Quote from: Ariene on May 08, 2014, 06:06

Quote from: roede-orm on May 08, 2014, 05:37

Must be new. The option was not there, when we started the thread. I see this as a small success! But you can't  say precisely, this switch is an eyecatcher 

Success?!  Lol, somehow this word doesn't fit in here for me, don't know why...   
Sorry, couldn't help myself...

Tell me, what would you call it? Defeat?

How about the first step on a long road that has no foreseeable end?

I don't know much about profit margin or what it exactly means, maybe someone could explain that.  I see according to Motley Fool that Shutterstock has a profit margin of around 11%, how is it possible that iStock had 6 times that?  http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/sstk/guru-analysis/fool

Unfortunately, Bruce does not explain which "profit" he is referring to.  In most businesses, profit can be expressed is any one of several ways.  On most P&L statements, all profit points are noted.  These are as follows:

Gross profit ... sales minus labor, material and overhead costs (some businesses do not include overhead costs at this point).
Net profit ... gross profit less S,G & A expenses (sales, general and administrative costs).
EBIT ... earnings before interest and taxes
EAIT ... earnings after interest and taxes (this is the final bottom line number often referred to as the southeast corner of the P&L statement).

The Motley Fool report indicates the SS profit percentage is the EAIT figure, but we do not know which point Bruce is referring to.

Note that different countries have differing rules on how a company must report it's earnings and may have different names for the different points.  But at the end of the day, it's what the company puts in it's bank account after all bills and expenses have been paid and accounted for that matters.

My work flow is as follows:  Shoot in RAW (5DII). Open in PS CS6 RAW convertor.  Make whatever adjustments needed to all images simultaneously.  Save as TIFF.  Open the TIFF files in Helicon Focus and let it do it's thing.  Save output as a TIFF file.  Open this TIFF file in PS CS6 and finish any post processing, including adding all metadata.  Never had any problems following this sequence.

I can pretty well sum it up in two words ... it sucks!  Right now it looks like DT, IS and 123RF will outsell them this month.

Barry, you get minuses if you just say it's a beautiful day and we should all get outdoors and enjoy the sunshine.   

I've a batch of 9 images pending since March 10.  Why should we have to send an e-mail to prod them along?  They're not all that great of an agency to begin with.

http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/infographic-shutterstocks-global-design-trends-2014
http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/2013/02/infographic-shutterstocks-global-design-trends-2013/

Best sellers of video, photo, illustration, and vector from 2013:  11,340
Best sellers of photo, illustration, and vector (not including video) from 2012:  13,968

Without even including videos for 2012 the best sellers had 20% less sales than the best sellers from the previous year.  I don't know if that means best sellers are punished or there is something else at work but a 20% decline seems significant especially when Shutterstock had 100 million downloads last year (28% of the total downloads were in 2013).  Average downloads per image in the library stayed at about the same level, maybe even increasing slightly.

That sounds to me like while overall sales are going up (according to SS), best sellers are becoming a smaller proportion of the total mix.  Thus the remaining sales are spread out among more and more individual images and could be a part of the reduction (dilution) of individual income many contributors are reporting.  More images ... greater competition.

Can you imagine iStock or Getty sending out a message such as this?  It would rank right up there with Alice in Wonderland or Hansel and Gretel as high fantasy.   

Keywords have always been broken up there. They are relisted alphabetically. No phrases but if a phrase is put into the search box with all the words it works the same.

Thanks.  Guess I never noticed it before or I had always used single words.  Anyway, so long as it works and DT doesn't care about odd-ball floating individual words I can live with it.

Last year I had occasion to replace a laptop with a newer version.  Unfortunately it came pre-loaded with Windows 8.  I struggled with it for about a month and finally threw up my hands over the beyond useless OS.  I took it in to a friend of mine who runs a computer repair business.  Together we stripped out Windows 8 and replaced it with Windows 7, upgraded the appropriate utility drivers and all has worked fine ever since.  Makes you wonder when people are willing to get rid of the "latest and greatest" technology and spend money to go back to older versions that actually work and make sense.

I understand this is no longer an option for most computers as they have changed the utilities such that Windows 7 drivers no longer work with them, only Windows 8 drivers.

I trust that's not a reviewer in the foreground working on a laptop.   

Just received an e-mail from iStock indicating that on January 23, 2014 my redeemed RC rate was accidentally set to pre 2014 levels.  They have now reset it and have added all monies I should have received to my account.

Apparently things can go both ways.  Note I did not receive any claw-back notice and no funds have been removed from my account.

Anyone else seeing this?

Showing solidarity of spirit with a deactivated file from IS

What an appropriate location for the iStock watermark.  You couldn't have planned it any better.