I was also interested in the quality of the Stocksy photos, to get an idea of what my standards would have to be.

Well, obviously you have figured it out by now, have you?

Hint: Technical quality comes secondary to the true value of a photo. You will also note that when you start downloading full-res images from Getty or Corbis.

Not trying to piss you off but it's the truth: Microstock set so high standards because they wanted to prove that you can get really good technical quality despite the low prices. But they lost touch with reality in some aspects. As you can see by those calling out the "irrational" rejections by Shutterstock for lighting or focus - which I am getting as well randomly. Those aspects might be important to cheap buyers but apparently they are by far not as important for buyers with deeper pockets.

Yup. But I can understand the impulse to want to level an unfair playing field.

Why would it be "unfair"? If you don't get the deals you want, your product probably isn't good enough.

It's not like anyone would be discriminated because of their skin color, gender, sexual preference or whatever. You can do everything that all the big guys do. You just have to become a big guy (or gal) yourself first. You're free to do whatever business you want with whoever you want in the way you want. But so do all of your business partners. No one is obliged to give you the same treatment as someone who is just better at doing what they do.

And I don't mean anything of this personally directed at anyone, it's just the way business goes and I am as much of a "you" in all of this as most others in this forum.

. [accidental duplicate post] .

I owned a technology marketing  firm during all the dot com, pump-and-dump period of the late 1990s and early 2000. So when I see all these VCs throwing money at another startup with a poor man's inDesign, well... I can't help but think... "here we go again."

the "YOU" is a metaphoric directed toward the investors still chasing questionable dot com start ups with no clue how to monetize it.

In a way, I can relate to those sentiments, seeing how many companies are getting funding these days. Then again, $6 million is a rather decent amount for a startup that already has a product and customer base. If it was 1999, I would guess a company like that would already have their IPO at this stage and get $150 million or more from selling their stocks at the market.

I've been a vector contributor at iStock for years now. I'd like to test the waters but I don't want to lose my exclusivity status. Here is the thing I'm thinking. All of my iStock work is credited to me as an individual. All royalties are paid to in my legal name as well. Could I, as an individual, sell exclusive vectors through iStock while an independent business i own creates and sells royalty free vectors through other sites? Would this violate the exclusivity terms?

If you have a look at the Exclusive Artist Supply Agreement, there is a number of things you are allowed to do as an exclusive listed in section 2. a. One of the statements is:

"Content that is produced as "work for hire" within the meaning of United States federal copyright legislation or is otherwise the result of a specific commission by a bona fide client of the Supplier evidenced by written agreement where the Content deliverable from such commission is for the personal use of the client and not for resale or license to any other person or entity,"

As you can read Jo Ann Snover doesn't remember it correctly: You are allowed to work for hire and sell your works directly to others but not if they are going to resell or license them. So you you can not provide content to anyone else if that content is going to be put up as stock somewhere, no matter if you own that other entity or not.

If you want to explore the world outside of iStock, I would say as a vector artist your best bet is to move into the world of pixel based illustrations or maybe 3D. Images that are being saved and sold as JPG. Because that is in fact a possibility: Stay exclusive with your vector work but sell everything that is counted as a "photo" on iStock on other places as a non-exclusive.

But again, it's a thin line. You can not just take your EPS (or AI) files and save them as JPG. In some way they need to be different enough to classify them as JPG files.

I wouldn't consider contributing to a site that I didn't expect to make a payout every month.  RM or sites that pay $100's per sale would be different but none of the microstock sites.  There is no way the effort is worth it to get a payout once a year.

That is most likely due to you being used to consider it "normal" to upload through a proprietary software, click on every second keyword to define its specific meaning for the term, upload new model releases with each single image etc. That kind of "effort" indeed isn't worth my time, even when I get paid more regularly.

There are agencies which make it a matter of minutes to upload 20, 50 or 100 images at once. For those I don't see why I wouldn't send my files to them. There are others which make it a bit more complicated but none come even close to iStock.

The only condition to me is that there must be a realistic expectation to "eventually" get paid and not just collect one or two dollars a month for a $100 payout limit. Otherwise I basically would be submitting my images for free as I would never get a chance to cash out my money. And my personal limit to this expectation is to be able to reach payout level at least once a year.

Hi all,
I am quite new in microstock business but even my portfolio is more like mainstream (landscape, holiday, travel) I made it already into the "big earners" with some dozens pictures.

I also learned that uploading and keywording to 12 agencies is a lot of work - so I will use picworkflow soon to reduce my workload.

There comes my question now - there are so many so called "low earner" sites in their portfolio that I ask myself if it's woth the effort registering to them and uploading there too. I would go from 12 to 40+ agencies - but how about my earnings?

I am focussed on landscape/tourism like fotos from the philippines - maybe in next year I can also look into specialising to get more content people look for - but I will maybe upload 200+ pictures a year.
So how about my workload compared to my earnings on those "low earners"?

Ok I can do it and then tell my experiences in 3 years but maybe some of you already have done this and can advise me.

My goal is to earn maybe 250$/month in 3+ years from now.

I have between 2,000 and 3,000 images uploaded to 13 agencies. Of which three not even made a payout within a year after uploading. So in my opinion those agencies aren't worth uploading to.

Also comparing the royalties they are making, some of them provide around 1% or even less of my total royalties. So I would have to upload to 20 more agencies to make 20% (or less) more in royalties. Again, my personal assessment is it's not worth my time.

I plan to reduce the number of agencies in the mid term rather than find new ones.

Btw which are these distributors that sell in getty, corbis and all? And how does one get in touch with them?

Well. I can see you have 400 images on iStock after 3 years and 50 images on Shutterstock. Most of them look like random snap shots (no offense, I do a lot of those as well - but I know that those belong into microstock and not on premium sites). There is no point in asking this question at this point. Distributors will look for people who are able to provide a certain volume of images that warrant a premium price on a regular basis.

Let me remind that when istock,first with Bruce, then with Getty, was raising prices year after year, a lot of people, including a lot of photographers used to angrily protest (for example in this very forum). Recently, someone said that istock is still selling ex-Vetta and S+ images at "ridiculous high prices as if these fotos were gems" (meaning about 2 dollars and a half with the S+ subscription!!).

Obviously, introducing subs at istock was a (another) mistake. For what I can infere from my sales and revenue, and sales and revenue of some friends, we are losing money, yes, but Getty is losing money too. A lot of money.

Sure. Raising prices across the board was a part of what drove customers away from iStock, I am pretty sure. Despite the prior comments about the "good old times" when even web res images were $35 to license, there is a demand today for images that just don't justify that price. Have a look at all those "ten reasons why..." posts at Huffington Post and others that run 10 images along with the article - those articles will never make $350 in ad revenue. Not even talking about smaller blogs.

iStock opened that market to photographers who didn't get into those high priced agencies. But Getty thought they could come back to that old pricing. If you go back in time (like 2010), iStock made about $300 million in revenue when all others combined probably made less than $150 million. I believe even a higher tiered collection like Vetta did work very well as it was curated.

The problems came when prices for all images went up, no matter if they were unique, artistic, special or just a plain apple on white. Plus the seven collections with six size based price levels each, totalling 42 different price points for basically the same product. Customers didn't understand the reasoning behind that. I believe Shutterstock makes more money from non-subscription sales today than from those who are willing to pay $3,000 a year for image licenses. And all those non-subs sales could have been (sticked) with iStock if they acted smarter.

However, I am not sure if we were better off if that would have happened. Probably Getty would have cut down everybody to 20% (or 10% for non-exclusives and 25% for exclusives) today. They didn't have to cut royalties further since the RC introduction only because almost no one ever reached a higher payout level since but many dropped down, so they are already paying out less today than they originally expected.

But there is at least six months if not a year or two lag from the beginners doing uploads until they are disgruntled and stop. Then it will take time for the word to get around and the beginners no longer begin. I figure we are 3 to 5 years out from that point.

I think you are right but the point might be coming sooner. When I started in 2007, a main motivation to continue was the first download. And the second one the next day. And another one. It kept being rewarding. That time has passed. Nowadays I'm happy if one out of ten uploads gets a download within the first week. And five downloads a year is becoming a top seller at most agencies.

I believe newbies already don't get the same amount of reward/motivation today. Even from our times, most stopped uploading after a few weeks or months. There won't be many who will continue uploading for years.

I think the 100mm Macro was originally designed mainly for table top photography. Then many photographers figured out because of it's sharpness it's also a great portrait lens. That's why Canon decided to add the IS feature. Not to improve sharpness but versatility in use. If you think, you can make good use of the IS by regularly shooting without a tripod, the IS is probably the better choice. I am happy with my non-IS one.

here is a fact, i don't do 12 times the work for similar rewards. you can split hairs all you want, but that is just plain dumb to do that much work for similar results. work smart or work hard, we all make our own choices.

Seeing how you count, and seeing how much time you have to repeat your pet theme in almost every thread, I can see what your choices are.

Quote from: Roberto on May 20, 2015, 02:34

I think is time to pass  from Top Tier to the middle tier forum, it's going down day by day    The glory days have passed

yet it appears exclusive still outnumbers all the others combined in the poll, and always has. what is your point?

Use a calculator and come back with the correct numbers.