Well done, iStock.
You undercut your exclusives with indie content, you promote old formerly high-selling images to a higher price bracket which kills them dead and won't allow us to demote them, and now you make your low-cost subs so attractive to former refuseniks that now they're clamouring to get into TS.
Just (expletive deleted) fantastic. 

It's funny, because as a non-exclusive I'm convinced they really only want exclusives. They're cettainly oushing exclusive content big time intheir marketing. Maybe they don't want *any* contributors?

Seriously, though, it seems to me they're splitting the options available to exclusive and non-exclusive contributors with an eye towards one day having a curated collection that's exclusive only and a subscription site for the rest of us. That's my guess.

@BD.

I realize this. There are several other articles later on that support this.

Do you agree/disagree? How do you think things have changed?

What was their testing methodology? Remember, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The good news is that all the changes have resulted in a much faster site.






Not.

Yay! I'm waiting for an email or call about my first (hopefully) sale today. Getting very positive feedback from art directors and art buyers about my site and the Symbiostock idea.

Lasagne.

My experience so far is that I'm really amazed at the amount of work that's been done by so many people to get Symbiostock up and running and user-friendly.

I was surprised to find step-by-step instructions, which, when I followed them (I didn't always, and that's when I grew frustrated) were clear and easy to implement.

I was surprised that someone took the time to set up templates you could download to create your logo, header, etc., which made designing all that stuff to fit perfectly so much easier.

I was surprised how helpful people on the forums were...my questions were answered VERY quickly. And how they much they were willing to share/help. I kind of had this idea that I'd be struggling to figure things out on my own, which was very far from the truth.

I'm purposely keeping my site very simple, so the vast majority of time I've put into it has been spent designing a slideshow and my logo and writing copy, but most of all, uploading.

I sort of look at it as being slightly more involved at the beginning than submitting to a new micro agency, where there's a learning curve about the upload process, what inspectors like, what keywords they accept, how long you wait for files to be approved, etc.

I'm planning to launch Monday with about 10% of my portfolio�with a little advertising blitz, thanks to the $50 in free Facebook advertising that comes with hosting the site on Bluehost. And I'll be keeping my fingers crossed.

I've just been sitting around quietly the past two years or so, being annoyed with all the things that doesn't work properly at iStock, so I thought it's time to actually do something. Share my thoughts on how to improve the site with the people in charge. But how the heck do you get in contact with Ellen Desmarais? I'm not a paying member at LinkedIn so that doesn't work. Does anyone know her e-mail?

I invited her to link to me but she ignored me. We have several mutual acquaintances (since I work in advertising).

I'm not exclusive. iStock sales have gone down slightly, but the partner program there makes me more money than iS downloads, so my overall earnings there have increased. SS makes me 3-4 times as much as iS (but my portfolio is 6x larger there). This week sales have increased for me on both sites, because it looks like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are taking off.

I'm working on my Symbiostock site and hope to have it started up next week so I don't completely miss Halloween sales.

I think allowing large ad agencies unwatermarked images is a brilliant move. I was just away for the weekend with a bunch of agency art directos. I explained that SS now also allows these comp usages. I think I'll reiterate that to them.

This is exactly why the sites require model releases. I'm pretty surprised Getty didn't require one.

I'm disappointed they haven't featured a single female filmmaker. Certainly they exist.

Quote from: stockastic on September 17, 2013, 20:43

Maybe a designer wants to offer several possiblities, and doesn't want to pay for all the different images he'd need, so he "borrows" them.

I thought that was what subs were for? Why would you need comps?

My feeling...and I could be wrong...is that they offer this service to large ad agencies in order to compete with Getty and Corbis. Ad agencies won't buy subscriptions because the client pays for images, not the ad agency. The macrostock agencies allow art directors at large ad agencies to "borrow" unwatermarked images to present in comps to clients.

Agencies wouldn't present a photo from SS, for example, and then shoot something similar on their own, because paying a photographer costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and stock art costs much less....usually only hundreds.

Ad agencies are the ones likely to pay the most for an image because they need extended terms for large campaigns.