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Messages - pancaketom
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1901
« on: August 01, 2011, 17:37 »
I must have been a bit out of the loop on this one, so please correct me if I'm wrong here:
1 XL-JPG credit purchase costs 5 credits - that includes my biggest file with 55MP (panorama) Cost for buyer: $2.50 (or less) respectively, using the highest price credit package (18 credits) Payout for photographer: $1.25 (50% and more if bigger credit packages have been purchased)
1 XL-JPG instant purchase costs $5 - that includes my biggest file with 55MP (panorama) Cost for buyer: $5 Payout for photographer: $2.50 (=50%)
Besides Scanstock, can anyone name any agency that pays a lower commission amount than Canstock?
I'm not talking about the percentage.
I can't think of one (non-subscription plan) agency that sells the images for less money.
Maybe I'm just so in shock that I cannot think anymore but that's awfully low.
Even at Crestock I get $4.50 for an XXXL sale priced at $25 = 18% commission.
Anyone, something? 
I think you are looking at the page that shows the payout to photographers, the cost is twice that. See the schedule here: http://www.canstockphoto.com/about.phpI do agree the subs payment is too low though. What are the cutoffs for S M L XL etc. there?
1902
« on: August 01, 2011, 17:14 »
BME for me thanks mainly to a BME at SS. IS was saved by ELs, and DT was pretty weak. SS pretty much carried the show.
1903
« on: July 27, 2011, 23:12 »
I had a chunk of an illuminated manuscript (bible chunk) from who knows how long ago (pre 1800) rejected for the same reason.
1904
« on: July 21, 2011, 01:34 »
Cogent - I am really sorry to hear about your (and your team member's) experience in the ISP forums. Hope you are finding what you need at the other sites you are going to now. I will never understand why Istock is so indifferent to its buyers' concerns. 
Shank - I realize that you didn't start this thread as a place for buyers to air issues, but frankly, I think Congent Marketing has answered your original question quite handily. The liberal use of the ban hammer is a big reason that the ISP forums are so quiet. Considering you yourself have been banned, doesn't that make sense to you?
Seems Cogent is still smarting from having his account closed on Istockphoto.A series of events led to that account being closed and if many people from the company had access to it why allow them to post on the forum? .Buy and use the content. Where is the logic is posting inflamatory remarks on a companys forum (quote) ripping the P### out of Lobo) and directing them at a well respected admin of that company.It's like DUH.
Earth to Shank, Earth to Shank, come back to reality. I am guessing in the words of John J. R. "They drew first blood"
1905
« on: July 20, 2011, 22:15 »
I do wonder how many bogus testimonials from fake buyers a site like that might seed itself with to look more legit. (they may well be perfectly legit, sort of like a busker throwing a few bills into the hat to prime the pump so to speak.
It would be funny if they had to admit that to avoid paying royalties though.
I saw a too good to be true price listed for a camera and looked at the reseller ratings page for the place and about 1/2 the comments were from people who got the classic NY camera rip off bait and switch and the other half were gushing praise - so I assume they are from the site owners trying to boost the ratings.
1906
« on: July 20, 2011, 22:11 »
Which is in America - North America. Along w/ the USA and Mexico as is often pointed out to people that assume the USA = America.
edited to include: Then again, H&F and Getty, which are really the source of much of the misery and problems are from the USA as far as I know.
You forgot South America.
Actually I just left them out because I couldn't be sure of all the countries off the top of my head. I'm not sure they'd really want to be associated with this mess anyway.
1907
« on: July 20, 2011, 21:27 »
The community on istock is a gold mine and they just give it away to the competition.
That is because American companies, in their rapacious greed, don't care about community. They are only interested in maximizing profits. They don't see the faces behind the money, they only see the faces *on* the money. And the more Benjamin Franklins they see, the better.
IStock is in Canada.
Which is in America - North America. Along w/ the USA and Mexico as is often pointed out to people that assume the USA = America. edited to include: Then again, H&F and Getty, which are really the source of much of the misery and problems are from the USA as far as I know.
1908
« on: July 20, 2011, 19:29 »
Think of it as the XXL rasters being overpriced for the lazy as opposed to the vectors being underpriced below them.
Now, if you disagree with the vector price, that is a valid reason to not upload there, but I wouldn't not upload vectors just because some other format and size is more expensive.
1909
« on: July 20, 2011, 19:23 »
IS had to lower overall commissions (they were told to do so). I consider dropping commissions screwing - Shank considers it prudent business. In any case, a few others agree with me and that combined with a long series of site problems raised some understandable ire and questions which IS mostly ignored for a while before they started banning people and locking threads. Some of the thread locks and bans are probably reasonable and were done reasonably. Others were not. People didn't like that and went elsewhere.
1910
« on: July 20, 2011, 16:55 »
my numbers are small - probably not statistically valid, but still curious.
1911
« on: July 20, 2011, 15:39 »
I too have a big spike on the 18th. In fact the graph looks quite similar except for an EL. I wonder if they turned off the independent suppression filter either by accident or to see what the results would be.
1912
« on: July 20, 2011, 12:40 »
I've had a few rejected for
" We have too many similar images already. Please perform a search on the subject before uploading, to see what is already online and where to fill niches."
When I think it is a somewhat obscure subject I do a search and rarely find any let alone many similar images. I'm not talking about isolated apples or mallard ducks here.
I think DT is trying to fix a problem they have in the wrong way, but I suppose they can do what they like in their own sandbox. If it continues to get worse at some point I'll stop uploading there.
1913
« on: July 18, 2011, 17:31 »
...
The other good thing that Istockphoto had and still maintains to this day is discipline.It make contributors responsable for what they post and will never tolerate abuse of any form against a fellow poster on the forum.
admins on the other hand...
1914
« on: July 18, 2011, 14:44 »
From time to time (usually after what seems like a flood of subs) I look at the last 20 sold, and usually it is between 9 and 13 subs.
DT does seem to have some weird on/off sales patterns. It seems to go every few days for me. Maybe it is based on getting x number of sales and then you get shuttled to the back of the line for a spell and if you get 20-30 sales a day it kicks on and off more rapidly? Perhaps sub buyers see things differently? I don't know. It could just be our human brains trying to find patterns in somewhat random events (although perhaps subs sales are more regular and it is the non sub sales that are more sporadic). When the non subs are in an off spell it seems like nothing but subs. Right now my DT tap seems to be off for subs and regular sales - however my sales are probably small enough to make statistical analysis somewhat weak.
It could just be ebb and flow.
right now of the last 20, 9 are subs and 5 are painful level 0 1 credit sales (< .35 return)
1915
« on: July 18, 2011, 12:10 »
This thread however was made to discuss the way redeemable credits were brought in to steady and secure the long term future of Istockphoto.
I believe that istock would have had a steady and long term secure profitable future without these changes. In fact although they may boost the short term profits in the long term the contributor ire and mistrust that they engendered will possibly have the opposite effect.
1916
« on: July 18, 2011, 11:22 »
If I were able to investigate places I'd investigate the credit levels and currency conversion exchange rate monkey business as well as if sales are actually being recorded and paid. I guess the moving goalposts and "promises" to contributors would be worth a look too. Also maybe if the contract is legal.
The actual sales price seems like something less legally problematic unless you believe it is some sort of product dumping to drive the competition out of business.
1917
« on: July 18, 2011, 10:54 »
I think the web usages can be much closer to the actual event than the print usages that can be months in advance.
Still, if it includes contributors it could also be skewed by people who just uploaded images checking to see if they have showed up yet (before the event).
I would like to see some sort of relative scale on there. Otherwise you have to put in another term to compare your search to.
1918
« on: July 17, 2011, 20:01 »
I would avoid the cheap canon 75-300 lens. When my 17-50mm 2.8 lens got fungus in it last year I went back to the old non-is supposedly poorer 18-55 kit lens and the 50mm 1.8. I used the 1.8 for stock when I could, but for landscapes I wanted the wider angle and used the kit - it has some limitations, but you can work within them and at least last year I was able to get most images accepted from it. (this is with a canon xti aka 450d) - It might not be as good for the higher resolution sensor, but at least to get started you can downsize a bit if it isn't sharp.
By the way, back in 2006 I started w/ a sub 4 megapixel point and shoot and gradually upgraded with my microstock earnings. I think things are a little tighter now, but with some effort, you can still learn and earn.
1919
« on: July 17, 2011, 16:16 »
Maybe you will like their new "exclusive minus" collection better.
1920
« on: July 16, 2011, 20:59 »
It's hard to believe it was necessary for non-exlcusives no matter how you slice it. I'm not a super earner there, but iStock's share of my earnings last year could pay somebody's salary. My share on the other hand doesn't even cover my mortgage.
taking for granted the portion I don't see...holy cow, when you put it that way, it's so true...crazy.
I think the sad fact of it is that iStock could have easily crushed their competition with moves in the opposite direction. Paying a flat 50% to all exclusives might have pulled all the fence sitters into exclusivity (myself included). I don't know if I'd want to go full exclusive now, but I'd probably make a deal with IS to dump their major competition for 50% of the share. I'd still want to be able to have my own site to sell through though. That deal is never going to be offered, so I guess I'll never have to be tempted. 
It is a little staggering to think about what their take must be even now with reduced sales. I agree they could have completely crushed the competition with some savvy moves - like image exclusivity - at least before they started killing sales w/ drastic best match shifts.
1921
« on: July 16, 2011, 16:31 »
That's how polls are made, aren't they? They ask a few hundred/thousand ppl for which party they're going to vote and present the results. Or even a better example they're doing that on the election day throughout the day and when they're over (at 19.00 in my country) they present the results on the news and they're never far off from the official results. They're usually just a few percents off, e.g. a party gets a seat more or less in the parliament. So my method must be very good and proven as well 
In a decent poll they are very careful about those that they select for the poll. There is significant bias in self selected polls in that the people that tend to respond care very strongly or have an agenda or are just those with more time on their hands and they aren't necessarily representative of the whole. If IS hadn't blurred their sales stats then looking at total sales on istockcharts.multimedia.de would have provided an interesting month to month comparison at least of the sales # if not the $ #. (In fact that might have been why they did that).
1922
« on: July 15, 2011, 19:14 »
I have about 15 zooms per sale, but my sales are all very small - more micro in size really. I mostly have micro images as RF w/ a few RM files. Not really worth my time yet, but a few >100$ sales could change that. I keep hoping.
1923
« on: July 15, 2011, 19:08 »
I think that making a search that really works makes the total # of files irrelevant for the agency. If there are a million isolated apples and someone searches for isolated apple a good search engine would show them those apples and the buyer will buy. That makes a happy customer and a happy agency. Now the chance that my isolated apple will sell is pretty small, but that is how this works already.
The real problem will be fixing or culling the bad keywords. Either someone needs to actually do this, or they need to make a search engine that can somehow tell and deliver relevant content w/o pages and pages of near identical images. DTs image flagging is one way to do it, but it doesn't seem like their program really works.
Someone else mentioned a field for what is actually in the image - that would be pretty nice, but who wants to go back and do it for the old images. It would be like istocks disambiguation mess, although if you pushed images w/o this field to the back of the search that would be a pretty good incentive.
Rather than having the search try to guess what you want based on previous experience, it would be nice to have the ability to have lots of settings and have them stay the way you set them until you reset them. So if you just want cheap files, you set it that way.
1924
« on: July 15, 2011, 17:56 »
I am pretty sure I had a self portrait release rejected for no witness, but it might not have been IS.
1925
« on: July 15, 2011, 17:52 »
...
Over the years theyve tried so many different strategies and they always corrected their mistakes. ...
From my point of view that is not true, unless you are still giving them time to correct mistakes from years ago. Although the changes announced last fall really are the biggies.
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