|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - BaldricksTrousers
Pages: 1 ... 67 68 69 70 71 [72] 73 74 75 76 77 ... 206
1776
« on: November 21, 2013, 01:54 »
Desperately important things, these pluses and minuses. I don't know how I survived the first 50-something years of life without them. (Please, no minuses for this post, just lots of pluses, or I'll spend the whole day feeling depressed!).
1777
« on: November 21, 2013, 01:50 »
The site isn't 'seriously screwed up', I'm still getting sales and we can see each and every one of them.
That's a faith-based statement rather than one based on knowledge. As with all sites we HOPE that every sale is being reported but you may recall the time they ran the PP, missed reporting a pile of results and then had to go back and do it correctly. Whether they would ever have known it was wrong it if there hadn't been a chorus of "this can't be right" protests is anybody's guess. There sometimes seem to be odd shifts in PP buyers' behaviour that happen on the first of the month and carry on for the whole month. Look at the surge in PP in October. It didn't begin sometime in September, it started precisely on October 1. But can we be sure those high-priced sales didn't start on Sept 8th or June 5th but somehow not get included in the reports because of some coding error? Similarly, remember all the trouble they had getting the July PP figures out. My PP sales were normal throughout May, abruptly and consistently down 30% in June and then after the massive intervention to get reporting going for July the figures shot up again in July and August, to a slightly higher level than May. Why would July be the best month for DLs in the year on PP? But maybe it was, maybe people were fleeing iStock's price shake-up. It's not just iS. The seemingly non-random distribution of subs and credit sales on DT bothers me too (but it could just be the way randomness works). There is no way I can determine whether or not all the sales are being correctly reported. I just have to trust them. And I do trust them not to deliberately cheat me but I'm not sure - especially with iStock - that I can trust their skills in making sure their computers don't have some coding error that leads to false reports. Actually, I know for a fact that iS has misreported sales. You may recall I raised the question of why I had a black bar (Getty sale) appear in my stats for several months earlier. Lobo promptly responded saying it was only for 19c [subtext, "what a meaninless cheapskate to quibble over 19c" - at least that's how I read it] and proclaimed it was a Getty 360 sale, which would appear like that. I wrote to Support, who came up with something similar. The best interpretation I can put on it was that they just invent excuses when they don't know what is happening, because the bar and the 19c it represented subsequently vanished. I can only see three possibilities that explain this: 1) Due to human error, earnings from a Getty 360 sale were wrongly assigned to me and the error was later corrected. 2) Due to a computer "glitch" a sale was wrongly assigned to me and later corrected. 3) Lobo and Support know what they are talking about, the 19c belongs to me but Getty decided to steal it. (A fourth possibility is that the colour coding for 360 sales changed from black to green, but I'm pretty sure that the 19c disappeared along with the black bar, which wouldn't be the case with just a colour change). I discount point 3 since I don't believe Getty engages in theft. I hope that every time there has been an error in reporing my sales they have corrected it but I have no way of knowing that is so.
1778
« on: November 19, 2013, 16:19 »
A mortgage can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the financial situation of the person who takes it out. As for " the debt exists because the lenders believe in the company", that is in the wrong tense, it should be "believed" at the time they made the loan. We don't know whether or not they still believe in it, but Getty's admission that it failed to produce the performance it said it would must have gone some way to undermining the original belief.
1779
« on: November 19, 2013, 02:46 »
Some downloads from yesterday are not reflected in my total earnings yet, even though today's downloads already show up on monthly totals..
This means things are not fully fixed.. I will have to contact support if the issue is not fixed in the next few hours..
I'm not seeing any dls today which might just be bad luck but is extremely unusual for me at this time of day. [one's turned up now, so either it's slow for me today or the site has a backlog of data to process]
1780
« on: November 19, 2013, 02:44 »
Sounds like they admit that their projections from last year were terribly off, but they're desperate to keep contributors.
Sounds like they are desperate to hide the number of people who would go down a level, which might reveal something about how their overall business is doing. I wouldn't pull my portfolio if I dropped a level (which I would) but I would probably tell the world that their price changes this year made what started as an easily achievable target nigh on impossible to reach. Which means iStock is making a lot less from me than it did last year. This way, there won't be any kerfuffle from downgraded contributors.
1781
« on: November 19, 2013, 02:37 »
The site is still down. 
It's working for me, is your computer reading its cache?
1782
« on: November 18, 2013, 11:56 »
. Doesn't seem to be updating the statistics page for me. I have to go in to the actual date to see the images that sold and there are a lot more images showing then the just general over all day by day stats. that and the total earnings hasn't updated yet either.
Ah, yes, that's better. Quite a reasonable day for sales according to that page.
1783
« on: November 18, 2013, 11:41 »
^works for me too. Unfortunately, no big boost in sales that others are seeing
Yeah, my sales are horrendous if that is giving up-to-date info - nothing sold in the last nine or ten hours.
1784
« on: November 18, 2013, 09:40 »
Weird...I can get in on my iPad, but not my laptop. My earnings summary is not keeping up with the actual downloads. My sales are up big time. I took screenshots to make sure it's not a dream. New search algorithm?
It may be best not to get too excited about things that the site is showing while it is going wrong.
1785
« on: November 18, 2013, 03:44 »
Hello everyone,
As you may be aware, some have experienced issues recently accessing various areas of our sites. We are working to get things back in working order as soon as possible. Please remain patient during this time. Once the system is back up and running perfectly, we will inform you as soon as possible. Your patience is appreciated.
Sincerely,
Anthony Correia
Director, Contributor Success
Shutterstock|Bigstock
Thanks! While you're at it you couldn't pop over to Calgary and sort out those dozy plebs at Istock could you?
What, and teach them to say "We are working to get things back in working order as soon as possible. Please remain patient during this time."? I think they know that line already.
1786
« on: November 18, 2013, 02:04 »
Pete, I think you've misunderstood what the ESA said (though their paragraph is badly worded and rather obscure, so I'm not entirely certain). What I take it to mean is that the chance of anybody anywhere being hit over the course of 75 years is bit more than 1 in a billion. The paragraph concerned states: "The European Space Agency, on the other hand, feels more comfortable pinning down the odds: "The annual risk of a single person to be severely injured by a re-entering piece of space debris is about 1 in 100,000,000,000" one in 100 billion, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the ESA's Orbital Debris Office. In the course of a 75-year lifetime, then, the odds of getting injured by space junk would be a little less than one in 1 billion." Look at what NASA said: that the chance of this bit of junk hitting anybody on earth was 1 in 3,200. To bring that down to one person being hit every 10 years you would have to have 3,200 similar-sized objects falling in a 10 year period, or about one per day. That clearly isn't the case. So I still think suggesting a one in a billion chance of being hit is being extremely alarmist! Those are not MY numbers, they are from the space agency. The idea was to explain that much lower number which was being misunderstood.
I'll give you their address and location and you can continue with the source. LOL  NASA Johnson Space Center
Here's a nice page about it.
http://www.space.com/13034-falling-satellite-space-debris-injury-risk-uars.html
The ods that someone might get hit, 1 in 3200, "The odds that you will be hit are 1 in several trillion,"
You're still a bit off there, I think. If the odds are one in a billion in a lifetime, then seven people will be hit by space junk over a 70 year span, which is one every 10 years. So far, the tally is zero and even though the chances of a hit are growing with the growing populations of people and of space junk, I think you are being overly pessimistic.
1787
« on: November 17, 2013, 08:41 »
Maybe the enemy is not the exploiting agencies.
Looks like the worst enemy of a photographer is his collegue, who f*u*cks up the whole market, instead of showing solidarity.
Dog eat Dog, right?
Good appetite
Why are you f*u*c*k*ing up the market by selling at DT, or, indeed, anywhere on microstock, Axel? It seems that according to your interpretation you are your problem rather than the solution. But you're not eating me, apparently you're eating yourself. Woof, woof!
1788
« on: November 16, 2013, 17:49 »
I think you've got the truth of it there qwerty. Of course, they can always argue that the hairstyle is out of date or whatever, making a new version valid. However, I did read a cogent argument from an old timer who claimed that the earliest microstock superstars basically copied stuff straight out of catalogues produced by traditional agencies.
1789
« on: November 16, 2013, 12:46 »
I had a similar only even more bizarre experience with landscape shots. I found someone had stood in precisely the same spot as me in Sri Lanka, Greece and the UK and taken identical shots to mine, with only slight differences in lighting etc. I can't remember who got where first, but it was obvious that neither of us was copying the other, you don't travel 6,000 miles to copy a stock photo.
1790
« on: November 16, 2013, 12:38 »
They should already have turned up in your cash balance if they have been recorded.
1791
« on: November 16, 2013, 10:19 »
As Ron says, but 40MP could certainly fill square metres of canvas without looking bad. All the main agencies sell huge files for next to nothing.
1792
« on: November 16, 2013, 10:16 »
Click on the thumbnail of the file in the "my uploads" page. When that opens, cllick on the "manage file" link at the top left of the page. Click on "file download history". Click on the "partner program" tab and you will see the sales recorded there.
You'll notice that the file earnings listed in the "my uploads" page is lower than the earnings in the "file download history". In some places they keep the accounting of regular and PP separate, in other places they give the overall total.
The sales recorded in the "partner program" tab do not appear until the time the PP earnings are credited. so you will have been paid for those sales.
1793
« on: November 15, 2013, 01:39 »
Its just another shady Google deal or Microsoft or Yahoo or .........
Not unless they simultaneously lost all their previous customers. It's a change in the sales price, not in the sales volume.
1794
« on: November 15, 2013, 01:35 »
At least people like that have the excuse of being naive but the industry is awash with more cynical copycats, from the top down - I mean, look at the top-selling lifestyle genres, nobody's going to tell me that all the top artists just hit on the idea of doing near identical shots, in which only the models have changed!
I prefer not to look for copies of my work, there's no point in getting a blood pressure problem over something that you really can't do much about. I can't help stumbling over some from time to time, but I try to move on without getting mad.
1795
« on: November 15, 2013, 01:27 »
I believe you can. You'll notice that one of Andres's istock names is a limited company. Here is how you can do it: Keep your exclusive istock account in your own personal name as is. Then set up a business and give it whatever title you'd like. Then create your images, sell them to your company for a dollar each as a "work for hire" contract. Then use the business to set up whatever accounts you want and sell it's own images. As a person you remain istock exclusive and the business can sell elsewhere. That's the loophole.
If they allow that then they should allow people to run two accounts without jumping through loops. Lots of people have run lots of money-making dodgy tricks at istock for donkey's years - there was even a husband and wife team where one was exclusive and the other not, so they would set up a shot, put the camera on a tripod, the exclusive would hit the shutter then stand back and let the non-exclusive hit the shutter, so the exclusive shot could go to IS and the non-exclusive shot could go to the rest. Of course, only an idiot would believe they actually went through that rigmarole but iStock were perfectly happy with this approach. Then again, you never knew who had special privileges at iS that would get less favoured artists booted.
1796
« on: November 15, 2013, 00:51 »
ahh 1/800 is perfect for that thanks for educating me :-)
The 1/800 is because a Hasselblad has a leaf shutter in the lens, which opens and shuts more rapidly than a focal-plane shutter, where the two "curtains" move across the film gate together with a narrow gap between them. But 1/800 isn't really necessary for this shot. If the plane is moving at 300kph then it will move only 0.1m in 1/800 or 0.4m in 1/200. The plane is at least 100m away, so the motion blur is going to be insignificant, especially as it is further reduced by panning. By comparison, a tennis ball served by a top pro will travel at half that speed but photographed from the side of the net, 10m from the player, will travel through an angle 5x greater than the plane viewed from 100m. If 1/1000 will freeze the tennis ball, which it will, then 1/200 would freeze the plane. The larger image size of the Hasselblad offsets some of the advantage of the faster shutter speed, too, as you will use a longer focal length on the 'blad, so the only advantage you are left with is that you have a bigger image if you want to plaster the side of a building with it (or you can use a wider lens and crop if you want to). I'm sure Gostwyck is right to dismiss my idea of the air force sponsoring it - maybe Hasselblad did, or maybe it was just a very expensive "boys with toys" event. in any case, I reckon a top-end DSLR would have been more suitable for the job.
1797
« on: November 14, 2013, 14:41 »
My PP earnings almost equal my iStock earnings for October...typically they are maybe 15-20% of my earnings. Is this in error? I hope not, but we've all seen iStock take money back before
When did Istock take money back ?
After credit card frauds over Chrismas, was one instance.
1798
« on: November 14, 2013, 14:14 »
It's a strange project. I suppose the air force wanted the shots and arranged it all, since the expense certainly doesn't seem justified for stock purposes. You could tell he works mostly in a studio from the time it took him to hit on panning as the solution, which I'm pretty sure a motor-sports shooter would have done automatically.
1799
« on: November 14, 2013, 13:52 »
Something doesn't add up for me in all this.
My 'PP sales' are on target to be almost double my royalties from Istock last month or roughly equivalent to my earnings from DT and FT combined. Where has all this 'new business' come from almost overnight?
The sales from which these PP royalties are derived must be in the tens of millions of dollars (annually it could be the equivalent of a new agency with $100M in sales revenue). How is it possible that the market for our work has apparently grown so much so quickly? It is not as if anyone is reporting an equivalent fall in their earnings elsewhere.
Could this be an error or could it be that historic under-reporting has been discovered and is now being corrected? If so why would these new sales be so evenly distributed throughout the month? It is all very strange.
My sales haven't increased, they are still in exactly the same narrow range they have been all year, what has changed is that the RPD has almost doubled. That suggests that the market for the work hasn't changed, but the price being paid for the work has. How could that be? Has the TS price changed? Has there been a major drive to convince clients who were on subs that credit packages make more sense? I don't know, but perhaps someone out there has had experience of a change in Getty tactics for TS over the last couple of months. If this is a sign that there has been under-reporting in the past then my portfolio indicates that it would be under-reporting of the value of sales, not the volume of sales. But maybe others are actually seeing an increase in dl numbers, too.
1800
« on: November 14, 2013, 11:24 »
I hope they have managed to get all these sales from IS and Getty rather than somewhere that paid a better percent. If there isn't something equivalent for exclusives coming along that is a tough blow.
From what one reads, the sums we are now getting on PP would not be considered very good by exclusives, it's just that expectations are so low among indes. What this has done for me this month is compensate for the loss in earnings from the commission cuts a few months back, putting me back where I was. But the total is still significantly below what I was getting a few years ago. I'm going to end up 10-35% below the same month last year and 20-30% below October 2011, so while it's better than a boot in the face it isn't really something to be deliriously happy about.
Pages: 1 ... 67 68 69 70 71 [72] 73 74 75 76 77 ... 206
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
