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Messages - Xanox
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301
« on: July 16, 2013, 15:52 »
it could work in the third world, there are still places where 5$ go a long way.
but for anything else, forget it, and it's really a BAD IDEA to even trying to sell such a dis-service, this is the very last thing photographers need and it further devalues photography as a whole.
302
« on: July 16, 2013, 13:31 »
well, what the fo-ck !!
from the horse's mouth :
"Ah, but video content creators win too. Thats the beauty of it. Video creators get to use the music legally. And they can even make money too."
great, so now anyone is allowed to steal copyrighted music in exchange of a pittance in advertising ?
like ... if you can't beat piracy join it ??
as if the whole of you youtube wasn't already 90% stolen content ? (that too was admitted by the two cofounders as their "dirty little secret").
really, the whole music industry finally is hitting the rock bottom if we've come to this.
and it's 100% bu-ll-sh-it, they make the example of an artist with 1700 tracks earning 30K/month but what about random bands with no more than a few dozens tracks ? sorry that will make it 4-500$/year if they're lucky and in the meantime hundreds of crooks will be free to use their music in hundreds of videos.
and on top of this the videomaking crooks are complainig there's no more money to make off youtube, booo-hoo !
303
« on: July 16, 2013, 13:12 »
@Baldrick : the issue is all about the so called "entry barrier".
yes, nowadays the bar has belowered so low that anyone can produce some stock snapshots and start selling for fun and profit and then see what sticks on the wall.
but this because to get the foot into a micro agency all you need is a few decent photos and you're done.
if just they asked 100 or 500 photos to start the whole crowd of amateurs will stick to Flickr rather than polluting the stock market.
it should be a basic requirement as without at least 500 images you can't earn any decent sum anyway, where's the logic in allowing access to anyone with portfolios of 30 images ?
but the value of an image is still there as it still had a production cost.
even if i take a sh-it in my toilet and make a photo of it i will waste 30-60 minutes to get the final photo edited keyworded and uploaded.
that's the bare minimum production cost .. so i must earn 5-10$ at least if i plan to sell the image once, or 1-5$ if i plan to sell multiple times, but these numbers are barely to get my production costs back actually, what about taxes and all, what about working to make a decent profit, or we're supposed to just pay the bills and save nothing for tomorrow ?
yeah, you can take a snap with your image and send it to instagram in 30 seconds all inclusive.
ok, but that's not a stock photo, it's not edited it;s not keyworded, and that means 10-20 minutes more at least, so end of the story it's half an hour even for images of your dog taking a po-o.
this is the reality agencies dont want to admit and buyers fail to realize and instead prices will keep going down and fees will keep getting slashed.
no problem, but people will just stop producing images altogether, only phoographers living in third world country will be able to keep costs down as doing stock in the west will soon become unsustainable.
304
« on: July 16, 2013, 11:44 »
instead of having Seimens looking to buy my work off SS.
Xanox, I know that if I was where I am now 20 years ago and got into stock I would have made a million. In fact, if I had known 10 years ago what I know now I could have been a Lise Gagne or a Sean Locke and made a million in the micros. But I was learning. No way were your lot going to invite me in to your little clubs and let me get my hands on the big cash, so I did what I could, where I could and when I could and it worked out for me.
It wasn't unfair competition, either. Unfair competition happens when people sell things for less than they cost to make. Your problem wasn't really me, it was the Canon 300D. 6MP digital for less than $1,000. That cut the cost of making big digital pictures by almost 90% at a stroke and as soon as that happened your existing stock was overpriced by the same amount (at least, if we are talking about isolated objects, plates of food and holiday snaps; for real top-quality stuff it's a different story). The technology made everything inevitable.
PPS: Xanox - I think writing books, drawing cartoons and journalism are still potentially profitable. So is photography. Like everything, it depends how good you are and how willing you are to adapt to the market.
well congratulations selling to Siemens and earning what .. 10$ ? 20 yrs ago : i don't think so, people hated film cameras at that time, even autofocus was a sort of novelty. a pro was supposed to everything manual including white balance and spent a lot on print labs. even as a hobby the bar was raised pretty high from the start, it's not like today where any one with a bit of luck can make some lucky shots on green mode on a 500$ canon rebel and send the image anywhere with a few clicks. in a nutshell, only the few ones with talent had any reason to invest time and money on it, anyone else quickly lost insterent and gave up. Canon 300D : maybe, but what about the cost of prints, of shipping prints with DHL/UPS, of storing negatives, etc etc ? it's the internet that disrupted everything and broke the distribution chain, not the cheap canon rebels, there were already many "auto everything" film cameras around producing decent results. and then Photoshop of course, allowing you to quickly correct white balance, dodge and burn, spots, saturation, exposure, cropping .. i mean with the actual gear we have today the sky is the limit, even my grandma now takes snapshots with her smartphone and she could upload the whole cr-ap on instagram with a couple clicks if she just knew how. and yet, how many of these punks with their Rebels will join the stock industry nowadays ? one in a million ? maybe.
305
« on: July 16, 2013, 11:15 »
Xanox, your problem was you trad guys had had it too easy. You bragged about your professionalism but you weren't able to compete with a load of amateurs because your stuff wasn't good enough (not you, personally, whoever you are, I've no idea, but your private club of people allowed into traditional agencies).
You wanted to run a closed shop and keep it secret from the world that most of you weren't really doing anything very special. And we broke it for you and you had to share the money with people you despised. Well, hard luck, that's the way the world works.
Whether or not microstock is sustainable has got nothing to do with it. Jobs for life went out of the window a generation ago. We all have to be able to adapt to innovation, at least enough to keep ourselves fed.
Those of us who didn't listen to the carping of you and your ilk a decade ago have done very nicely, thank you, and made a big pile of money we wouldn't have had otherwise. The boom may be behind us, and a lot of people are looking at ways to adapt to microstock being a dwindling income source from now on, but that's just the way things go, it doesn't mean that you were giving us good advice in the early noughties.
All you guys ever cared about was yourselves and your comfy little earner, and we spoiled it for you. Now you want to wallow in glorious schadenfreude over life getting tough for microstockers. Well, sorry, chum, it's not a big shock for us. We're still making some pretty decent cash and we've known for a long time that one day we would have to adapt to a flooded market.
Now, if you're a real professional, go and shoot something remarkable that I can't do and then you can sell it for a pile on Getty or Corbis or do something for one of the many major corporations who no doubt hire you on a huge day-rate.
walled-gardens are the norm in many creative fields, it's not only the old RM agencies being difficult to get the foot in the door. try doing film music they'll hardly give you a chance if you don't live in L.A. and you're friend with producers, try showing some demos to Sony or Universal, no way if you're not friend of producers and if you're not famous already. what about fine-art photos sold in art galleries ? even worse, that's a whole mafia in itself. books & ebooks : good luck finding a medium/big publisher if you don't have an agent, and no agent will care about you if you're not recommended by someone in the industry or other agents. getty had strict requirements but was not impossible to join, it's Corbis the only one who's not taking anybody in apart for news and other niches. by the way, my market hasn't been ruined much by micros, i will survive pretty well don't worry, what makes my blood boiling is to see once again artists and creatives happy to self-scre-w themselves agreeing on unacceptable low fees and creating a domino effect where the only ones doing good money are the rats owning the agencies. they're the ones laughing all the way to the bank, not me ! your rants about pay cust are pointless, do you think it makes such a big difference if you get 2$ instead of 0.50$ when by all means in 2013 we should expect at least 5$ for the crap-piest snapshot ? yeah, musicians sell their sh-it for 0.99$ gross but there's a big difference : their biz in doing live gigs as that's where the money is, we can't do live gigs nor we can expect to do exhibitions with stock images, in the best scenario we can make some beer money with PoD sites and merchandising but that's all.
306
« on: July 16, 2013, 04:33 »
Your RM wisdom amounted to "we don't want competition, we don't want the world to change". You weren't the only ones who saw that it probably wouldn't be a job for life but what you are overlooking is the 100,000+ that I've shoved in my back pocket thanks to microstock (and which now yields 5% per year in interests). Your argument that we would all have been better off if you had had that 100k instead of me is a crock of nonsense. You would have been. I wouldn't.
great, so now that nobody is making serious money composing music, writing books, drawing cartoons, recording videos, with journalism, or doing stock photography, what's left for us creatives ? doing gigs in bars and getting paid in beers ? switching to wedding photography and buying a cheap canon rebel ? nobody ever complained about selling cr-ap images at bulk prices, but there's a big difference between a huge discount and selling stuff at 1/10th or even 1/100th of the going rates. competition has always been welcome in pretty much any industry selling digital products, it's the distributors filtering the sh-it out of the whole sea of products for sale and finally it's the buyers voting with their feet. you 100K could have been 500K or 1 million not long time ago, all you guys were doing was unfair competition and underpricing. moral of the story, photographers are the ones who got scre-wed again and now it's too late to complain, agencies don't have a single reason to raise our fees, actually they can't even keep up with their backlog of new images on que and you're all thinking here they will miss you or other exclusives if they ever leave in droves ?
307
« on: July 16, 2013, 02:55 »
He hasn't left the micros. iS is still a micro and has just cut the prices of half its files to underline this. Also, his deal with iS/getty, didn't prevent his pics remaining in the PP, undeniably low-cost micro.
That's true for his micro archive, but as far i understood for his new stuff he's only focusing on Getty and will give to micros only some leftovers.
308
« on: July 16, 2013, 02:53 »
@ xanox - well, what did you guys expected ? it was obvious for everyone on RM how micro would first kill RM and then kill micro shooters too.
absolutely my friend. anyone who was a true professional stock shooter before the day of microstock could see this one coming. the micros started to cannibalize the RM agencies, and now it is starting to cannibalize itself. i too have been lambasted for saying the very same thing. always from the microstock crowd and never from the traditional agency crowd.
the micro crowd had it easy in the beginning, all they could see were booming sales and the RF/RM agencies crashing and burning, they were all feeling it was the beginning of a new era and that they were at the right place at the right time. they even coined some new words like "trads" and "macrosaurs" to joke on us, and any criticism on the micro was seen as trolling. and now finally they're reaping what they sow, guess it will be a very hard lesson for many here. however, as i wrote before, we're still having it better than in other creative industries, at least for a while because who knows what the major agencies have in store for the future, i can't believe the acual situation could go on forever with such cheap prices and cheap fees and there will be also a few M&As shaking the industry, maybe SS buying FT or DT or 3-4 second-tier agencies ? Alamy doing some bold move and entering microstock with millions of junk images they cant sell as RM ? we will see .. interesting times ahead but at the moment SS is the breadwinner.
309
« on: July 16, 2013, 02:39 »
...i was saying the same sh-it since many years just to get banned and called names and now you all agree with me...
I don't think anyone is agreeing with the sentiment that micro was going to kill the industry. This discussion is about microstock agencies making it impossible for artists to make a living anymore. A few years ago it was possible to not only achieve success in microstock but to thrive, to grow your income. Now it's nearly impossible just to maintain previous income levels, forget about growing income. And it's all to do with agency greed, changes to policy, rate cuts, etc.
You're talking about a completely different topic. All that stuff in the past was about penny stock, dollar stock, the "race to the bottom", microstock undercutting traditional RF, etc. It's not the race to the bottom that's killing microstock. What is happening now isn't what was being predicting years ago.
If you were predicting this, the clawbacks, cuts, SS IPO, threat of investor loyalty, referral program cuts, BigStock RC system, massive growth alongside unprecedented greed, then you've got a mighty fine crystal ball in your hands.
well, it's a shame Alamy closed down the old forum, there was even a "The Stock Industry" section years ago, mostly devoted to bashing microstock and with plenty of "micro is killing the industry" threads. as for making a living, actually i blame more the oversaturation rather than the cheap prices. saturation and over supply mean less downloads per image and that means less money at the end of the day, killing the whole "sell cheap, sell many times" mantra at the foundation of the whole micro concept. there's just no more space for everyone in micros to stay afloat and make a good living. and by the way, we're still having it better than musicians and writers, if selling an image for 0.50$ is a disgrace, what about selling a whole ebook or a song for 0.99$ on iTunes or Amazon ? i've just read yesterday about that, the singer or Radiohead pulling out all their music from Spotify in protest for ridicolous royalty fees (with bands like Pink Floyd reporting a net profit of just 5000$/year !), if they can't make money with it, who will ? Thom Yorke pulls albums from Spotify http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23313445that's a sort of "strike" microstockers should try before or later while also making sure it hits the headlines of at least the major photo sites and blogs.
310
« on: July 15, 2013, 16:50 »
besides, Yuri leaving micros is clearly a sign of the times and the nail in the coffin.
311
« on: July 15, 2013, 16:47 »
well, what did you guys expected ? it was obvious for everyone on RM how micro would first kill RM and then kill micro shooters too.
i was saying the same sh-it since many years just to get banned and called names and now you all agree with me.
too little too late.
ironically i still see some opportunities in micro for some types of imagery that dont sell well on RM agencies, micro is here to stay but it's gonna be very hard to make a living with it alone.
312
« on: July 10, 2013, 08:44 »
if you've no experience with Pro printing, save your time and go in an expensive print shop, talk with the guys there and ask them advice about the best paper/printer/profile combo solution.
you WILL save time and money and headaches paying a professional to do the printing for you, trust me !
there's just too many factors to take into accounts, too many variables, too many limits in most of the machines about gamut/paper/profiles.
i wouldn't touch an inkjet printer with a 10 foot pole nowadays and i do have hands-on experience having worked in my past life in digital printing, it's a BIG MESS, for instance the black in your images are probably not printed using black ink but with a mix of black and green and it will come out differently on each paper unless you know exactly what you're doing.
there's no way for a consumer to save money on all this, inks and papers are overpriced, only print labs can provide a good deal.
313
« on: July 10, 2013, 08:39 »
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/website-builder.aspxthey're offering a turn-key web site for a pittance including access to 28000 stock images ? but where are these images coming from ? a bulk deal with micro agencies i guess, or .. ? is it legal ? do you need an EL for that ?
314
« on: July 10, 2013, 02:06 »
in other news i just went to my local supermarket and for 1$ i could barely buy one orange or two small apples, and then i was thinking ... what ... people can buy a photo for the price of an orange ! 
315
« on: July 07, 2013, 01:52 »
@MichaelJay : relax man, and keep drinking the kool-aid.
by the way, i was serious about IS hiding something nasty and big, wait some time and you will see ...
316
« on: July 06, 2013, 00:15 »
if they had to reach the point where they block all payments and make the news public it must something BIG and nasty !
either they've been hacked and millions of $ stolen, or in one way or another they've lost big money from a software screw up.
317
« on: July 03, 2013, 11:59 »
The software is still in development so please bear with its remaining bugs and report them on the sourceforge website
At least provide a compiled version otherwise i'm afraid nobody will bother with it.
318
« on: July 02, 2013, 02:06 »
it's a temporary phase of the market, sooner or later any market niche will be run by a few monopolies and everything will be pay-per-use.
319
« on: June 30, 2013, 11:39 »
if you're an agency you can do it.
but then again, is it worth it ? you'll have to edit and keyword and upload and all.
320
« on: June 30, 2013, 03:40 »
it's finally becoming a rat race to the bottom.
on the other side i've met a guy working for NGOs who made around 20K with his latest exhibitions, prints in A3 format of street photography stuff of asian cities, and this on top of his well paid full time job at NGOs, he's also planning about doing expensive workshops to teach newbies.
another guy works for a local newspaper, they're so cheap they dont even provide him the gear, he's using his own 5DmkII with a few lenses, if he get robbed he 's F-ed.
We'll have to see if istock is successful with lowering some of their prices. They've not got a good track record over the past 5 years, every change seems to of sent buyers away. Buyers might not be bothered with lower prices, there's already sites out there that have failed by thinking cheap prices are all the buyers want. Buyers might not like having such a big range of prices, they might prefer all images at the same price. Hopefully they will be aware that a lot of us have removed all our best images from istock and no longer supply them with new images. Low prices and 15-20% commission is unsustainable for most of us and will kill off microstock, do buyers really want that?
many buyers are simply discovering that SS and other agencies are as good or better than IS, simple as that. however, i dont think they give any sh-it about our fees, in their eyes photographers are all rich just for clicking a button on a camera ! IS lowering prices could seriously shooting itself in the foot, in practical terms they're undervalueing their one brand and their products, it's the final acknowledgment that what they sell is no more in any way superior to the competition and hence no more worthy of a premium price.
321
« on: June 30, 2013, 00:21 »
they're thinking selling images for 0.15$ instead of 0.50$ will suddenly double their sales.
NOT TRUE.
the number of buyers is still the same, there are many other factors involved than price.
322
« on: June 29, 2013, 01:11 »
it's finally becoming a rat race to the bottom.
on the other side i've met a guy working for NGOs who made around 20K with his latest exhibitions, prints in A3 format of street photography stuff of asian cities, and this on top of his well paid full time job at NGOs, he's also planning about doing expensive workshops to teach newbies.
another guy works for a local newspaper, they're so cheap they dont even provide him the gear, he's using his own 5DmkII with a few lenses, if he get robbed he 's F-ed.
323
« on: June 28, 2013, 08:43 »
it's distributed by Getty but i've no idea about RPI, however the BBC site for instance is using SPL/Getty *every day* in its scientific articles, mostly extra small web size (2-300px ?)
i think most of the best images are made with 3D softwares and then with photoshop they make a whole illustration using other layers, take a look at the images of molecules or DNA for instance, there's some very nice stuff and concepts, a few ones could even be "fine art" and great for book covers or posters.
so i guess to be over the top you need to invest a lot of time on it, production costs will be higher than for normal stock but probably there's also less competition.
324
« on: June 28, 2013, 04:20 »
most sites will adapt this "horrible" look soon..  this is the new trend: "touch compatible layouts"
users moving in droves to mobile is one of the reason of the fall in sales in my opinion, both for Zazzle and e-commerce in general, maybe i'm an old fart but a small screen is just not inviting enough and there's no space enough to convey the right buying experience.
325
« on: June 28, 2013, 04:17 »
this latest move from IS only confirms that non-exclusive content is dime a dozen nowadays.
it will be soon sold in bulk like sacks of potatoes just as they did years ago with the cheapest RF photodisc CDs.
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