Quote from: heywoody on January 14, 2015, 17:59

Why does anyone care if someone is taking IS for a ride?  I don't condone it and sure there will be a reckoning at some point but not gonna waste any sympathy on either party.

It's less about any harm done to iStock than it is harm done to all of us if the marketplace looks - to buyers, who are the ones making this all possible - like a sleazy back alley where you never know what you're getting or who you can trust. Ideally (and I realize we're not there), it should be a fair, honest and well regulated marketplace where buyers get a reasonable deal and know what they're paying for.

The harm to the buyer in this scenario, if they buy from iStock, is that they've paid a premium price for something that should have been main collection (not cheap, but not premium). A low level ripoff.

iStock tool the first image reported down within a few hours, so they were responsive once told.

errr...  no sympathy for such buyers either.  Anyone dumb enough to pay a premium for a product of no better quality than is available elsewhere for a fraction of the price because of a perception of a "label" deserves to be screwed.

Let's face it they've effed if up again - there is no earthly way that virtually nobody had TS sales in December.  It almost seems like they have monkeys manually keying in the sales from paper transcripts the way it NEVER behaves the same way one month to the next.

I wouldn't worry about it - DT regularly competes with IS to win the trophy for Slowest Review Team on Earth.

In defense of IS though, at least they understand that an image containing some of the same elements or props is not similar if the concept is different. DT can't seem to grasp that and are the poorer for it.

But at least DT know when they're looking at a render and don't mistake it for a photo or a vector illustration

Quote from: Mantis on December 20, 2014, 09:20

Quote from: Pauws99 on December 20, 2014, 05:55

IMO there is no big 4 - for me there is a BIG ONE - shutterstock followed by the middle sized 4 - Fotolia, 123, Istock Dreamstime - Dreamstime is trending sharply down for me but has often sprung back in the past. Contary to many reports I stock is trending up. Just sayin!

That sums up my thoughts as well.

actually i would say there is only a BIG ONE and the rest are dribbling around position 70 to 100 based on the percentage of earnings.  i joined about 30 of the 2nd to 30th on the right of this page in early 2K and joined every new one for about the next 10 years. but after i joined shutterstock
and started to earn monthly payout, i decided to drop the rest of them. i still have ports with all of them except last time i checked, none of them have earn as much since inception as shutterstock has earned for me in a week.
does that answer your questions?

So you earn in a week on SS, with the same port, the same as any other site over 10 years? 


Getting back to reality, DT is certainly top 4 but tend to agree with the consensus that, really, there's a big 1 but have to concede that, for some, IS is still there.  Per image, IS is worth about 7% of what is was but push SS most months on the RPI front with PP but this view is probably skewed by just putting up the proven sellers.

While not in the same league as Shutterstock, DT still does fairly well for me and I take several payouts each year.  This is probably due to a relatively large number of individual sales in the $5 to $10 range each month, along with the usual $0.35 subscription sales and an occasional EL.  So are they dying ... not so far as I am concerned.

Seems about right.  Overall RPI seems to be in slight decline everywhere but IS is the only one that is truly spectacular

Spamming keywords is a bit like steroids in sport, agencies should come down on offenders much harder than they do presently

Agree with disorderly.  Whatever niggles folks may have from time to time SS is far and away the most professional agency out there.

The strange thing is that when folks show actual examples of what is rejected the majority of contributors usually agree with the reviewer

The tool I use for stills (Vue) has pretty comprehensive animation features which I believe will do anything you need (tons of example videos on youtube).  However I haven't really explored this so wouldn't be volunteering (learning curve etc etc).  Might be worth posting on this forum though where the skillset would definitely be available (vue general forum possibly).


http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/index.php

Quote from: dirkr on October 12, 2014, 10:42

I fully understand why you don't want to work with them. I don't like them either, though I still have my portfolio with them.

But what I don't understand: why are you still with IS? Their attitude towards contributors is no better, and they have been - for the longest time - the role model for all other agencies to keep commissions down. They had the lowest percentage in the business since they started. And when they decided that 80% is too much, I left them.
I don't think that decision had any positive effect for me. Since then I'm a bit more cautious with deleting portfolios, even at agencies that screw contributors like FT and 123RF.

And by the way, my sales at FT have been up last month, although I am opted out of DPC. Must have some other reason.

I agree with what you are saying, but each agency is different.

IStock milks its contributors for everything it can get, but it's incompetence and high prices mean that it isn't really a threat to the other agencies. In fact it's mostly cutting its own throat by taking such a high percentage (as already discussed).

They also haven't been caught out misleading contributors in the same way as FL (using generous language). FL's hypocrisy is also hard to swallow, throwing their toys out of the pram when DP came along and threatening their contributors then coming up with DPC that is much worse.

Also before evaluating whether leaving IS had any positive effects for you think about all the time and frustration you have avoided by not uploading to them. Then think about all the subsequent (and future) shenanigans you don't have to worry about. Then factor in that their market share is ever decreasing. Seems like you could have made the right decision, no?

Sorry, IS - high prices???  That was then, this is now - at least for non-exclusives..

To be perfectly honest, I get a better return for my sales at FT / DPC than I do at IS where we are getting raped on both pricing and commission but I suggest the decline there is more to do with the ineptness of the folks in control than any external factors.  SS are holding up, DT is coming back nicely after a few bad months mostly due to good RPD and the only place I see a downturn is 123.  There is a sense of running faster to stay in the same place generally that can be totally explained by the vast increase in supply over the last while.

Nope, ordinary upload

SS - average to good
DT - average to poor
FT - very good, pushed SS for a while
123 - poor
IS - who knows until PP comes in
AM - single sale making them #2 for the month and producing an overall BME