Quote from: AttilaTheNun on October 27, 2011, 07:40

Quote from: antistock on October 25, 2011, 15:22all indicators are showing microstock is a declining industry

For the individual contributor yes. For the agencies no.

I find it quite amazing that after years and years most ppl still just can't make that distinction

This almost always comes from your email getting hacked, as a communication centre for most ppl thats the main target, keep a close on eye it - delete mails containing password, etc. Hackers won't kidnap your models, what they are looking for is e-money on paypal etc.

I got 71 dls yesterday starting from early morning, and 0 yet today. Weird. Anyone having similar experience?

Quote from: cthoman on October 25, 2011, 22:21
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll have to take a look at those. Although, I probably won't be doing much gaming. My mouse spends most of its time in Illustrator or surfing.

esport mice are the best ever built for anything. after a year using the xai, using the regular ms or logitech simply on a desktop felt like guiding a very drunk fat person by the shoulder. they don't track 50% of the time just most ppl have nothing to compare it to.

Yep, mouse is the one most underestimated factor in workflow, in fact it's so underestimated, almost nobody even thinks of it - real photoshop fulltime pros do tho. I used to be a serious gamer, tournaments and all back in quakeworld, so when I re-dsicovered quake live, I also bought me a steelseries xai... I cut thru my photoshopping almost twice as fast with it. No misses with the tools. All the computer branded mouses that most people get feel like unhandleable junk in comparison.

Quote from: Slovenian on October 22, 2011, 16:07

Quote from: cclapper on October 22, 2011, 15:20

Quote from: Sadstock on October 22, 2011, 13:31

Quote from: cobalt on October 22, 2011, 11:40

I find it very hard to believe that "they are out to get me". I know most people here think, the exclusives are naive, we are not. We have met many people from the team, and they are all hard working, very dedicated people.

---------------------------------------

I agree nobody is out to get you or anyone else.  I certainly don't think you or top tier exclusives are naive, and I certainly value your input.  I've also met a number of the istock management and I agree they are hard working and dedicated people.  I don't think that is the group of people that Slovenian is talking about.  I think he's talking about Getty and H&F and I don't think that that those people care about exclusives or independents one bit.

The one thing that is surprising to me is how long the original Istock staff is hanging onto their jobs.  I don't think most of them have much future with Istock/Getty.  As the content line blurs more and more, the need for dedicated Istock staff (marketing, accounting, and likely inspectors too) decreases and the impact of their salaries on the bottom line becomes more and more apparent. 

I agree and I have not met a number of istock management, but I suppose they are nice people. Most contributors here are nice people. The people at Getty making all the decisions are probably nice people too. But this is business (remember?). Niceness doesn't have anything to do with it! I don't know why people seem to think that those two statements even belong in the same sentence. The people at Getty and H&F want their money. Period. And no, they don't care about anything but their own bottom line and their own interests.

Nice or not, their greedy capitalistic logic is not going to work long term, instead of milking the cow, they'll settle for huge short term profits, mess up the site completely and then sell it. IS will never recover if it keeps on going like this for a while. Unless they have some super strategy which is taking longer than expected to incorporate (I highly doubt that).

And of course I wish traffic would go up, why wouldn't I want to earn more? Unless it goes to sites that will pay me at least 3 times the royalties (50%+)

H&F mission statement pretty much sais they come, milk cash out and lave, and do all that as fast as possible, if you can read between the lines.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on October 24, 2011, 14:59
Of course, the funny thing is that there is so much competition between HCV images that unless your "smiling girl with headset" image is outstanding it is likely to have zero commercial value.
Maybe, in the end, competition will reach the point where everything has s0d all commercial value.

If you shoot models at least it's a new face that customers might like or even fall in love with. An apple... is an apple... so as time goes on shooting models might just be one of the few things that still make sense. Attractive ones of course, sex appeal triumphs over 'credibility' anyday.

Is this new to anybody?? lol really, most of the packshots, etc, I got from companies or did myself were CG already with separate layers for each side of the box and logo f.e., years and years ago.

Quote from: Slovenian on October 20, 2011, 09:30

Quote from: Perry on October 20, 2011, 09:01
It's also funny that you  said you were shooting weddings... that's not a very harsh condition in my books

I think you should make a note or even a change in your books Wedding Fight in Ulyanovsk, Russia

turf war! that happens if you feed them, they get accustomed to human presence, and these creatures are very territorial : )

Quote from: collis on October 21, 2011, 07:33
Hey Pixart,

Ah yes there is quite a bit of support in theme selling. It's much less a *passive* income stream than photography. I think Orman's themes are one of the easier to use (this is total hearsay I've never tried myself )

The royalty structure on all our marketplaces is as follows:

• Exclusive authors earn 50-70% based on their sales volume. Once they have sold $75,000 they have hit the 70% mark (it's an incremental scale going up in 1% blocks). After $75k they enter our Elite Author group and get further rewards. We are actually closing on our first author to break $1 million in sales!! You can learn about the Elite Author program here: http://elite.envato.com
• Non-exclusive authors earn 25% of every sale as a flat fee. As you might guess, our marketplaces are heavily slanted towards exclusive authors. In fact close to 99% of all files sold on our marketplaces are by exclusive authors. Though as we branch into new areas like photos, that's changing a bit

Hope that helps!

Do you accept just PSD templates, ordo  you demand funcional webdesigns with most of the programming, html etc, done ?

Quote from: jamesbenet on October 20, 2011, 01:03
The Lytro camera released today outputs 11 megarays or around 1 Megapixel with 1080px on its height. No word on the width but I'm betting 1200px.   Hardly stock material. 

In a few generations it will be an incredible tool in the arsenal but right now it is pretty useless besides net pic sharing.  In Macro imaging and microscopy where you usually have to layer and merge several depth exposures this camera could revolutionize those markets.

Lets hope the technology survives until it matures in the market.  I have a Lytro order option right now that lapses in a week. Somehow I don't think it is enough resolution to buy it.   At 3MP it would be a different story, 1MP is just too low.

I bet you thats an already heavily upsampled resolution.

I see you can play jenga with it if you get bored of the thumbnail size pictures. : ) Despite that I bet it will be a lot of fun, and all bloggers or even semi serious online news repoters will get one.

"U SUCK" 

Quote from: lagereek on October 18, 2011, 17:02
DO NOT SPIT ON THE HAND THAT FEED YOU AND YOUR KIDS.

ohh, remember they HAD TO cut royalties, and adjust the tiers so they don't go bankrupt. So... when will they announce banktrupcy and close shop now, with sales dropping? ; ) btw what' costing them so much? Are they building a spaceship? or maybe lobo gets an enormous paycheck for molesting people on their forum. : )

Some serious pro (yuri maybe) mentioned here, that according to his estimates most buyers don't even dl 30% of their package. A very-very well setup sytem building on human habits abd psyche

Quote from: retrorocket on October 14, 2011, 16:46
@fujiko

"I like your comparison of the reasons behind the protest to the belief around Santa and Easter."

These protesters seem to want some form of socialism to make things more equal, right? That would require an even larger central government. If you can't trust the politicians with allowing free speech, would you be so naive to trust them to equally redistribute all the money from the banks and the rich people?

"The protests don't happen because they lost trust on politicians, the protests happen because the latests politics consists only on saving the rich at expenses of the poor, bailouts to save banks or companies that give huge bonuses."

If the government was smaller and had less power then there would have been no safety net for banks. They would have gone out of business and no CEOs would have received big bonuses at our expense. If we the tax payers put less money into the system then the politicians have less money to spend on their corporate sponsors.

"It will grow and spread because things are not going any better and politicians are acting against their own people. It's history unfolding."

So will this change be the result of all these people voting or something else?

@Ithn

"Oh yeah, jobs will just appear   I see that's the plan nowadays, lets wait and stuff will appear... "

Nice try, but I will explain it to you anyways. The market is cyclical. It expands and contracts. In a recession, businesses cut jobs and during an expansion they add jobs. It's not magic.

What Does Business Cycle Mean?
The recurring and fluctuating levels of economic activity that an economy experiences over a long period of time. The five stages of the business cycle are growth (expansion), peak, recession (contraction), trough and recovery. At one time, business cycles were thought to be extremely regular, with predictable durations, but today they are widely believed to be irregular, varying in frequency, magnitude and duration.

Since the World War II, most business cycles have lasted three to five years from peak to peak. The average duration of an expansion is 44.8 months and the average duration of a recession is 11 months. As a comparison, the Great Depression - which saw a decline in economic activity from 1929 to 1933 - lasted 43 months.

That's from:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/businesscycle.asp#axzz1alrj1Zgd

Yes they add jobs during expansion.... nad it is happening, they are adding jobs. In China. You seem to have forgotten while pondering that wonderful model that the US f.e. isn't actually the whole world, they are just 4-5% of its population.

Quote from: lagereek on October 14, 2011, 06:20
Well I have just had a private mail here, telling me about my personal attack on some people in my thread about "copycats" which was removed. Now anybody reading that thread must surely have seen it was a comical thread, with an ironic undertone,  hence the smiley!   but sadly, not so. Instead some took this as a personal attack, well?

Dan!  however, was right,  this is what its come to. Sadly this forum is degenerating to a similarity of the DPR,  where you cant even mention a camera brand and all hell breaks out.

Frustration, jealousy, bitterness and anger, is nowdays the criteria of the MSG, which seems to be accepted not just by most members here but also by the Admin.

I have no use for that and I cant belittle myself to share such values and thinking. It should be beneath ones dignity.

So sorry and thousands of appologies to the ones mentioned in the Copycat-thread.

Thanks for this time around and dont get swallowed up by bitterness and jealousy

Anything gets cut that hits a bit rougher tone of voice - which tone is an absolute neccessity when dealing with most people. Even kids know that, only childish adults don't who never grew up. Those want kidergartens for adults with pink fences and pink grass, and little pink saliva fountain : )

Quote from: retrorocket on October 14, 2011, 09:31

...The economy sucks right now but it will come back and those jobs will appear...

Oh yeah, jobs will just appear   I see that's the plan nowadays, lets wait and stuff wil appear... and I see things like that being put as an argument! ROTFL really ,tho I know some wise men here don't like these weird teeny acronyms. Thanks to all that wiseness this is a collapse, and the three centers in the euro - dollar - china triangle area rooting for the others to go down first, so the remaining capitol would flee to them, giving them several good years before they go up in smoke, or maybe this time they og uo in the lack of smoke. : ) Has anybody any news on whether Chavez is getting his gold or not? That could be a new war.

Quote from: cobalt on October 12, 2011, 15:52
I think sharing how much is being paid out to the artists would be a good...

we already know that, it's about 20%, or less for most of them...

Quote from: williamju on October 12, 2011, 08:54
its revenue is around $400 million this year, I imagine all the rest of iStock competitors summed up may just reach this figure, so iStock take at least 40% of micrstock market.

The figure is from microstockdiary:
iStockphoto's Dittmar Frohman presented on the Past, Present and Future of microstock. Despite explaining how he couldn't provide any numbers, a few interesting ones were mentioned. Most interestingly were the weekly royalty payout amount now up to $1.9million,

1.9 x 52 x 4(royalty from 15% - 45%, I used 4 here) = $400million

Market estimation figure is from a owner of stock photo agency.

link to the article? Those might just be past numbers even if just several months old, considering how istock seems to be sinking very recently.

I don't shoot but I do render for christmas. But if you shoot models outdoors like me, it's gonna be seasonal too anyway. : ) The one year lag is not cool tho : )

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on October 11, 2011, 18:51

Quote from: ShadySue on October 11, 2011, 16:27

Quote from: lagereek on October 11, 2011, 14:48
They simply dont have the traffic, its as simple as that. That fact alone makes the site worthless.

Sadly you may have a point.
I know Alexa is nothing like the whole story, but:

That's got very little relationship to my sales rankings, which are, in order,  SS, iS, DT, TS, Fotolia. TS is probably  understated because it isn't visited by submitters the way others are.

alexa is pretty good, you can trust their numbers

Quote from: loop on October 11, 2011, 20:04
Well, but making the rule of "if you sell your product elshewere cheaper we'll match this price" is not price fixing prices at all. And many internet business do that, beggining with Amazon.

No, they are trying to go around negotiating the price, even if thru some 'third party'

Quote from: timburton on October 10, 2011, 15:56

Quote from: Alessa on October 10, 2011, 13:30
Hi everybody,
We've seen a lot of guesswork going on in this thread as to what's happening, and we'd like to make it absolutely clear that we are not part of any sort of arrangement with Fotolia to keep prices in the industry at a certain level.
That being said, it is true that we here at Yuri Arcurs Photography, as many other photographers, have contacted amongst others Deposit Photos to make them aware of where the industry will be heading in a short time if they continue to drop prices. This has resulted in Deposit Photos having raised their prices. We encourage every photographer to engage in negotiations with whatever agency they submit images to in order to get a fair commission. The agencies cannot and should not agree on prices amongst them, so Fotolia will never negotiate any deals with Deposit Photos, but the photographers who submit images to the agencies can and should do so.

I hope this clarifies some of the questions which have been raised in this thread.

Best
Alessa
Yuri's personal assistant

Quote from: chad_fotolia on October 03, 2011, 22:26
Folks,

After carefully considering your feedback, we've decided to focus on retail pricing rather than commissions. Most of the photographers that we have spoken to agree that destructive retail pricing is not good for the industry. We have worked with industry leaders such as Yuri Arcurs and Mark Butler (Monkey Business) to convince agencies like deposit photos to sell at sustainable prices reflected by the current online market leaders. We applaud their recent success and hope the trend will continue. We encourage all photographers with portfolios on this and similar sites to do the same.

Based on your feedback, we've modified our rule to allow Fotolia to decrease retail pricing to the lowest tier, if a photographer's images are being sold on other sites for significantly less, **without** modifying the royalty levels.

Please note that this rule only applies to Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, and Diamond ranked images that are non-exclusive, and selling at prices above the standard XS price. No changes will occur without prior communications with the artist.

Chad Bridwell
Director of Operations
Fotolia.com

Note to anyone who dislikes fotolia- what theyve done is illegal and they would be fined for it in most countries. If one company tells another (via a supplier or otherwise) to raise their prices, it's called "price fixing". You can read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing
Anyone who has an issue with this company is advised to contact the relevant authorities in their countries.

Exactly, finally someone actually paying attention to the important things, not this yada industry negotiate yada. Price fixing is a serious crime that can (and often did) land people in prison in many countries

the same thing will all these agendas, anti terrorism, anti smoking, anti anyhing, at the end of the day they are used as an excuse by some frustrated moron who just wants to molest other people.