I tried to give Dreamstime the benefit of the doubt, I really did.  But what benefit can there be to participating in a trial where my work is given to customers and I get no direct benefit beyond a hope (not in the original letter) that some compensation may be given when the trial is done?  The loss to me may be small, but the benefit is even smaller if it exists at all.  And beyond that it's all unknowns, including the duration of the trial.  The only reason I can see to participate is that opting out means losing any third party sales as well.  Better to opt out for now until and unless more information becomes available that changes the equation.

Start by figuring out why your IPTC data isn't getting handled by all those sites.  Bigstock has no problem reading mine, and I don't bother with more categories than are essential.  One or two at most, and I assign those to a batch of related images in one operation.

Dreamstime likewise retrieves everything.  It takes longer to submit, since I have to submit each image individually, but the new Autopopulate at least makes MR and category assignment relatively painless.

Regarding your complaint about Shutterstock, I'm reminded of Henny Youngman's line: "Doctor, it hurts when I do that.  Don't do that."  Turn on Javascript, at least while you're submitting.  Takes me seconds to set categories and releases.

I had become exclusive at IS when StockXpert was shut down, so I didn't have work migrated to Hemera. Has it been making money via Thinkstock?

Not for me.  StockXpert/Hemera has more than 10x the images of iStock, and yet it produced 1/10 the income on Thinkstock over the last year.  That's down from 7x a year ago.  No idea why there's such a large disparity.

Quote from: disorderly on May 21, 2014, 11:41

Really?  I've had most of my portfolio up on Stockfresh since they went live four years ago, and in all that time they've produced nothing.  123RF earns me more in a month than Stockfresh has done in four years, and Shutterstock does about twice that.  SF has been a waste of time and energy, and demonstrates that a storefront with no marketing plan won't produce sales.

The question was about potential, not current earnings.

From the OP:

Quote

Please disregard the current sales performance of your media type, instead consider the potential return per sale and track record of the company in the stock media marketplace.

From their track record I get that they have no interest and maybe no ability to spend money to market their site.  That tells me they have no potential to be more than a flyspeck in this industry.  "If you build it, he will come" works great as a movie catchphrase.  In the real world it hardly ever works out.

I'm not worried at all.  Even if this patent survives a challenge, the arrangement it describes looks nothing like any lighting setup I have ever used or even seen in use.  It's bad law, no question.  But I'd love to see it taken up in court.

If my SS sales continue to be slashed by 80% a day, and it is the result of DPC, and it is persistent, and I am not the only one seeing it and suffering it, then what's next?

Those are four separate questions, and I would dispute all but the first.  I believe you if you say your sales are down so far.  Mine aren't; in fact at this moment I'm on track for a record month.  It could still tank, especially with a holiday weekend coming up in the US.  But I'm doing very well at SS this month and I doubt I'm in the minority.

And even if lots of people are down, is it all because of DPC?  Maybe but I doubt it.  As the old saying goes, "The plural of anecdote is not data."  That a few clients may decide to sample DPC is bad, but it's not enough to make me panic over the whole market.  Especially when a lot of suppliers have either pulled their content or won't put up any more.  Fotolia is also at risk here; if DPC costs them new and valuable content at both their sites, they may have hastened their collapse.  I can only hope.

There's another saying that's relevant here: "Post hoc ergo propter hoc."  That means "After, therefore because of."  Sometimes it's true, but it's often not.  The establishment of DPC may precede a decrease in sales for some suppliers to some other sites, but that doesn't mean that it's the cause of that decrease.  We look for patterns, and we often see them when they aren't there because we expect and want the Universe to behave in an orderly fashion.  That's why people see the face of Jesus in toast.  It's not a miracle; it's just a belief system gone haywire.

It's wise to be concerned, but in this case the instructions are real.  They are dealing with the aftermath of the Heartbleed bug, which might have let someone get to your current password on any websites that relied on OpenSSL for their security.  Now that they have patched their sites, everybody needs to change passwords to be safe.  And to be doubly secure, make sure you use a different, unguessable password at each site.

To verify the instructions you were given, examine the URL in the email and make sure it goes to one of Envato's domains.  Don't just look at the URL as it appears in the email; look at the HTML code to see where it really points.  If the domain in the URL looks weird or you just aren't sure, contact Envato's support people.

At a constant aperture, increasing the ISO from 100 to 400 will only halve the exposure time, not quarter it as you suggest above.

I'd love to see a source for this.  Pretty darn sure ISO changes are linear: from ISO 100 to 200 you need half the light, from 200 to 400 half again and so on.  This corresponds to the old ASA film speed system.  According to Wikipedia there's a second ISO standard that corresponds to the old DIN specification; that one is logarithmic rather than linear.

I don't see that this news changes anything, at least in regards to DPC.  DPC is still a lousy deal.  And yes, you get a few percent extra on Fotolia sales if you're opted in to DPC, but that's balanced out by the likelihood that you won't see those sales.  Why should anyone pay Fotolia's higher prices for content that's available on DPC?

I'll stay out of DPC, and I'll continue to remove my work from Fotolia a drop at a time.  Thanks for the extra income, assuming I see any, but you're still untrustworthy in the extreme.

I have about 60% more images on 123RF than on Dreamstime.  Over the past two years I've made 4X as much on 123RF as DT.  I submit large numbers of images from the same shoot, which can give me a lot of downloads.  DT's level system doesn't help me much at all, since my downloads get distributed among many different images instead of promoting a few.  I'd expect somebody with a more carefully selected portfolio to do better on DT.

A contrary data point regarding sales.  Envato is my #4 earner behind Shutterstock, 123RF, and iStock.  Pretty impressive for a site I joined just three years ago.

To put some numbers to Elena's remarks, I can get 10 images for $10 on DPC.  That's one heck of a cheap deal if I only need a few images.  How many do I really need before it looks like a steal?  One at $10?  Two at $5 each?  Three at $3.33?  Even if I only need a few, it's amazingly cheap.

Contrast that with Shutterstock, where two images in a Pay As You Go plan cost $14.50 each.  If I need three, they'll be $16.33 each (using the 5 image pack).  Four will be $12.25 each.  Five will be $9.80 each.  And things don't get cheaper until I buy a 25 image pack, which is $9.16 each, assuming of course I need all 25.

Subscriptions get you cheap images, but only if you need and download a lot over the course of your agreement.  Most clients download a small fraction of their monthly maximum, so each download isn't nearly as cheap as it seems.  And clients grab a lot of images they wouldn't take if they were paying by the download.  It's not a coincidence that I often see a lot of downloads from the same shoot.  I'm not the only one who benefits from clients' "might as well - I've already paid for them" attitude.

Problem is that DPC is the ideal subscription for the client who only needs a few images, and who wants the cheapest possible deal.  And even worse for us, it's not a subscription at all; it's a Pay As You Go credit model for those incredibly cheap images.  It's undercutting the competition by more than half, and that's why I opted out as soon as I could.  Oh, and I'm still slowly removing the last few images from Fotolia's main site.  Might as well get one or two more payouts on my way out the door.

Thats shocking if true.

Really?  From the agency that pays suppliers in Euros at a different rate than those of us who signed up with Dollar accounts?  I'd be more shocked if they weren't trying some sort of Divide & Conquer tactics.