|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - StockBottom
26
« on: August 10, 2012, 01:36 »
Living fairly well with 150-200$ a month... What's the definittion of "fairly well"?
Paying retouchers $4.63 per hour is abusive. Funny how Yuri complains about the low royalties paid by the agencies, and look at peanuts he pays.
royalties are low because the cheap as-s micro buyers aren't willing to pay a fair price for a photo. and they do it because their cheap as-s clients aren't willing to pay a single dollar more. and the clients of the clients aren't willing to pay a dime more for the cheap products advertised in brochures filled by micro images. sorry, welcome to the real world ... and it can only get worse. as for salaries you better travel a bit more before talking about abusive payouts. a clerk at 7-eleven in Bangkok is paid no more than 200$ a month, a thai meal is 1-2$, a bus ride 0.3$ ... now, no idea about Cape Town but i don't think a guy earning 30$ per day is starving, quite the opposite !
27
« on: August 09, 2012, 21:52 »
The problem of "fair" fees exist for a long time
I seriously wonder why some people advocate the big agency
Yuri works fine.
80% might look unfair but if they spend 100 to make 120 to me it looks fair, there are very very few companies around making net profits above 30%, you guys forget that with their 80% fee they have to pay ALL the costs and the taxes, which in canada are at least 20-25%.
28
« on: August 09, 2012, 21:49 »
Youtube is owned by Google, which earned $2.8 billion after taxes in the last 3 months. Yahoo netted well over $200 million. Fighting to stay afloat? Seriously?
source : Bloomberg news, take a look and follow the Nasdaq index. no matter if they make profits, they're killed instantly when their stock is in free fall, Zynga lost 40% overnight last week, FB is going down to 20$ per stock, Yahoo changed 4 CEOs in 2 yrs ...
29
« on: August 09, 2012, 21:43 »
$4.5/hour a very good salary in most of the world?  I guess you mean, a very good salary for people living in very poor countries.
for instance in Thailand a good salary is 15$ a DAY, i mean in Bangkok, not in the countryside where 5-10$ is more than enough. china (apart in big cities), vietnam, burma, indonesia, philippines, india, nepal, same story ... that's roughly 2-3 billion people living fairly well with 150-200$ a month, so enough to say "in most of the world".
30
« on: August 09, 2012, 21:39 »
... and ebook sales are not compensating for the profits they were making with paper, as simple as that.
Er ... it's not actually as simple as you think. Ever heard of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' by EL James? Just happens to be the fastest selling and most profitable book of all time with the majority of sales in e-book format. Things change, businesses adapt.
yes but yet i would like to know how much their publishers had to spend in advertising and promotion to sell that book, any other newspaper and magazine and blog is talking about it, it can't be all free or "viral" promotion, i mean in many articles the news itself is about the book selling a lot, not about what the book is all about.
31
« on: August 09, 2012, 11:51 »
i don't say it's hopeless, i say it's very hard, risky, and takes a long time and lots of money and skills.
because of the internet now everyone thinks it's easy to sell stuff online while actually it's even harder
than with a brick and mortar store !
i'm personally trying to get my foot in the door of art galleries and it's a hard costly and sectarian business,
and even if you ever make a sale the gallery will keep 50% of it as that's the going rate, but for newbies
they could keep up to 80% of sale, take it or leave it, the demand is low, the buyers few, and you're not
famous, what do you do ?
in plus, nowadays any other 13 yrs old punk shooting junk with his iPhone and Instagram thinks to
be a fine art genius and you see people buying into this new trend along with stuff shot on Polaroid
and other conceptual rubbish.
i mean here you have the top selling micro photographer telling us his own agency is making profits
but he's not making a trillion $ out of it and he's got a whole marketing and sales team, if he can't why should we ?
I wouldn't say it is easy either, but the barrier to entry and path to a profit (I thought) was pretty low. A few months after I opened my store, I seriously wondered what these agencies were doing with their 80% of the share. They certainly didn't seem to be using it to bring in sales for me. My theory is that they waste it on staff that they probably don't need and ads that don't convert.
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 if you just run a small site you can get away with maybe 30-50$ a month, but once you scale your business it's quite another story, the costs are massive and that's exactly why facebook is losing millions, they run the biggest datacenter in the world and they get peanuts from their whole operation. as for ads not converting that's also quite another complex story and it's also the biggest limit for micro agencies, they can't chase customers on the phone or signing big deals like RM agencies do, all they can do is advertising on web channels targeting the cheapest buyers, but as i said before this model is flawed in my opinion as the product is too cheap, they exploited a niche making it so big that now it's mainstream while killing RM sales and now discovering they can barely pay the bills with it .. the moral of the story is dozens of respectable RM agencies had to go bankrupt to leave space for the micro agencies which are now scre-wing us in any way, talk about progress, "adapt or die", etc etc
32
« on: August 09, 2012, 11:30 »
It's true. This kind of forum tend to get very one-sided and not consider the agency's point of view. Valid point
no, they're all just jealous of your success. and indeed they never see the other side, if running an agency was such an easy and lucrative business anyone would do it and any other photographer would at least set up his shop on Photoshelter. well i know many people on Photoshelter and SmugMug and they can hardly pay the bills for the hosting. i mean even Magnum Photos is in dire straits, even Murdoch is talking about selling part of his news empire, we must accept nowadays selling photos is harder and harder, the whole publishing business is in turmoil and nobody can see a way out or an exit strategy, and ebook sales are not compensating for the profits they were making with paper, as simple as that. agencies are the ones making the market, chasing the buyers, selling them our photos, and sharing the profits. too many here downplay the role of agencies as if photos could be easily sell like hotcakes alone once they're online on a few web sites and once they're found on google images. it's BS, and i would be surprised if SS or IS make a net profit above 20% actually. so they make 20% ROI and we make 20% per sales, it's not as bad as it seems. making comparison with Apple taking 30% off any sale on iTunes is like apples and oranges, Apple sales are backed by their hardware (ipod, iphone, imac), stock agencies are not backed by canon or nikon and have to grab customers by themselves including getty and corbis, it's a cut throat business !
33
« on: August 09, 2012, 11:13 »
Maybe, you should try it before you decide it is hopeless. 
i don't say it's hopeless, i say it's very hard, risky, and takes a long time and lots of money and skills. because of the internet now everyone thinks it's easy to sell stuff online while actually it's even harder than with a brick and mortar store ! i'm personally trying to get my foot in the door of art galleries and it's a hard costly and sectarian business, and even if you ever make a sale the gallery will keep 50% of it as that's the going rate, but for newbies they could keep up to 80% of sale, take it or leave it, the demand is low, the buyers few, and you're not famous, what do you do ? in plus, nowadays any other 13 yrs old punk shooting junk with his iPhone and Instagram thinks to be a fine art genius and you see people buying into this new trend along with stuff shot on Polaroid and other conceptual rubbish. i mean here you have the top selling micro photographer telling us his own agency is making profits but he's not making a trillion $ out of it and he's got a whole marketing and sales team, if he can't why should we ?
34
« on: August 09, 2012, 11:02 »
What iStock is getting in supporting you is a person that gives little back to the community, shoots cheap because spending money on shoots would be less profitable, and takes the low hanging fruit because they are very accessible while making sure that he gets the biggest piece of the pie for himself.
and what you're getting from istock is being told to limit your uploads despite being their top sellers. i think here both Sean and Yuri are right, they just their goals on different ways. i've nothing against photo factories, and nothing against single photographers in their own studios cutting costs and producing as much as they can. however, i can't understand this diatribe about charity and giving back. istock is giving us NOTHING back, nor are the cheap as-s buyers who only choose micros to cut costs to the bone. considering the rock bottom payout we get from agencies i can't see any space left for extra charity or volunteering projects, many photographers are lucky to stay afloat actually.
35
« on: August 09, 2012, 10:54 »
You advertise on your site for retouchers at $4.63 per hour! You say you are running these bootcamps to pass on your knowledge on but really you want cheap pictures shot for your own personal gain, you've copied this idea from Simon Cowell and the X Factor and lets face it he's a very charitable guy that is just helping out new talent!
I have nothing against you making a good business, but please do not make out you are the new Mother Teresa.
no idea in South Africa but in most of the world 4.5$ per hour is a very good salary. i'm surprised he hasn't outsourced to India or Cambodia actually.
36
« on: August 09, 2012, 10:47 »
I refuse to believe you can't run a microstock agency profitably and still allow everyone to win. Shutterstock, like most of the others is simply trying to take the whole pie. Greed isn't a viable business plan.
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.
37
« on: August 09, 2012, 10:19 »
I don't want to take the thread off topic, but this is a very important point that you raise Yuri. Shutterstock has told us for years that our percentage was in the 25 to 33 percent range. Now that the numbers are public, it is obvious that we have been quite misled.
Congratulations on PeopleImages. As we have done with Warmpicture, many of us are obviously scrambling for a way to eliminate the need for agencies which bring the industry down, and mistreat artists.
agencies are the market makers, not an idiot "middleman". if you sell on your own you will need a sales team, and at the end of the day it could cost you more than selling on SS. look at many companies in the Nasdaq, they spend 100 to produce a 10% net gain on a good year. if SS is so greedy is because either they do so or they simply can't sustain their biz. and when a company goes public is also usually because the founders recognize they reached the peak and want to monetize. considering that here Yuri is confirming he's getting flat or sluggish sales overall the top micro agencies we should clearly see a pattern from all this : the whole microstock model is flawed, too cheap, and unsustainable when run on a massive scale.
38
« on: August 09, 2012, 09:36 »
as far as i know they're told to shoot in JPG, edit in PhotoMechanic, fix the exposure with PS, add a short caption, and FTP to the agency.
they don't care about using high ISO, noise, grain, whatever, the only thing that matters is getting the images on sale before the other agencies.
as for the price, it's usually a flat fee subscription, the photographer get a standard salary + eventual bonuses + stock fees.
39
« on: August 09, 2012, 09:30 »
sorry this is just aerial photography, not fine-art.
as for sales, i don't think there's any chance to make big sales both on micros and macros, because of the high production costs the few people doing money with these things are working under assignments.
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
