Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on June 18, 2009, 02:38Microsoft usually never gets the first or second version of something right but they almost always eventually figure out the right formula.

After suffering from a preinstalled Vista for over a year, I finally reverted to WinXP, and that one starts to look very good now.

Quote from: Lee Torrens on June 18, 2009, 02:16Microsoft doing search is like Corbis doing microstock. It's just not their ballgame.

Corbis > Veer > Veer Marketplace = microstock. That's a very bold statement. 

Quote from: tan510jomast on June 17, 2009, 13:51when I date, I date sincere women

Those are like Snow White, Santa Claus and honest lawyers. They don't exist. 

Quote from: goldenangel on June 16, 2009, 14:26
Only 5 sub sales this month for me.

123rf : April = 32.91$, May = 8.29$, June = 3.77$.

Quote from: puravida on June 17, 2009, 13:33You don't like IS?

Everybody likes IS. The problem is that IS doesn't like everybody 

Quote from: tvphoto on June 17, 2009, 00:08My uploads to SS are intentionally down at "minimum acceptable size".  You want larger, you pay for larger.

Nobody prevents you from uploading minimal size to DT too.

Quote from: stockastic on June 16, 2009, 22:57Yes, 'quality'.  In other words, they want to keep selling what's been selling in the past.  New images from new contributors go nowhere.

New images from old contributors too 

Quote from: Lcjtripod on June 17, 2009, 00:16Perhaps I should focus my attention to a different site.

For some reason, DT un-favors recent images. The most recent I sold is from end February. All the others are 1-3 years old. The "recent" sale was found without keywords. That means it's the result of a buyer wandering off in your port and reverting to visual search. The message is upload, and ... wait.

Quote from: melastmohican on June 17, 2009, 00:43I must be masochist.

You must 
Just had a look. 8 sales on June 8, one for 3$. Just 4 sales since then, all of my top 4 photos there, always the same. It's a nice and quiet site that gives a good and steady side income.

Quote from: stockastic on June 17, 2009, 01:47I'd say that Getty will simply shut down StockXpert and any others they buy that compete with IS.  But they won't do it in a day, because they don't want to lose customers. The whole idea is to take down these sites in stages while herding all their existing customers over to IS.

At least it's clear now what Getty plans to do with StockXpert: they bought their customers, not their contributors.
But somehow, it doesn't make sense, since many images on StockXpert are not on IS. If I were Getty, I would position StockXpert as a B-site and IS as an A-site. Losing all those StockXpert non-IS images to the competition (DT,SS,FT) is dumb. Independents on both IS and StockXpert could be encouraged to delete their IS images on StockXpert, and keep the left-overs on StockXpert. That would be corporate logic: different quality, different prices, maximize income, not feeding the competition.

Quote from: MichaelJay on June 16, 2009, 14:58

Quote from: FlemishDreams on June 16, 2009, 14:26What did I miss?

Maybe, that your royalty payments are not necessarily an indication of overall market size?

Yes, I'm biased 

Quote from: madelaide on June 17, 2009, 00:52Is my "index" what they call "your points" in "account options"? Then mine is 46.25.

That's about as low as it can get  - Mine was 79 when I left. Some people have almost 9,000.

Quote from: Milinz on June 16, 2009, 20:29It is true that FP is adopting just facts and they are that microstock photos goes to standard (microstock) category.
Mid-stock will be live and running much better than before due to clear term authors must accept - that is not to sell photos on microstock or to list them less expensive than they listed at FP...

I'm not happy at all that FP was forced down this road, let that be clear. FP used to be the dream business model site for contributors. I can just observe that the "gold"/midstock images can only be sold at Alamy and Zymmetrical, and not on DT for instance, since DT has a subscription program. The "midstock" of FP is different from other midstock and much more restrictive in the sense that you can't have those pictures on cheaper sites. The question is whether FP is worthwhile to park "gold images"/midstock since those inevitably will return more on DT, SS, IS. Simply said: I don't want to trade hypothetical big sales on FP for proven and steady lower sales at DT,SS,IS.

As far as I can read on the FP test site, subscription is unlimited as to size, and a sale will be less (0.35$) than on SS.

FP is undeniably on its way down (compare the ranks of FP on Cubestat and CC on Cubestat with DT on Cubestat) and it's in fact a new beginning site with a mix of subscription and midstock.

Quote from: gostwyck on June 17, 2009, 02:22Move along now. Nothing to see here.

Correct. The best years were 2005, 2006 and 2007, before the whole world started shooting backgrounds and handshaking businessmen for microstock. Then came the credit crunch, obama, lucky oliver and the swine flu. Business men don't shake hands any more to avoid catching the flu, and real estate sites can't afford luxury mansion pictures any more. It's too late.

Quote from: sharply_done on June 16, 2009, 04:25Why are you still involved with them? If you view all microstock agencies as parasites, why are you still involved in this industry?

Because living with a parasite is better than no life at all?  

The question is too generalizing. Some sites behave like parasites, some don't at all. I would never describe SS and certainly DT as "parasites". About a couple of others, I have my doubts. I have left those or never joined.

Quote from: bobkeenan on June 16, 2009, 15:16Any other thoughts on exclusive photos?

IMHO and in general, it's a bad idea. I would like to make one exception, and that is the DT assignment. I won it once, and in most other cases, the assignment image made me good money. It gets escalated to level 5 which means more return and more emphasis in the search engine. In other cases, don't consider exclusivity. You'll never know who's going to be next year's darling site. They all play with us, so let's play with them (sad but true). The worst you can do is go exclusive with Istock. You are not even allowed to sell your declined images elsewhere. In our middle ages ages in Europe, we called this serfdom. I'd rather die and only shoot weddings than be a slave. 

Quote from: hlth on June 15, 2009, 09:31Flemish Dream. If MP doesn't cut it for you, what small or mid microstock sites do you use? Or do you stick t the bigger ones at this stage?

When everybody had more or less the same rating on MP, I had sales twice per month. Then, the rating game started to play. A year or so ago, the site manager stated here that sales were important for the rating, and there was a mechanism in place to deter 1-2 raters that want to kill their competition. Both statement are blunt lies as I observed. Sold photos don't count for the rating at all, and they don't advance the photo itself. I had a "competitor" that gave me 1's and 2's in a row and I observed my rating not advancing for a while, whatever I did (logging in/out in their very slow site, "write your comment here", and things).

Sure, some people report regular sales on MP here, but their index is over 1,000. That means they must spend a lot of time commenting and rating. MP promised to get better for a year but nothing happened. A year with no sale is the limit for me, for any site. Keeping a site in your list is a burden timewise, and I want to limit myself now to sites that sell without having to socialize and comment.

"Midstock" has been a disaster. LO went down (and I made 8$ or so there), FP had to abandon its midstock concept, and Zymmetrical sells OK but not enough to spend much time on the cumbersome and flawed upload/submission system. Cutcaster sounded promising but after 3 sales in February, the site is dead for me. I don't know really of any midstock site that sells enough to pass payout level at least once per year for a moderate contributor like myself.

The only ones that meet that goal are DT and SS, and I'm thinking of putting my next batches exclusively at DT, and slowly cutting down on the rest. Now that the price competition started "for as low as 0.06$", I'm concentrating more and more again on assignement, like weddings. Those people don't complain about LCV and noise, and a D40 is enough.

I got his email from StockXpert too : "As you may already know, iStockphoto is the industry leader in microstock."

I didn't know that.   Looking at my earnings, ShutterStock is the leader. What did I miss?

Quote from: sjlocke on June 14, 2009, 02:12LCV?

Low Commercial Value. Looking at the iStock homepage, it accepts more creative and "unusable" shots than for instance Dreamtime, that plays it more safe.

After two years, I just canceled my MP account. My "Index" is was still under 85 since I don't have to time to play their silly Flickerish rating game. Some are over almost at 9,000. Sales don't count at all for the silly system at MP, as was denied by Arian before. I had three sales in the begin when the rating system didn't count that much, but for over a year, I had no sales at all. It's quite obvious you have to waste a lot of time commenting and rating to be successful there, and that's what brings you in front of the search engine. Sorry, I have better things to do.

Bye bye Mostphotos.

Quote from: sharply_done on June 13, 2009, 20:12What you are referring to is called Revenue per Image (RPI). This varies a great deal in this industry, but I think a broad line can be made between amateurs/hobbyists, who typically earn something in the $1-1.50 per image per month range

As an amateur, I don't even make 1/3 of that.

Quote from: madelaide on June 13, 2009, 20:13I agree it should be so, but the image is hidden somewhere.  It must be in the server, but not linked anywhere visible.

In that case Google is to blame not to respect the decision of the site admin keeping the picture out of his links. One reason this could happen is keeping a non-linked directory with full size pictures with no "index.html" in where you have to put "noindex,nofollow". When you don't that, the entire directory shows up as a list with files in it, and it's very easy to retrieve/download them.

Many people use the slack size on their server to backup their images full size and they should be aware of that, especially once Google Images is going to be able to read the IPTC metadata. Put a blank "index.html" in every directory you want to keep away from Google or anybody else, and put an "noindex,nofollow" into it. One could expect social networking sites to do that. It's pretty useless to make a profile private if all images on that site are grouped into a server/directory that is in reach of Google and anybody else that knows the proper file names.

Quote from: averil on June 13, 2009, 23:58After looking at Jonathan Ross' talk it's obvious that those images are available, but at RM prices.

That was my impression about Avava's presentation too. He has a lot of very creative and wonderful stuff and I wondered if it would pass the LCV barrier of microstock.

Quote from: madelaide on June 14, 2009, 00:47Youtube...

"This video is not available in your country because of copyright restrictions".
Is the planet copyrighted? 

Quote from: lisafx on June 10, 2009, 17:13Any suggestions???

As Milinz said, use the HTML upload. I just went to the 10-image application process and HTML upload is workflow-wise almost as easy as FTP since you can select multiple files to be uploaded. Actually it's not a real HTML upload but a hidden flash thing. Overall, Im very impressed with the smooth and very pleasing aesthetic programming of the submission part of the site.

As to IPTC import, they still have some flaws when the data have been rewritten with Irfanview. Just like in the BigStock title, they always take the first version that you write in there, not the subsequent alterations.