first of all they pay taxes, a building with offices, clerks, security guards, parking lots, electricity, water, insurance, a data center or cloud provider to host the whole backend/frontend site etc etc

Those costs are easily spread out over all the contributors. When I left iStock, I joked that the person's salary I was paying would have to find a new job. It was a joke, but the money they were receiving from my sales was literally enough to pay someone's salary for a year. And, I'm a nobody when it comes to sales. If you are going to pay somebody that much money to be your agent, they should probably... well, be your agent, represent your interests and drive sales to your portfolio. I'd probably be better off hiring a single employee to make cold calls all day.

even facebook, youtube, yahoo, zynga, are losing money or struggling to stay afloat, no matter if they have zillions of free users, paying users, huge advertising deals, sponsors, and whatever in between.

i never hear anybody here talking about how much is the cost to acquire a customer for instance.
that would be a good start but no, only endless rants about greedy agencies.

what do you guys know exactly ? they can easily spend 10$ to acquire a client that buys 5$ in credits and later dumps them off to buy on cheaper agencies.

let me remind you if your images were so precious and unique they would sell like hotcaked on art galleries or at least on Getty and Corbis rather than for a pittance on micros.

SS might have its greedy plans but no one forces you to join them, it's up to you.
considering they're the only agency left who's really delivering i've nothing against them eating up 80% of a sale that me alone could never possibly make on my own without a substantial and risky investment.

Maybe, you should try it before you decide it is hopeless.  

Personally, I don't even see why exclusivity exist. If most of these agencies were actually offering good deals and sales, they would get plenty of exclusive content and destroy their competition just by being better.

It would be fascinating to compare an indie vs exclusive from the start both with 250000 downloads to see who was the smarter person.  One has made the wrong financial decision.  The data is out there!

I know I'm not very good with word problems, but you lost me on what that would prove.

What are the current gradient trends? Is there a gradient monthly magazine I can subscribe to, so I can keep up to date? 

Welcome and congrats on your degree!

When I started uploading to microstock, I was passionate about photography and viewed it a wonderful creative outlet.  Now, after 7 years doing this full time, it just feels like a job.  I almost NEVER pick up a camera if I'm not working.  Maybe it's different for illustrators...

It's a nonstop party on the illustration side. I just got a couple new #2 pencils, and I'm ready to rock! Seriously though, I still have fun doing this. I don't think I could do it if I didn't.

I did get rid of a couple of sites in the past but I don't see the point unless most of us leave.  The problem is, all the copycats stay with those sites and will get the money that would of been mine.  It's only a small percentage of my portfolio that makes most of the money and many of those images have similar versions by other people.

It would be great to leave some sites but when you start, where do you stop?  Is there much point in being independent and only using SS?  I rely on the money from microstock, if it was a hobby, I would probably be exclusive with istock.  Hopefully one day I wont be so reliant on my microstock income but it's going to take me a long time to get another income with the non-microstock sites.  So I don't see much advantage in leaving site, unless they completely stop selling.

I guess I gave up on what everyone else is going to do a while ago, so I'm definitely not trying to lead a revolution. I'm just focused on trying to make my own situation better. It's hard to say if I'm accomplishing that or not because I don't know if I would be doing better with the sites that I eliminated. It's the whole you can't be in two places at once thing. I am trying to dial down on these sites cautiously, so that I can maintain a certain income level. I am doing that, so I guess it is working from that perspective. Everything else? Who knows?

Think SS will ever be on your chopping block? In terms of RPD, they've improved but are still on the low end. It's hard to imagine anyone cutting SS out of the picture.

I could see a day when that happens, although I'm sure I don't do anywhere close to as well at SS as you or some others do. I guess it really depends on how things progress at other sites. Whether or not they keep growing or hit a wall.

Neither crazy nor stupid

I do hope that your buyers find you and that the move works out - as we know, you don't have to have as many buyers when you aren't paying anything/as much to the agency. I no longer upload to 123rf but haven't yet pulled the plug (I think I'm going to hold on until the end of the year and see if they go through with their ill-advised commission changes).

I hope so too. I've kind of been running in place the last couple of years. I make progress, then I delete an agency and end up back where I was. All that trouble and I still have my great white whale in Shutterstock. 

Quote from: etienjones on August 02, 2012, 04:29

Lisafx,

I would have kept all that information secret.  Its very revealing.

PS 

I did keep my secrets secret, but they got out anyway.  There's always some douch_bag or other who can't wait to print every trick or secret in this business.

That's me. 

But, I guess I don't think there are any real secrets. Like others already said, hard work, etc.

I assume Google is just giving weight to the title, so images with the words cartoon cat in their title show up first. That seems like a pretty simple solution for some of these problems. I guess people could spam their titles too, but that is a little easier to catch.

Some of us tried to join Warmpics and were turned down without a view, because we didn't have big portfolios. So will the co op be the same? Only the chosen ones get in?

I would assume it depends on who starts it and who they want to partner with. If I started something like that, I probably wouldn't accept photos because I don't know anything about them. I probably would also start out small (maybe 5 artists), so I'd probably need them to have larger portfolios to build a decent size catalog. Then, I would grow my contributor base as my customer base grew larger.