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Messages - pancaketom
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1676
« on: January 03, 2012, 22:25 »
Dear iStockphoto,
Can you please change your search engine to favor DLs/Month. This way buyers get to see a fair representation of good images. Frankly, not all of your "exclusive" images are very good at all. Your future actually depends on keeping buyers happy, not looking after "exclusives" interests.
Downloads a month favors images that have already been favored by Best Match.
Two identical images one on page 1 and one 10 pages back - after a year I can tell you which one would have more downloads a month unequivocally - however I almost guarantee over a year downloads/view ratio of those two images would be near identical - and a much fairer judge of a files worth. x amount of buyers who viewed this file bought it - vs. x amounts of buyers who had this file pushed in front of them months on end bought it each month
but views are too easy to rig - just set up a thing to view your rival's images a few thousand times to drop them from the search... maybe if they only counted buyer accounts... actually what they claimed best match 2 was would make the most sense - too bad for everyone they couldn't actually stick with it.
1677
« on: January 02, 2012, 15:03 »
Price images at $100 - several thousands of dollars
I think you would limit your market pretty severely at those prices. I have trouble getting people to agree to freelance prices at those rates. 
That's kind of what I like about the micro prices. It allows me to capture the market of all those clients that can't afford custom prices. That said, I don't think somewhere between $10-$30 is unreasonable to ask for most buyers. I really don't think anything should be priced at a buck or two anymore. I'd like to see my average RPD be at around $5 rather than $1.
So that makes the price up to $33 at IS and $10 at the 50% places
1678
« on: January 01, 2012, 20:08 »
Mine was my second best month of the year, but a lot of that is from a good run (for me) at Alamy - without that it would be the 3rd worst of the year.
Sales held up remarkably well through the holidays at SS, and IS even improved on an absolutely dismal November.
1679
« on: January 01, 2012, 16:42 »
I've sort of been keeping an eye out for them but at this point they seem pretty rare. I still think it is pretty underhanded and lame both in implementation/communication and the way it is. As long as it is a tiny % I suppose there are bigger things to be annoyed about (like the drop from 50% to as low as 25%). If this becomes the future for subs at DT, that would be bad.
My worst was a sub that should have been .70 but was instead .52, so I suppose you "win" there.
1680
« on: January 01, 2012, 14:18 »
$ up 31% portfolio up roughly 20% (although I think my acceptance %age might be going down despite what I consider better images)
I also pretty much gave up on IS during this year and deactivated most of my port.
I have seen an encouraging growth of sales on Alamy, but that site still seems pretty random in sales for me.
Good luck to everyone for next year.
1681
« on: December 30, 2011, 20:27 »
My experience is similar to Lisa's above. My one "big" - not all that big, but the biggest I've had- sale is for an image that was rejected by most micros... yay Alamy.
I uploaded a lot more there this year than before, so hopefully they are finally starting to get some visibility and sales.
1682
« on: December 30, 2011, 16:31 »
I wonder how big the error bars are now that they are deliberately fuzzing the data (presumably so people can't keep track of actual sales numbers, since it doesn't do much to stop people from seeing what the popular images are to copy).
I remember they used to also spout numbers about x million $ paid out to contributors every week. Now they just assure us they pay out more than anyone else - I have also heard Fotolia say they have industry high commissions though...
1683
« on: December 29, 2011, 20:43 »
They haven't reviewed my month old backlog yet, but I suppose I should be glad 'til Atilla the reviewer takes a break. I always wonder about when they take one image of a set that really should be together (like the 4 seasons, or all the typewriter keys or other alphabets etc. etc.). I suppose in the long run it means that each library of images is different, but I still think most buyers only look at a one or a few libraries to find their images.
1684
« on: December 29, 2011, 13:38 »
The flip side is IS cutting commissions has also seemed to encourage other sites to do so, plus although IS continues to jack up the exclusive and "special" collection prices, they are also encouraging their buyers to go to PP sites which are hardly pushing the price envelope up (and at least in some cases are pushing the commission envelope down).
I do agree that it is probably better to have a number of somewhat robust microstock sites that compete both for buyers (presumably with prices and services) and contributors (prices or at least commissions the other way, convenience, stability, and services - statistics, etc.)
1685
« on: December 29, 2011, 13:20 »
I got my first 2 subs sales at veer, both for .83 - so presumably the buyer got 6 images of which 2 were mine. So far so good.
1686
« on: December 29, 2011, 13:15 »
Tangie on the DT forum said
" There is a delay in processing the uploads and we are currently working to have this fixed as soon as possible. The delay is somewhere between 12 and 24 hours at this point. We apologize for the inconvenience and we kindly ask you to wait for your files to appear in the Unfinished folder. "
1687
« on: December 29, 2011, 10:20 »
my batch via ftp on the 27th took about 24 hours to get "processed".
1688
« on: December 28, 2011, 14:54 »
I don't know about everyone else, but IS has WAY less of my images than most of the other sites. Up until the RC announcement that was mostly because of the painful upload process and the upload limits. Since then it is because I stopped uploading there and deactivated many of my images. I imagine that there are plenty of others who don't have all their images at IS for some of the above reasons.
I'd much rather someone buy 15 of my images somewhere else than one from IS - I'd get a lot more $ that way. I also prefer the 35% more I get from SS than the PP program. IS might lead the field in raising image prices, but they also lead the field in lowering commission percentages.
I agree that IS could have completely dominated microstock, but they didn't.
1689
« on: December 27, 2011, 20:22 »
I have thought about cognitive dissonance a number of times in the exclusive/independent arguments. I think it goes both ways however lately the number of people who continue to do well at IS seems to be dropping.
People (myself included) tend to look at the data that confirms their decisions no matter what their decision may have been.
1690
« on: December 27, 2011, 16:53 »
Hard to believe it's only 15 months since they first announced the RC target system. It boggles the mind how much Istock has changed in just over a year. I wouldn't have believed it possible if I hadn't seen it for myself... 
That sure is the truth, and also a real shame what has happened to what once was a major earner with promise.
1691
« on: December 25, 2011, 23:06 »
Thanks davh900! I uploaded my ID photo and my 10 got promptly reviewed
question 2 now though: I've started uploading a bunch of old shots via ftp, and they still havent shown up under the 'uploaded this month' section... how long does it typically take for ftp uploads to show up there?
You need to process the files to complete the upload. (go to the history page - near the top it says : "FTP Upload: If you have uploaded photos via FTP, click here to process uploaded files." do so.
1692
« on: December 24, 2011, 13:28 »
As a geologist I think it is always important to look at the surface of the earth from the inside - clearly IS thinks so too.
1693
« on: December 21, 2011, 15:53 »
I've just realised why they've done this.
They're about to close down for the Christmas period and no doubt will be posting that nobody will be monitoring anything for the whole period, this way when all the credit card fraudsters around the world download exclusive files only there won't be the aftermath of angry posts in the forum from all us nasty independents, like there was last year, they'll say 'were working on it' and the majority of replies will be 'you guys rock'
<conspiracy theory> while they are closed for the holidays there will be massive downloads of vetta and other images from favored exclusives, of course the $ will all be clawed back, but to throw a bone to the favored ones they will allow the RCs to stay - thereby allowing the chosen to make their targets without actually costing them any money or letting the great unwashed get to their targets - genius</conspiracy theory> Maybe Sean can make a greasemonkey script that only shows indy stuff. HA
1694
« on: December 21, 2011, 11:33 »
perhaps buyers will learn to search by age or downloads instead of "best" match?
1695
« on: December 19, 2011, 23:27 »
So looks like contributors will be taking another hit off their already low % to pay for these discounts. 
I'm already a snake crawling on my belly, independent, lowest percentage, base everything. They can't go any lower for me.
except that 15% of 1.00 is .15 and 15% of .80 is .12 - at least this way IS takes the bigger hit huh?
1696
« on: December 18, 2011, 20:31 »
I also fear the situation (especially with something like Getty) where each layer skims off 50 to 85% after a few shuffles there won't be much left for the artist. If H&F owns all of the other layers they just get to skim more - it is a win win for them and a lose lose for the artists.
1697
« on: December 18, 2011, 18:07 »
Will there be a 50% discount for whatever it is they give a 50% discount for photos for?
oops that is another site - never mind, carry on, nothing to see here.
1698
« on: December 18, 2011, 13:53 »
I thought the new Canon 1d mark V was too expensive until I saw it had an Awesome Value mode. That's what I'll use.
1699
« on: December 16, 2011, 22:20 »
Is it a good thing?
Oh, absolutely. When the day comes that the majority of buyers come to the realization that any image is worth no more than 33 cents we should all pop champagne and break out the high fives.
I think the buyers don't really know how much the contributors get paid for an image - if it is .07 or .25 (those are the lows I have seen listed for IS xsmall and pp sub sales) or .25 to .38 up to 5.70 (ss sub to single image range). we shall leave ELs out for now. In general I do agree that sites could stand to raise prices a bit and commissions more. In reality I am guessing that prices will only rise slightly and they will be offset for the artists by drops in commission and dilution of sales as the image libraries continue to grow.
1700
« on: December 16, 2011, 20:41 »
I haven't had an SS rejection for noise in ages - either I have figured out how to avoid it or they don't care so much. A lot of this was when I switched from a p&s to dslr, but I think I still had noise rejections for a while after that. I also used to get "distorted pixel" rejections from IS - I never really did figure out what made the pixels anything other than square though.
SS seems to have tightened acceptance lately, I have no idea about IS, but back when I was submitting to both it often felt like what IS accepted SS would reject and vice versa. In general SS liked saturated colors and IS liked it less so. SS has always been tough on shallow depth of field.
I would have preferred customers pay IS prices and I get 50% of that, but that doesn't seem to be happening much, so I'll accept subs at SS and others and hope that customers avoid the sites that seem to be primarily concerned with skimming as much as they possibly can from each sale while moving the goalposts whenever they feel like it <cough>IS FT </cough>
If you are stuck in the IS basket with all your eggs you still might be making more than you would outside, but if the trends continue eventually that will not be the case.
I think that the dropping contributor commissions has been a much more damaging trend in the last 2 years than dropping prices - we aren't in a race to the bottom price war, we are in a race to the bottom commission war and contributors appear to be losing.
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