...Why go the trouble of dealing with photographers when you can generate the precise image you need in CGI?...

Because CGI doesn't look anything like (a) the world as seen through our eyes or (b) a photograph. Nothing wrong with CGI, but it's no more the same as a photograph as a vector illustration is.

And getting a street scene from Boston or New York would be a lot of work to do - we're a long way for a Star Trek replicator for images (or food for that matter).

I would say that if it was ever a good idea to be exclusive at DT, it isn't now.

I've been an indie since late 2004 with a stint for about 3 years (2008-11) as an iStock exclusive, so I don't have any experience with being exclusive at DT or FT. However I would say that exclusivity at an agency that isn't a market leader (not even close in the case of DT) makes little sense unless it's a specialty agency, which DT isn't.

Here's a transcript of the earnings call today

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3408976-shutterstock-sstk-jonathan-oringer-on-q2-2015-results-earnings-call-transcript

There were a couple of interesting things. Revenue grew 27% and image collection growth was up 60% over last year's growth - which says where the pressure on our royalties is coming from.

Also interesting that the user base increased 25% but the enterprise customers grew 50%  - they say 20K users, which probably means it's fewer companies (they're counting every person in the team packages?)

"...in the past year alone, the number of customers spending over $50,000 annually has doubled; and those spending over $100,000 has increased by nearly 70% (6:48). Our enterprise business now exceeds 20% of our overall revenue..."

With the 350 a month subscriptions, SS's take is much higher - where ours stays the same 38 cents max. Not sure that I like that.

SS revenue, if the buyer took all they were entitled to (which they don't) is 56.85 cents per d/l or 48.28 cents on the annual plan for 350 a month versus 33.2 cents or 26.53 on the annual plan with the 750 a month plans.

But from the link above from Bixby:

"On the gross margin side on the new products, our goal is for contributors to make a fair return. That is a key part of why our content library is so strong; if our contributors tend to come to us first, we pay out 28% or so of revenue across contributor base. Products on their own can have higher or lower royalty impacts, but we're seeing fairly consistent royalty rates across even the new products. It tends to be a little higher when you launch a new product then it comes down over time, because folks are testing, and without a limit they may download more. But the trend-lines are all going where we expect them to go. If we found that a new product had very strong uptake and great growth prospects, and it somehow had a higher download rate at a royalty or margin impact, we control that. We would have to decide and we would decide and our target is to continue to deliver that just under 30% return to our contributors. I expect that will continue to be very � part of the strategy going forward."

I didn't see any of mine at a quick glance, but the filenames of some are a giveaway. Most are just numbers, but search for tunnel and you'll get a picture of a "tunnel of media" and the filename is

Fotolia_65372548_Subscription_Monthly_XXL.jpg

I know the guy whose image this is, so I sent him e-mail about it.

There's another Fotolia file name for a Sergei Nivens image (search for cosmos to find it)

Fotolia_60157821_Subscription_Monthly_XL.jpg

This really suggests that this bum got these from a subscription and forgot to rename some of them...

The old forum has just bitten the dust   R.I.P.

For the moment, it's still there if you know the URL. Not sure if it will stay around

http://www.istockphoto.com/forums_archive.php

... so it'ts natural giving it a higher price.

Only if there are no essentially identical images available elsewhere.

Lots of the exclusive content on iStock (from real iStock exclusive contributors) is just generic stock with lots of readily available substitutes.

There is some stunning imagery that really is different and that would command a higher price, but lots of fruits, veggies and handshakes that are technically exclusive but easily purchased anywhere.

Jo Ann, your deleted files were deleted/removed, not moved to the "pending cut-out" section?...

When I said deleted, what I meant was the images previously marked as Accepted, and which had been selling, are now marked as Rejected.

I have a few from the first couple of uploads that are pending cutout (before I realized they didn't want isolated on white as a JPEG).

Other than wasted time and hurt feelings, the main reason for trying to fathom what they want is to be able to resume uploading. Images are selling and each month is selling more than the previous one - so normally I'd be encouraged and upload more work. But I can't reverse engineer what criteria they're using for the images they are retroactively zapping.

And they've removed another 50 images from my portfolio sometime in the last few days - I'm now down to 306.

This latest cull is even more of a headscratcher than all the rest. It's as if they went through my Shutterstock portfolio sorted by sales and got rid of a big chunk of the top 50 images.

Meaning, I know it's not quality or commercial value. These have no text, aren't easily mistaken for isolated (one of the last culls included several images with lots of copy space, like this one)

And the promised explanation in a contributor newsletter hasn't happened, at least not that I've seen.

It's like being dumped over and over again - you'd think I'd be used to rejections having submitted to microstock since 2004, but I guess my skin's still too thin...

And I didn't get my login details. Thank you iStock, what a service.

I didn't get information either, but I checked the old forums and Lobo had posted that if you ever had a Getty Contributor account, that would be what you could use and there'd be no e-mail coming.

I had tried the old Getty account earlier and the login failed, but today I tried the password reset procedure and my old account is now accessible.

I read the rules and set up my profile, but the tumbleweeds are rolling through the forums (newest thing is 4 days old and most areas haven't had entries for weeks).

There is some serious revisionist history going on here - iStock's troubles did not come about because of price competition from Shutterstock, IMO

Shutterstock has been around since 2004 and has done nothing but increase its prices over time.

iStock was doing fine raising prices and introducing the Vetta collection (which I was initially very skeptical about) at first. Whether you agreed with every decision the editors made or not, you could see that the more expensive images were not the same as the cheaper ones.

Getty and their two private equity owners started down the road to the current mess when they jacked the prices up significantly, introduced the Agency collection and poured a bunch of old Getty stuff onto iStock - suposedly as "exclusive" even though it wasn't - charging even more (most went in as Agency). Anyone remember the flash picture of the bathroom door? The underexposed fruit slices with black bars down the side and so on?

You can't charge premium prices for content without the buyers understanding the difference between the price tiers. Looking at any search results, any buyer would be hard pressed to figure out why things are priced the way they are.

The reason? The private equity owners wanted out but couldn't given the state of the company and financial markets and so larded Getty with debt to pay themselves a "dividend" of over half a billion dollars.

The business was not able to soak both buyers and contributors to pay these leeches without suffering loss of designers, contributors and bucketloads of goodwill.

Getty/iStock have done this to themselves and Shutterstock has eagerly courted Getty's corporate customers, happily taking advantage of every eff up.

Getty then convinced themselves that the problem was price, and lurched into badly priced subscriptions and even worse one price for all on credit sales - driving away any small design firms they hadn't already lost.

If the problem was price competition, iStock would never have been the leader up until 2010/11 as the other sites were always cheaper. The big slide in iStock has only come since then when its primary competitor, Shutterstock, has only increased prices, not cut them.

There are some good tutorials on Cambridge in Colour, including this one on white balance

If you do a search, you can find many more, but here are some examples:

https://fstoppers.com/post-production/learn-shoot-proper-white-balance-using-kelvin-temps-3328

http://photoblogstop.com/photoshop/accurate-white-balance-adjustments-in-photoshop

I don't sell video anywhere, so this is a general comment about comparing price alone being pretty meaningless as a strategy.

1. If you don't compare license terms as well as price, then it's not an apples and apples comparison and thus not really useful. As an example from the photo world, Canva sells an RM license to one of my images for $1 (a low price) but that's per use, so if someone uses it 10 times, it's $10 which might be more expensive than a $5 RF license offered elsewhere.

2. If you don't compare other business terms and conditions, then it's not a valid comparison. Again using a photo example, Alamy allows buyers to download the content, use it, take up to 3 months to report that they used it and then up to 45 days to pay for the usage. They get to pay more (generally) for an RF license than other agencies where you don't get to download until you pay. Shutterstock is another agency offering all sorts of special terms to corporate clients, charging them more for effectively the same usage license.

3. If you don't compare the amount of money you have to commit to get a particular price, it's not a fair comparison either. Agencies offering packs of credits give discounts for large purchases, but the buyer who wants to just get one image license typically pays much higher prices for the same license.

If Dissolve cuts the price of a clip and the contributor removes the "offending" site (or increases the price if it's at an agency where the contributor has that control), will Dissolve increase the price again? Automatically?

This just seems punitive, likely to be highly error prone and pretty labor intensive if you really keep up the monitoring on an ongoing basis of all your competitors' prices.