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Messages - Shelma1
Pages: 1 ... 66 67 68 69 70 [71] 72 73 74 75 76 ... 116
1751
« on: April 22, 2015, 14:33 »
I agree...it's totally doable to work up to $400/month even now. Just takes time, talent, strategy and perseverance.
1752
« on: April 22, 2015, 14:18 »
No troll here, if you don't value the small you don't deserve the big.
It seems I have a larger task before me than I have anticipated at first, but I will try.
Do you think making 3D models or icons for shutterstock would sell for me better?
Maybe I post some of my work tomorrow.
I think things are somewhat easier for illustrators, but it sounds like you don't have the right software. (Do you have Illustrator?) Also, icons are very thoroughly covered on all the sites. I don't do 3D so can't advise you on that. The same advice applies to illustration as to photographyyou have to draw with the end consumer in mind, find niches that aren't done to death, and develop a style or at least a strategic approach to what you draw. There's a lot of competition out there and it's tough. However, it is doable. And you might be able to make some money by uploading simpler stuff that will help support you a little financially as you learn and improve. Take the "entrance exam" on iStock to learn all the rules you'll have to follow to apply to the stock sites. Whether you do photography or illustration, there's a learning curve. We've all been through it. 
1753
« on: April 22, 2015, 11:34 »
You might want to start small...I mean that literally. Perhaps shoot small, simple objects at first just to get noise, lighting and composition right.
1754
« on: April 21, 2015, 09:45 »
I was already wondering why subs were drying up and ODD's were nowhere to be founds these last few weeks. As if things couldn't get worse in microstock already.
I think microstock is going to be very, very different, 3 years from now...
Funny enough I said this 4 days ago, but today I received a whopping 20 ODD's!
Congrats! 
1755
« on: April 20, 2015, 07:37 »
Mine just showed up...right after I posted here. Coincidence, I'm sure.
1756
« on: April 20, 2015, 05:11 »
Yes...images approved more than two days ago still not in my portfolio.
1757
« on: April 18, 2015, 12:05 »
Quote - Time was when we were all in love with iStock - but that didn't last more than a few years.
There was also a time not so long ago on these boards when IS exclusives were not accused of being macro contributors.
It is baffling to me that so many here miss the fact that shutterstocks downward pressure has affected the entire market in a huge way. If you don't raise prices for 9 years to gain market share it takes it's toll on your competitors. In the end IS was forced to drop prices and adopt subs.
iS has dropped prices and adopted subs and they're still going downhill. In fact, their prices are lower than SS's now. So why aren't they taking over the market? Stocksy proved people are willing to pay more for quality images. iS could have taken any number of paths. And they were already offering subs through the PP. They make wholesale changes without any evidence it will increase sales. Adding subs. Raising prices for buyers who liked buying small sizes, losing who knows how many customers. Eliminating image descriptions, asking contributors to take time away from creating new/better images and using their time to rewrite invisible descriptions instead. And being consistently behind the curve in what sorts of images they'll accept ("don't tell us images we've rejected are selling well elsewhere!"). I could go on. Misstep after misstep. That's nobody's fault but theirs.
1758
« on: April 18, 2015, 09:36 »
For me, I want to start selling from my own site but haven't a clue how to do that nor do I have the technical skills. I would have to hire someone to get me in a place where I could self manage, add new content etc.
There are a few ways to sell your work on your own site without needing many technical skills. The challenge there is marketing...getting traffic to your site and making sales. And also competing against behemoths like SS and Getty, who make it easy for buyers to choose from millions of images.
1759
« on: April 18, 2015, 08:15 »
I think they paid out $80 million dollars to contributors last year. How many cents is that?
Just how can you defend subscriptions? Are you saying that you wouldn't want to earn, or deserve, more for your work? Come on...you must be on SS payroll to try and justify demeaning "royalties" with statistics that may or may not be doctored up to look good. This is not exact but with about 60,000 contributors that means the average earnings for each contributor last year was $1333. Ummm....oh yeah then there's taxes. Oh yeah and then the cost to produce images. Wait...and fees from Paypal. Maintenance for equipment... oh well you get the picture.
I guess I was naive when I signed up thinking that SS was looking to license images in a way that contributors and SS would profit together. Wrong...
I think subs opened up new markets. people who couldn't afford stock images before now had a way to license them. They certainly opened up a new way for me to make money. I'm just not sure if ending subs would simply close off an entire market and a way for tens of thousands of people to license their work. Look what happened when iStock raised their prices for small images...they lost tons of buyers.
1760
« on: April 16, 2015, 19:48 »
It looks like the after-Easter decline to me. Easter just happened to come early this year. Last year it was April 20th.
1761
« on: April 16, 2015, 15:32 »
What I don't get is the continued sarcasm directed at SS specifically. iS pays lowers royalties to independents. I only get 28 for subs sales at iS.
As I've pointed out before, most of us can't be represented by Getty, and microstock opened up new markets and broader representation. Why MACRO photographers come to MICROstock Group and continually post jabs at MICROstockand specifically SS, which is the big earner for most peopleis beyond me.
You don't see any sarcasm directed at iStock, you're one of the main purveyors of that sort of thing. I think people can dislike both companies why does anyone have to like one or other?
Why are you here? Seriously. This is Microstock Group. And I'm sarcastic about iS because I wish they'd do better. When they screw up it costs me money. You?
I'm here because I do this for my living, it's important to me what happens not only on iStock but in the industry as a whole.
What is your goal? Are you hoping to convince 65,000 people they shouldn't license their work online so you can hopefully make more money? Do you think that will ever happen? I know a lot of photographers who shoot custom work who are just as angry at people who are represented by the likes of Corbis and Getty because stock imagery cuts into their business. I remember when art directors spent 10 minutes scribbling a layout and then it was all about getting in touch with reps and looking at portfolios and hiring photographers and going on shoots and looking at contact sheets with a loupe. Then you hired retouchers and marked up their work with a wax pencil. I remember lightboxes and yummy catered weekly lunches when photographer's reps would come in to shop portfolios around. Art directors had promotional photography postcards (usually of naked women) plastered all over the walls of their window offices. Now we buy our own lunches and work in "open space." No more postcards. No more window offices. No more walls. Things change.
1762
« on: April 16, 2015, 15:07 »
What I don't get is the continued sarcasm directed at SS specifically. iS pays lowers royalties to independents. I only get 28 for subs sales at iS.
As I've pointed out before, most of us can't be represented by Getty, and microstock opened up new markets and broader representation. Why MACRO photographers come to MICROstock Group and continually post jabs at MICROstockand specifically SS, which is the big earner for most peopleis beyond me.
You don't see any sarcasm directed at iStock, you're one of the main purveyors of that sort of thing. I think people can dislike both companies why does anyone have to like one or other?
Why are you here? Seriously. This is Microstock Group. And I'm sarcastic about iS because I wish they'd do better. When they screw up it costs me money. You?
1763
« on: April 16, 2015, 15:01 »
What I don't get is the continued sarcasm directed at SS specifically. iS pays lowers royalties to independents. I only get 28 for subs sales at iS.
As I've pointed out before, most of us can't be represented by Getty, and microstock opened up new markets and broader representation. Why MACRO photographers come to MICROstock Group and continually post jabs at MICROstockand specifically SS, which is the big earner for most peopleis beyond me.
1764
« on: April 16, 2015, 14:12 »
Where on your home site I could get 28 cents for a sub? Keep pointing out how many contradictions there are in your hate for SS. ODDs can range over $100 does your place do that for Independent Artists?
keep at it, soon you will make 0.38 to have your image used in and advertising campaign.
Is your RPD closer to 38 cents or $100?
Where? My RPD is now lower on iS than on SS. SS blew past iS a while agoundoubtedly because SS pays independents royalties 50% higher than iS does. Also, I've never earned anywhere near $100 for a sale on iS, but have several in that ballpark on SS. I got two a just couple of days ago. On iS? Bupkis.
1765
« on: April 16, 2015, 11:17 »
Ad agencies pay much higher rates.
1766
« on: April 15, 2015, 13:57 »
BTW, can someone please tell me what 'organic' search is as opposed to an ordinary Google search?
Organic search is Google search results that are not paid for (as opposed to the paid search results that show up at the top of the results and have a little yellow box that says "ad" in them).
1767
« on: April 13, 2015, 15:42 »
Definitely not a good approach to upload everything at once. As other have pointed out, most will get buried in the search. Unfortunately you have to upload things gradually, which is the way your income will grow as well.
1768
« on: April 12, 2015, 09:51 »
With the exception of the director who's now in jail after a member of his crew was killed by a train while they were shooting a movie scene without permission.
1769
« on: April 12, 2015, 09:47 »
I don't know whether buyers will click on the ellipses, but I just don't see how choosing random odd keywords as "important" will improve SEO or the "searchability" of images. Sounds like things are even worse than I thought. 
1770
« on: April 12, 2015, 08:45 »
Today's the first day I'm seeing the new image pages with no descriptions. Not only is the description gone, the preview is smaller and the zoom function is gone. You have to click on the image to see it larger, which then takes up your entire screen. (In my case it takes up more than my entire screen, so I actually then have to zoom out to see the whole image.)
Plus, if you click on the little ellipses next to the title to "see more," it shows you the first five keywords, in order. So if, like me, you just copy your keywords from the other sites and don't make a special effort to put the most relevant keywords first, that "extra information" is a string of keywords that are not necessarily the most descriptive of the image and can actually be fairly odd, thanks to Getty's special library of wacky disambiguated keywords.
And of course iS's uploading system is already the most time-consuming out there. I'm really disinclined to take even more time to not only write a special 50-word description for them that never gets seen, but also to re-order my keywords just for them and try to make sure they don't get disambiguated into some weird phrase or another.
All in all it's a horror show, IMO.
1771
« on: April 12, 2015, 07:36 »
It's a bit amazing to me that I get minus-ed for my previous post. Are there that many people here who actually think subscriptions are good for contributors? Or who still believe that SS's intention is for microstock to be profitable for photographers?
The will to believe is strong.
You hit the nail on the head with that one.
you will get a minus if you don't like SS and their subs model, i get them all the time. and yes, sadly there are that many people who rave about subs. i don't get it at all.
I haven't seen anyone "rave" about subs. But for most of us SS makes the most income by far. Do I love getting 38 for a sale? No. But IMO that sale would probably not have existed before subs. I was on iS for a couple of years and was going to quit doing illustrations because I was making so little. And iS was arrogant, rejecting a lot of work they felt was "not suitable for stock" and telling people not to complain when they rejected files that sold well elsewhere. Thanks to their attitude I started looking around, found SS and uploaded my "not suitable" images, and lo and behold they started selling immediately. SS quickly became the place where I make the most, and has remained there. The gap between them and iS has steadily widened; my earnings per sale there have risen while falling at iS. Despite paying me lower royalties, which leaves them more to spend on marketing, iS continues to flounder. That's due to poor management, not subs.
1772
« on: April 11, 2015, 11:55 »
1773
« on: April 10, 2015, 19:14 »
It's a bit amazing to me that I get minus-ed for my previous post. Are there that many people here who actually think subscriptions are good for contributors? Or who still believe that SS's intention is for microstock to be profitable for photographers?
The will to believe is strong.
There are many of us who can not be represented by Getty, or make enough sales as an iStock exclusive. For us SS makes the most by far. Basically, by telling us subs are bad you're asking us to stop making money so you can make more money. Ummmmm.......no.
1774
« on: April 10, 2015, 14:21 »
If that was their goal why wouldn't they have just stuck to subs only? Why introduce all the other payment options, select, Offset, etc.?
1775
« on: April 09, 2015, 15:09 »
That's why I said "capable". Yes, anyone can now record a track and offer it on the web. "Independent" doesn't necessarily mean "great".
Exactly, but exactly the same goes for the photographers.
Snapping a good photo, now and then, doesn't make you an artists or even a good photographer. But a lot of times this is exactly what some customers want.
The competition among photographers has increased a lot since the explosion smartphones and all those continuous DSLR improvements.
With so many decent photos produced every day, how can you not expect the price of the photo to go down?
Simple economics.
Embrace the trend, adapt to it, or sink slowly.
Sometimes, what people really want is just cheap cr@p. But not always. Go into a big shipping mall, and you'll find one or two "Everything's A Dollar" stores. In microstock, a couple of middlemen got control of the channel and imposed a simplistic one-size-fits-all business model on the entire market. It's as if "Everything's A Dollar" bought the Mall of America and evicted everyone else.
Well, not precisely. If they'd bought up an existing library of images and priced them all the same, maybe. But what they did was set one price for images, and then the contributors decided to submit ever-higher-quality images as a way to outsell the competition. That raised the bar on quality, until now the bar is so high there's no discernible difference between the quality of certain images in microstock and some in macrostock.
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