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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
2951
« on: December 19, 2014, 22:47 »
I think Quark shot itself in the head and Adobe was there to grab market share - take a look at this story about why InDesign dethroned Quark http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/And Adobe is no paragon of software development virtue - they have a ton of legacy code and the problems that go with moving it forward. They're also slow to fix bugs in Photoshop and Illustrator. I'm sure they're better than Fotolia, but you seem to be painting a picture of Adobe that doesn't map to my experiences using their software since Photoshop version 5 (not CS5, version 5) and Illustrator 88
2952
« on: December 19, 2014, 22:30 »
My site is not really active (I haven't had any time to devote to it in the last several months) but I'm thinking of just putting something on the front page saying something like "I'm very sorry, but this site is unable to process sales to customers in the European Union because of complex tax requirements".
I don't have any software solution to stop someone from buying, but it would alert an honest customer that they couldn't do business safely there. I realize that it's more pressing for EU residents that for US residents like me, and Leo did reappear to say there was something coming for VAT support, but I haven't the inclination to get involved with another roller coaster ride at present 
JoAnn, if you are located in the US, does this even affect you? If European buyer dl one of your images, what can EU do about it? Will they really waste time to come after small website owners in non-EU countries like US?
Technically, I would be required to do all the paperwork and submit to the various countries the buyers were identified in - it's where they are, not where I am, that matters. But in practical terms I can't imagine anyone would bother. With a statement, I can at least be considerate of any EU buyers who wouldn't want to get themselves in trouble with their local taxing authorities. On the other hand, if the authorities were practical and thoughtful, they wouldn't have created this disaster for small companies when they were really going after amazon and the biggies dodging high VAT locations in the first place. Not to mention they wouldn't have that problem if they had common tax rates accross the EU... but I digress
2953
« on: December 19, 2014, 18:56 »
I've added the text to my home page. Possibly the EU will change, but I'm not worried about blocking anyone - if they buy in spite of the notice, I'm not going to worry.
2954
« on: December 19, 2014, 15:39 »
Somewhere in the last week my sales got updated with one additional October 2014 partner program sale for a royalty of 11 cents. I have a copy of the earlier CSV file and one I just downloaded and it shows a new PP download on October 1st for 11 cents.
I didn't think anything in the PP royalty set was 11 cents.
I'm not going to write to support about it - it's not worth the hassle and I'm still waiting after months for my last ticket to get addressed - but wondered if anyone else got something like this and if they know what it's for
2955
« on: December 19, 2014, 15:19 »
My site is not really active (I haven't had any time to devote to it in the last several months) but I'm thinking of just putting something on the front page saying something like "I'm very sorry, but this site is unable to process sales to customers in the European Union because of complex tax requirements". I don't have any software solution to stop someone from buying, but it would alert an honest customer that they couldn't do business safely there. I realize that it's more pressing for EU residents that for US residents like me, and Leo did reappear to say there was something coming for VAT support, but I haven't the inclination to get involved with another roller coaster ride at present
2957
« on: December 18, 2014, 10:48 »
http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2014/nov/25/new-eu-vat-regulations-threaten-micro-businesseshttp://chrislema.com/vat/Those links came from another poster in the Envato forum thread about the changes they're making. It isn't as simple as just charging the VAT based on the country from which the buyer is shopping, you would also have to make the VAT payments (and file forms) to each of those countries. That's just insane and certainly (as a US seller) something that makes selling though your own site to anywhere in the EU a real headache. I'm already thinking of leaving Photo Dune rather than dealing with the hassle of their new world order where your "income" is some large amount of money you never see from which you subtract author fees and buyer fees to arrive at the actual amount of money you received from Envato - it's not enough money to make the tax paperwork worth it if it goes ahead as they're suggesting. Based on the above, I wonder if other agencies will be starting something similar. It makes it clear why EU bureaucrats have a bad reputation....did anyone think through just how complicated this makes things?
2958
« on: December 17, 2014, 20:53 »
Perhaps this has something to do with it? https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-changes-the-outlook-of-Getty-Images-to-Negative-from--PR_314730Thanks to another iStocker for pointing me at that report. They are never explicit about what constitutes Midstock revenue in their book - given they mention SS and FT as competitors in that space, one would have to assume all of iStock is midstock. Then what is microstock in Moody's view? And is anything at Getty Images mothership midstock? The mention that any spare cash will pay down debt (thank you private equity) and that the amount of debt is till way higher than they'd like. These are burdens their competitors don't have. They said subs were 25% of total revenue - do you suppose that was 25% of all of Getty's revenue or just of iStock's? Given drastically lower prices, an increase in volume is all but a given - it's how much of an increase that determines if overall revenue grows healthily. Subs have to grow a lot in volume to grow your revenue and if the 25% was just of iStock's revenue, it could very well be that the non-subs revenue is weak or declining. If you look at the annual Getty revenue they give of $879m, SS expects to be just under half that size ($329m) for its FY 2014 http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362...That's way up from $100m in 2013, but according to Moody's, Getty's 2013 income was $897m - down.
2959
« on: December 17, 2014, 19:59 »
Check out the winners here!
I must be missing something, but that thread is about the contest and I didn't see a link to the winners - just examples of what you were looking for. I went to the Photo Dune home page but didn't see anything there either.
2960
« on: December 17, 2014, 10:53 »
I used Backblaze for a few months only to find out if i delete a folder from my PC, 30 days later its deleted from my online backup!
Backblaze is a backup solution for a particular machine (or machines; you pay them by the machine), not an archive. The other limitation they have is that they only back up directly attached storage - so external drives are included, but not network attached storage. The pluses (I use Backblaze) are that it's a pretty cheap option and it's completely automatic. I have an archive as well - every few months I update some external hard drives that live on a shelf in my office. I never delete anything from those. Depending on the upload speed of your broadband, it can take weeks for the initial upload, but after that it's pretty smooth sailing. So my 3-tier protect my data strategy is a LaCie RAID (it was Drobo, but I had all sorts of problems with reliability with the unit itself - never lost a drive!), Backblaze, and external disks on a shelf (the third part used to be DVDs in a binder and at some point I'd like to transfer that to hard drives, but that will be very time consuming to do)
2961
« on: December 16, 2014, 20:14 »
I don't currently submit there, but in the past they would sometimes have a mis-click - your rejection was for some other reason, not a missing release. But no, I don't know any raspberries Might have something to do with the fact that I regularly eat their friends...
2962
« on: December 16, 2014, 17:10 »
Lucky me - this morning I received one of those 12 cent royalties for a one credit sale! If you look at the page for designers, it says: "1 credit as low as $0.77" which clearly isn't correct as this buyer paid 48 cents a credit (25% royalties).
2964
« on: December 15, 2014, 23:22 »
I'm not contributing there, but I had another look today and it seems like a terrible site for contributors.
They sell images via credit for 50 cents, any size and you get 25 cents. They offer 25 cent royalties for subscriptions, but when the buyer pays as little as 8 cents if they buy in volume, I can't see how that can last. They let you embed a watermarked image (like Getty) for free in a blog or web site.
They stopped updating the free image/clipart of the week archive in April, suggesting the site isn't being looked after very actively.
2966
« on: December 15, 2014, 20:26 »
Another author contacted me via my own site suggesting that I look at this thread - it's massive already, and I think this is a follow up to a now closed one.
The person who contacted me suggested that by saying that the seller in every Envato transaction is us, the authors, not Envato the company operating the marketplace, we might owe taxes because we had only declared our net royalty amounts, not the total of the sale minus the expenses of 70% going to Envato (or whatever the percentage is).
I guess some of the really big sellers are pretty upset as there's some suggestion that this is the way it has always been - not just a change from Jan 2015 (when they'll begin adding VAT to all sales to non-exempt EU buyers) - which might mean back taxes are owed.
I don't have the stamina to read all 54 pages, and I really know nothing about the details of EU tax laws, let alone how they apply to a US seller. However the claim that the authors are the sellers just fails basic logic. We don't know who we're selling to, where they're located and have no access to the money at the time of the sale - as one poster noted, we have to wait 45 days to get paid by Envato.
Given the relatively modest monthly amounts from PhotoDune, if it looks like there's going to be nasty tax implications of selling there I will just leave, but I can't imagine that they can really operate so differently from every other microstock agency out there. It's just ridiculous to think that they're different just because they let buyers e-mail authors (iStock used to do that and in its own quirky way, dreamstime does too).
Is this something Envato is doing to reduce their own tax liabilities?
2967
« on: December 15, 2014, 17:34 »
I listed to most of it, but found it to be so light on content - even informed speculation or historical context of how similar things have played out in the past - that I stopped it before the end. Even if you put the contributor perspective to one side (easy for me to do as I'm not with Fotolia ) I think you need to put away the breathless excitement about someone paying $800 million for a rather shoddy agency with a great presence in Germany. Also put away the rather wooly discussions about the cloud - Adobe CC is about a subscription to one or more products that run on your Mac or PC (at least for the serious users) - nothing much runs in the cloud. Unless Adobe makes Dollar Photo Club-esque pricing deals available to Adobe CC subscribers - in other words some drastic price cuts - I can't see how I'd have any easier time buying and managing my RF licensing by doing it from Photoshop or Illustrator (or somewhere else?). Adobe can't even get the interface lined up between Illustrator and Photoshop for similar entities in both, so the idea that somehow there'll be some interface magic that makes licensing easy from a UI point of view seems truly silly (not impossible, just not something I can imagine Adobe being able to pull off). So we come down to the basics. Will they compete on price by undercutting existing agencies? I can't imagine they'll be somehow finding new buyers for licensing stock, so however they compete, I'm assuming they'll be stealing from other agencies (or trying to). If they cut contributor payments too much, content will leave and then they'll have less than a a top tier offering. If they keep contributor payments the same, how long can they compete on price and make financial sense of the whole thing? Buyers seem to be having relatively few troubles licensing images now (they'd like better searches and lower prices, but manage even with things as they are). They may be leaving one agency and moving to another when daft pricing schemes get introduced, but it's not at all the way it was when microstock came to be in the early 2000s. Adobe seems (to me) to be peddling a solution in search of a problem. If you surround that solution with enough buzz words (and cloud is definitely a good one right now) perhaps no one will notice?
2968
« on: December 14, 2014, 15:42 »
Even if you had model releases (which you'd need for commercial licensing) you'd have to clean the images of logos and other protected property (the Ford logo and the computer screen in the shot inside a vehicle, for example). Do you understand the difference between licensing for editorial use only (such as newspapers and magazines) and commercial - ads, web site banners, brochures, etc.? There's more money to be made (generally) for commercial licensing but you'd lose some of the authenticity of your shots by scrubbing them of all the prohibited stuff.
When you say you have had issues, the stock sites give rejection reasons - what reasons were you getting? And was it with getting accepted as a contributor or getting images approved for sale after acceptance as a contributor? Generally keywording has nothing to do with getting accepted as a contributor, but is critical in getting your images found by buyers.
2970
« on: December 11, 2014, 18:42 »
This is Adobe's second try at offering stock images. The only thing that's changed (other than prices) is that they now have subscription buyers for their software.
Unless Shutterstock is unusually hard for corporations to do business with (and their success suggests that's not the case) I can't see why any company would buy an inferior subscription, even if cheaper, from Adobe versus just buying from Shutterstock (or any other existing agency).
Great deal for the private equity folks who get out intact - it wasn't clear how they could get their money out otherwise. I would guess from Adobe's perspective it appealed because it was for sale - I can't imagine Serban being willing to sell, and who else among the nearly-successful agencies could they have purchased?
2971
« on: December 11, 2014, 13:33 »
I was surprised at how many sub sales I get there. It's just like SS, essentially. But a lot slower.
It's been mentioned before, but it goes in waves I have some pages of 20 sales where 1/20 is a credit sale and then some where 9/20 are credit sales. Now DT has done away with more money for subscriptions of level 5 images, the only variation in subs is when the $2 royalty ones show up. However, after you've been there a while (I think you only recently started uploading there) and have a decent number of level 4 and 5 images, the credit sales when they happen produce better royalties - two recent credit sales on level 5 images produced $7.61 royalty for the medium size, and a level 4 extra large $8.31 I'm still thinking DT's pricing is way too complicated (which has hurt volume there) and that they don't have the bonanza of $75+ royalties of SS SOD sales to make up for the many subscriptions.
2972
« on: December 11, 2014, 10:41 »
I had a quick scroll back through recent pages of sales and all the 1 credit sales I have were 29 or 26 cents. They were running some 50% off subscription deals earlier this week (good through Dec 31st) - possibly it's that? I'd write to support and ask
2973
« on: December 09, 2014, 23:53 »
I'm not up for sharing the numbers, but here's my DT graph, October 2004 to now (the flatline in the middle is when I was exclusive at iStock) 
2974
« on: December 09, 2014, 12:11 »
... and only those submitted over the past two weeks remain in the queue. (Submitted is not the same as uploaded) As we start catching up, all images will be re-submitted to the queue (by us, there's nothing you need to do) so they'll be reviewed. The order in which they were uploaded won't have any impact on the position they take in the queue. That's why they're being reviewed out of order, and this will continue until we clear the backlog.
I understand everything you've said, and I appreciate that the site's priorities are not accepting new content at the moment, but in the interests of fairness, I would ask you to halt all reviews until you're ready to put all the older files back in the hopper. I can handle waiting, but the unfairness of reviewing other content that just happened to get uploaded in the last two weeks while my (and lots of other patient contributors') content is in limbo is hard to accept.
2975
« on: December 05, 2014, 20:34 »
I know there are currently long delays but I uploaded my entire portfolio at the end of September and beginning of October and over 90% of it is still pending. I uploaded a couple of batches 2 or 3 weeks ago and they have already been approved.
Reviewing doesn't seem to be first in first out so how does it work?
At one point it had to do with when you signed up, but I have images from very early October that are still unreviewed and I signed up at the end of June or early July. Perhaps it has to do with the type of content? If there is newer work getting reviewed while my Christmas images from October sit idle, I think I might be a tad miffed. I would hope that they'd clear the backlog before reviewing new uploads...
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