy SS shares? I mean Yuri showed us how they dropped when he left, so now with Sean testing the waters it must mean they will go up right?
As always, Jasmin, by the time the man in the street realises it's time to buy the opportunity has passed. The Sean rally has already happened. Here's the news from Jan 8th: SSTK has traded 145,933 shares today. SSTK is trading at a new lifetime high. (Currently about $83, up from $27 a year ago.... if only I'd been taking my earnings as share options!)
1654
« on: January 10, 2014, 03:37 »
So, Sean, is it living up to its billing so far?
1655
« on: January 10, 2014, 03:34 »
I'll second Dave. And if you want to produce better quality pictures get a better lens, not a different body (an EF lens, not an EF-S, that way if you do decide to go to full-frame later on you can keep using the same lens). Though to be honest, the thing that has really made a difference to my pictures down the years is learning more and more about light and how to use it, and that doesn't require any extra gear.
The more expensive cameras have more bells and whistles on them but the thing that really matters is the image quality from the sensor, and Canon put the best sensor they have at the time in all their cameras.
1656
« on: January 09, 2014, 15:01 »
That's a surprise - but it does make sense. Trying to get a decent return must be almost impossible if you refuse to go on subscription sites.
1657
« on: January 09, 2014, 13:42 »
I agree on the SLOW reviews but when you get sales they can be very Sweet! A lot of ELs on this site to be had.
Lucky you! I haven't had one of those since mid 2012. But then I get hardly any sales there.
1658
« on: January 09, 2014, 04:20 »
With a ferocious heatwave in Australia, widespread flooding and storm disruption in the UK and Western Europe, and an extraordinary ice-storm all over the US it is a bit surprising that my dls are only down about 8% on the same time last year. It's way too early to start worrying about this year's figures.
1659
« on: January 08, 2014, 03:03 »
If you are not in it for the money, than Alamy is good choice indeed.
Alamy was between DT and 123 in my earnings last year. It made a modest but significant contribution to my overall income.
1660
« on: January 08, 2014, 01:26 »
Maybe they won't accept editorial of single people walking up steps because they think you could easily have got a model released version.
1661
« on: January 07, 2014, 16:38 »
Whats the alternative to algolrithms?
Editing, curation, tiered pricing decided by humans with an eye for aesthetics.
You can't run a microstock agency like that.
Not anymore.
I'm going back in my monkey cage to fling sh!t at passing tourists.
You never could. Istock have demonstrated that with their ridiculous efforts at "curating" and "aesthetics" (which was completely destroyed by the decision to put any old Getty rubbish into Vetta and to drive every inde file, however aesthetically brilliant, into the bargain basement).
1662
« on: January 07, 2014, 16:30 »
In business "sales" generally means a cash total. A "sales target" is a cash target, not a target to sell a certain number of items of variable value.
The link between DLs and cash value will be quite tenuous for iS, because of all the different prices and the changes they make. A large Vetta dl is worth a tremendous number of small inde dls and if they push customers en masse from one collection to another then the average value of a dl may also shift sharply.
1663
« on: January 07, 2014, 16:22 »
In hindsight, perhaps people would have been better off keeping their cake holes closed and leaving IS to find the error sometime in January 2064
No. It is very important that the figures should be accurate and mistakes should be exposed, whichever way they go. If we keep quiet about strange patterns in the accounting they could start consistently underpaying us. I'd still like to know why, when 2012 turned into 2013, my PP sales suddenly dropped about 30% and stayed at the new level for six months. For all I know I've been being underpaid for the whole of 2013.
1664
« on: January 07, 2014, 15:45 »
The 70% and 75% came from investors considering investing in Getty debt.
It seems almost incredible that corporate investors at that level would would be sharing inside gossip with a blogger whilst, presumably, under NDA. But okay.
Straight question: How did it go from being 70% of revenue to being 70% of sales ? Previously you said revenue. Now you are saying sales.
Revenue and sales are the same thing for Getty aren't they?
Could well be, but Jim's article cites "70% of sales" and then "75% of all downloads", so if "sales" means "revenue" the two figures are not comparable (though Jim has obviously taken sales to be the same as dls otherwise he wouldn't have put them in the same sentence).
1665
« on: January 07, 2014, 14:52 »
I saw something very like this being flown from a beach near Swansea just after Christmas. It carried a Hero III. The way it was handled, hovering and swooping, was very impressive. That one seemed to run off a console.
1666
« on: January 07, 2014, 08:40 »
I wasn't criticising you, Ron, but your post answered the question of where the "report" had been referred to, which made a good starting point for my post.
1667
« on: January 07, 2014, 05:47 »
4 dollar net in 6 months.
From how many images? I seem to make about 25c per image per year (it was better than that earlier on).
1668
« on: January 07, 2014, 05:44 »
The tools on Cambridgeincolour's website will tell you the depth of field for different apertures at different focal lengths and shooting distances.
Obviously, you need to know what sort of distance you intend to shoot from, which depends on what sort of perspective you want. And any sample shots showing perspective at different apertures would only be useful if they were taken at the same distance that you intend to use.
1669
« on: January 07, 2014, 05:32 »
There is no decline in excl files being DLed
I have no idea how you can say that.
Most exclusives (who report) are reporting big decreases in downloads.
Its in the OP
At that time it was reported that 70% of all iStock sales were for exclusive images. After the end of the 3rd quarter there were reports that 75% of all downloads were for exclusive images.
Without knowing where "it was reported", by whom and on what basis I regard this as a very weak platform to draw any conclusions form. It "was also reported" (here) that inde sales rose and exclusive sales fell after the price hike. The 12% drop in dls is based on equally shaky assumptions: The great bulk of contributors with more than 50,000 dls are exclusives, so any systematic benefit or hit that exclusives have taken will skew the figures. Note that downloads for exclusives have gone up from 70% to 75% of all dls (an increase of 7%), while dls for the mostly-exclusive top 420 contributors have fallen by 12%. If gaining an extra 7% share of the dls still leaves you down 12%, then it suggests that overall dls are down about 20%, with the bulk of the burden falling on the independents who should, I suppose, be down something like 33% (they were getting 30% of all dls, now they get 25% - a 16% decrease - of a pot that is 20% smaller, so instead of 30% of 100% they are getting 25% of 80%, which is a fall from 30% to 20% which is 33% overall). The trouble is that far from seeing a 33% fall in my dls, I am seeing a 50% increase in dls (and I'm one of those among Jim's 440). Where I am seeing a 30% fall is in my earnings. Now if "reports had said" that exclusives used to get 70% of the cash generated and were now getting 75% (of a much smaller pot) that would make some sense. But with downloads it doesn't seem to make any sense at all. It runs contrary to what just about everybody here from both sides - inde and exclusive - has said about the impact of the new pricing on sales.
1670
« on: January 07, 2014, 04:49 »
My dls are almost exactly the same as at this time last year. I did pick up an EL in the first week of 2013, so my earnings are down by comparison, but ELs scatter pretty randomly so there is no reason yet to think this Jan will be much different to the last one, which was a pretty average month for me.
1671
« on: January 07, 2014, 04:43 »
so not that I want to drag you all off the topic of Lobo - but going back to the original post - has anyone read anything more about the "Irregularity" issue? I briefly looked around the IS forums but didn't really see anything or the original post.
I know.. I probably could have spent more than 5 minutes poking around there but that was my limit before I really just wanted to get out of there.
The thread is somewhat hidden in the Partner Program forum. There are probably lots of people over there that have no idea what could be coming. Lobo posted that there will be an update later this week but it won't be Tuesday. http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=358476&messageid=6973868
His first update was they would have an update last week, the update after that was they would have an update early this week, his latest update is he will have an update later this week, his next update will be they will have an update next month. And in the end, come July your balance will be in the red and your RCs will still not be fixed.
You're a pessimist, Ron. I'm sure they will take the money off us much, much more quickly than that. In fact, I reckon that this is one problem that they will solve in record time. Their corporate communications have already improved dramatically to prepare us for the big day.
1672
« on: January 07, 2014, 04:40 »
There's no point in starting off with sites which hardly sell anything, it's a surefire way to lose interest. If you can get on Shutterstock then at least you have a reasonable chance of making some sales, even if you only get 25c for them, or whatever the starting rate is.
I get fewer than 40 sales a month from Canstock with about 4,000 files there, and I'm pretty good at this game, so how many photos do you think you would need to put there to get your first 25c sale?
1673
« on: January 07, 2014, 04:31 »
My most specific "requirements" would be shallow depth of field of the 24-70mm @ f2.8 for portraits.
24-70 is not considered portrait lens on a full size sensor camera. Conservatively, portrait lens is in a range of 80-135mm.
I think you are right. With the crop factor of my Nikon I end up at 75mm already with the 50mm f1.8.
Stupid me, looks like I "have" to get the 24-105...
Well, you could always stand a bit further back with the 24-70 to get the same perspective as with a 90mm lens and then crop the edges off. It really depends on whether you need all 22 million pixels, or would 15 million be enough? It may seem odd to use a 5D as a cropping camera but if portraits are just one part of your work and the rest of it needs the 24-70 range then it's a reasonable alternative to having to buy two expensive lenses in order to get portraits which probably have far more MP than you really need.
1674
« on: January 06, 2014, 15:22 »
6 (but do they need a model release for initial submissions?), 12 and 14. To be honest, you've got a long way to go to understand what stock is all about. Number 1 would get a rejection for copyright, so would 16. Number 15 would probably be rejected because it needs model releases. A lot of the others have no clear subject. You need to think about what someone would want to use your picture for in an advert before sending it - if you can't think of anything then don't send it.
1675
« on: January 06, 2014, 15:12 »
Whats the alternative to algolrithms?
Editing, curation, tiered pricing decided by humans with an eye for aesthetics.
You can't run a microstock agency like that.
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