Hey everyone,

I've been uploading to Getty through their flickr link and have gotten a couple of sales over the past year. My last sale however raised a question

I thought that an RM meant that one image could only be sold once (you are selling the rights to use it), however Getty has sold one of my images twice now (not that I'm complaining). So can these images be sold more than once?

Second, i thought that the biggest advantage of micro stock was that you could sell the same image to multiple prople. So over a period of time the image might earn you more than if one person bought it through Getty. But if getty can also sell to multiple people then isn't it better than a microstock?

RM = Rights Managed, the customer pays based on the specific use and time
RF = Royalty Free, the customer pays a fixed fee based on size, the use isn't controlled

RM has the advantage that sales and usage history is being tracked, so a customer CAN buy exclusive rights. But usually they would only do that for a certain period of time, a certain region ("America", "German speaking countries") and/or a certain industry. However, most RM sales do not include exclusive usage at all.

Different sites are targeting different clients with different needs at different price levels. One image could sell 1,000 times on microstock for $1 each. Another image could sell 5 times on macrostock for $50 each. Which one works better? In this case microstock. Then again, you might end up getting only 10 sales for $1 in microstock... or a single big sale on macrostock for $500.

Quote from: whatwolf on June 02, 2014, 09:39

maybe you should know one thing:
www.fotomore.com  this is a chinese stock, and it was from is. the price is 16500 CNY for one-year sub which allow to download 9000 pictures in all.
and it limited 750 per month.
so it is 1.8333 CNY per picture. it means 30 cent dollar per picture.

I looked there and found some of my images. Seems to be an 'official' site, but I don't know for sure.
I couldn't at first glance find a way to sign up there without understanding Chinese. Maybe it is a 'new market'? (Or maybe I'm just unobservant or not persistent enough.)

Yes, seems to be a site of Visual China Group which are the distribution partner of Getty Images in mainland China.

I thought Dreamstime was based in Romania?!?

Check out the most downloaded people image on iStock: a photo of a beautiful slender woman on the beach in a bikini throwing her arms straight behind her back.  Supposedly uploaded 3 days ago by Yuri Arcurs and has already received a purple flame and 4.2 Trillion downloads....

It's 4.2 billion, not trillion. Anyone interested how things like that happen in reality?

In a database you have to define how much "space" any given value may occupy, e.g. for a password field you can define that it may have 8 characters - anything entered into that password field above 8 characters will be cut.

For a number, you have to define the range (can it be positive or negative, can it have commas or only full values?). For the number of downloads you would certainly say "they can only be positive, whole numbers, no fractions".

Next question: How big can the number become? Here you get to choose "one byte" as the first option. That would only allow of a maximum of 256 values. So we are sure it wouldn't be sufficient. Two bytes would be good enough to store values between 0 and 65535. No file did reach that yet but then again there have been files with >20.000 downloads and database storage is supposed to stay untouched "forever". So it couldn't be good enough.

So the next "best" thing would be four bytes - this allows to store numbers up to 4,294,967,295 (four bytes = 32 bits, enter 2^32 in Google to get that value). Sounds familiar? In iStock's context, this would be shortened for the public to only show the first two digits, so ">4,200,000,000"

So, how does a file get to that number? Easiest way is to screw up the programming by having two processes doing opposite things but program them in different ways.

A potential example of this type of screwing up: Download a file, then the download counter is raised from 0 to 1... download it again because the server didn't work right, this time (it's a re-download) the download counter does not rise again! Now the server is still not working properly, the customer gets impatient, doesn't try again and asks Support for a re-fund. Now the re-fund cancels ALL downloads (i.e. removes all licenses in the system, including the "free" re-downloads), and each time a 1 is being subtracted from the download count. First time from 1 to 0. The second time our system gets confused because we defined the download value to be allowed positive only, so no -1 exists... Instead we are moving like in a circle of potential values, like on a clock 0:00 minus 1 results in 11:59, in a database 0 - 1 results in the highest number allowed in the field...

At least this is how I as an outside programmer would analyze this problem. And I don't need any wild theories about it, simple programming mistakes are enough. And we have seen too many of them in the past to dismiss that as a potential source for this, don't we?  

Check if you can switch the "Hide Account Balance" checkbox in your profile: http://www.istockphoto.com/my-account/preferences (in the "Profile" tab at the bottom).

This thing seems to turn on and off again and again by itself over the course of the last few weeks.

I know we are all frustrated with DPC, but .. er.. isn't this good news?

Fotolia are making it more lucrative to be part of DPC.  Isn't that what we want/wanted?

just asking.....  (goes and hides behind the tomato shield)

No. What I want is strong market players who are willing to raise prices for buyers to decent levels. Not players who are desperate enough to make "subscription" offers which in fact just target regular "Image Pack" buyers from other agencies at a fraction of the cost.

If an agency only sees a price war as a way to win new customers, it means that agency is lacking any other unique selling proposition. It should work on their offer and technology first. That's what I want and that's what I completely miss at Fotolia these days.

Oh, PS: As far as I know, if I decide to license my content through EyeEm, I do not have to license them through Getty. And not all images accepted for the EyeEm market are being accepted to Getty as well. So the EyeEm Market will definitely contain more images than the EyeEm collection on Getty Images.

So, just for the record. However, I don't know percentages how many images are being accepted and how many make it to Getty or not.

The EyeEm Market is now working for the photographer side, and just end of last week I saw the first of my images showing up on the Getty Images site as part of the EyeEm collection.

I was asked to write down my experiences with the EyeEm market and how things work over there. In case you are interested, here is the article now: http://www.mystockphoto.org/eyeem-market-contributor-guide/

Because nobody cares about any domain ending besides .com ?

That is a very (US) limited view. And one that is going to change over time.

Odd that there doens't seem to be a peep about this in the iS forums.

It's for Exclusives, so it's in the Exclusives forums... 

Good. Positive. Nice.

I don't care if I don't profit from it. And I don't care if it's PR. As long as they pay out some more money to fellow photographers and some friends, it is a positive thing.

I don't sell a lot but

A) easy uploading system
B) good royalty percentage
C) artist friendly people

So it doesn't cost me much to keep them in my list for agencies to upload to.

Why should I stop (or even remove my images) from an agency unless it takes steps that are against my interest as a contributor?