I had a look at 500px and PRIME last night - I'd never looked at either before.

Saw a lot of beautiful images but came away with the idea that 500px is the Whole Foods of image purchasing - it has a lot of really nice stuff, but  isn't where you'd pick to do your day to day shopping because of all the useful, if somewhat pedestrian, things it doesn't have.

It's fine not to have jumping goldfish, handshakes, multi-ethnic business teams in impossibly white office environments, but I wonder just how much of a market there is for drop-dead gorgeous landscapes and a few soulful looking people in dark-ish settings?

I'll watch with interest - more ethical agencies competing for good images to shake up the existing mess can't be bad

All sorts of images get licensed under these special deals - I think $112 was my highest to date. I don't think I've ever had a refund on Shutterstock - not once since 2004.

Getty loves to "donate" other people's assets! Example those .15 image sales that should of been 400.00

For me, that is the major sticking point. I should have the option to say yes or no to some materially new type of distribution. My copyright, my choice

Getty treats contributors badly by refusing to give an opt out. They absolutely could - technically - but they refuse

Some links to "history of Getty Images" articles, some of which have quotes or comments that look interesting now.

http://www.mactribe.com/news/features/feature50.php

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/getty-images-inc-history/

http://ethix.org/2003/06/01/under-gettys-images-brand-values-and-leadership-principles

http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2009/10/getty-images-business-fantasy-update.html

From the last one above, some comments from Jonathan Klein on the importance of subscriptions (and Getty has clearly failed, thus far, to build the industry leading subscription business)

"2. Build the market-leading subscription business

Subscription is a fast growing part of the market, and an area where we have had a long-standing gap in our product portfolio. Jupiterimages Unlimited brings a very good base from which to start, but we will create an entirely new subscription business that builds upon it. This new subscription product will be a major initiative, with significant marketing support. It also represents a major collaboration between Getty Images and iStockphoto. We may not be number one in subscription � YET � but we know how to get there and will get there."

There's also a mind-boggling quote from the ethix.org article about trust - not that I disagree with what's written, but I have a hard time squaring that with the behavior of the company:

"This brings up an interesting point about ethics. Our unusual industry is based on trust. For example, a photographer comes and signs a contract with us. We take the photographer�s images that we want and contract to market them, agreeing to pay part of what we will get if someone uses the image. We send the photographer a monthly report which says how the image was used and what money was paid. But the photographer relies entirely on us. They don�t really know if People Magazine paid us eighty bucks or eight hundred for their image. It is based on trust."

i found my pictures on ibudgetphoto in a "Dreamstime Collection"...:-(

I opted out of partnerships at dreamstime a week or two back (I hadn't realized until this Deposit Photos thing blew up) and unlike the useless Deposit Photos response that it was "hard" to remove, my DT photos were gone immediately - they showed up in searches but couldn't be purchased minutes after I opted out.

In addition to the comments above (and I noticed the rather banged up fork too - it said "grungy diner" which may not be the look you want) I think you want to consider who, other than you, might eat fried, battered fish with yams and salsa.

I love yams and I love fish, but if I think fish and chips I don't think of a plate that looks like yours - perhaps there's a niche there, but perhaps it's just offbeat enough that it won't sell. Take a look at a search for fish and chips on SS

If I'm thinking healthy eating, I'll have yams with baked fish, not something breaded or battered. If I'm indulging in a favorite comfort food, I'll go with potato fries and tartar sauce. I think you've mixed things up in a way that hurt the appeal of the image. I'd also ditch the parsley

The other thing I'd change is the mat - it looks very old fashioned and not in a funky or retro way.

Watch food network shows or look at sites that cover plating and get some ideas. Not that there is one "right" way to do it, but it'll give you some things to think about visually

You have a better chance of making money with their stream than with the Getty viewer.

But this is probably a model for what is coming next. The spotify model is reaching the stock industry.

Possibly, but we don't have to help by continuing to place our content with agencies that pursue these policies that are negative (at best) for contributors. An opt out (or better an opt in) helps, but as we saw with iStock and the partner program, for example, sometimes opt outs go away.

Two options for contributors, one much easier than the other: 1) stop adding new content and 2) pull portfolio.

Withholding new content is a reasonable way to get an agency's attention without making such a huge dent in our income in the short run. For subscriptions or streaming, new content is important to the agency even if they have a ton of good stuff  still there - people don't renew subscriptions if they don't see new content on a regular basis (it was one of the big complaints of photos.com subscribers that led Jupiter Images to put StockXpert content onto photos.com)

With deals that might put the earning power of images elsewhere at risk (like the Getty/Google train wreck) or when there's no opt out, then removing the portfolio is the only way to get an agency's attention. They don't care about any of us individually but if the big factories were all that mattered to buyers none of the rest of us would be making any money - and a lot of us are.

It is true that it's harder now than it was a few years ago to get the agencies to respond to contributor isuses - the agencies are bigger and they feel the balance of power has shifted - but harder doesn't mean impossible.

And just because an agency is "not worse than Getty" doesn't mean they're OK. Getty is the low water mark in terms of crappy agency-contributor relations, IMO.

I was quoting bunhill. the "groupthink" term isn�t from me. Sorry if my quote looked funny....

It was quite clear where the groupthink term came from - no worries there. I was trying to avoid giving any attention to the poster of that comment as I try not to "feed the trolls" and I ended up blending things badly in my post.

And Sean Locke's images are still on Shotshop too, all 2308 of them...

http://www.shotshop.com/search/%402273597

http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/solid-stock-art-21960

http://www.microstockgroup.com/new-sites-general/solid-stock-art/

This is a 6 minute interview from Feb 26th from Bloomberg's Market Makers series

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/shutterstock-brings-stock-photography-into-focus-0UVtjzz9RCWOG20D0WDU3w.html

I hadn't seen this before (found a link from Yahoo Finance)

Although the two interviewers kept interrupting Jon Oringer, they did ask some decent follow up questions - such as about what Shutterstock's success had done for photographer income - along with the expected.

The questions about whether Shutterstock had gone to the cloud sounded a bit formulaic - as if they know that's a new thing so they ask everyone what they're doing with the cloud - but after a brief waffle (I think perhaps Oringer wasn't expecting it as it really didn't make a ton of sense as asked) he fielded it with a reasonable answer. I'm guessing today WebDAM would be the answer but that didn't get announced until March 3rd

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on March 07, 2014, 15:13

Welcome!

Pick up your "Getty H8TR" button on the table by the door .

Can you just mail it to me or something?  Does it cost $0.28?

No - $39.84

I think istock's argument is that their database was effed up - my guess is they were trying to consolidate codes across photos.com, Thinkstock and iStock.

So if you imagine that on photos.com a subs sale was code 200 and an image pack sale was 220 and an extended license 250

On Thinkstock, let's say the codes were subs 250, image pack 300 and extended license 400

In the new combined system, subs are 50, image pack 200 and extended license 250.

There should have been a conversion program to translate the sales codes from the old ones to the new. Let's say it wasn't run (or it could have been broken). Perhpas it was only run on a portion of the months' sales.

The result would be you get a bunch of subs sales on photos.com (code 200) and it incorrectly pays you using the new code rate - for image pack sales. You get a subs on Thinkstock and it pays as extended license under the new codes.

This is only the mechanics of how they could have made a stupid mistake - how they managed not to notice it, not to check on the runs done after the change, not to pay any attention to contributors telling them things were much higher than usual is a mystery.

It is at least theoretically possible that what the customer purchased is the new lower amount they say you're owed. It's also possible that they have no clue what the customer purchased because they wiped out records when they "converted" - leaving a slime trail is obviously an important thing to do with changes like this, but so is testing which they apparently don't do, or do so poorly it's as if they didn't.

If they really did mess it up that badly, I think the sane thing to have done would be not claw back anything and eat their mistake, but then this is Getty we're talking about...