Quote from: traveler1116 on December 19, 2012, 12:50

I realize cutting the royalty rate is no fun for anyone but doesn't 123rf still pay a higher % than shutterstock?  Am I missing something?  36 cents per sub is more than or about the same as SS and even the 35% royalty is higher than SS right?

What you're missing is the monthly total earnings. If you're a super high volume site like SS, you can be a top earner with relatively modest royalty percentages or lots of subscriptions - IS was a top earner for lots of indies at 20% for a number of years.

If you're a low volume site, you need to offer a higher royalty percentage to make up for the crappy volume.

Even if 123rf now offers me 50% and 36 cent subs, I made nearly 7 times the money from SS in November as I did from 123rf.

123rf is a lower performer which is now lowering its rates even further. When IS tried it - from the top dog/close 2nd dog position - it backfired. And 123rf figures it'll work for them??

I know I'm going to get torn apart for saying this, but I will say it nonetheless as I'm interested to learn from the responses.

Is there not an argument that ss and IS were (past tense just for IS maybe) able to maintain and increase their top positions i.e. lots of sales, from giving lower royalties than those like 123rf. IS and ss started with low royalties i.e. much less than 50%, many of the others didn't. ss have played smart by simply not decreasing the royalties, IS already had low royalties but were foolish enough to decrease them from a rate where generally people didn't have much of an issue with, to a rate where people say they're unhappy with. I doubt that most buyers had any clue what royalty rate IS were giving before they decided to drop the rate. But the constant bad press about IS since they dropped the rate, I believe is certainly playing its part in their demise lack of growth. It's different for 123rf as it's not as well known, doesn't have as many contributors and not everyone is getting a rate cut.

I personally think that a company such as 123rf could grow even without any royalty changes, growth can come from many things such as initiatives and innovations. But say they don't have this ability, then a logical next step would be to try and get on a level playing field as companies such as ss and IS, which I assume for them means to take a percentage similar to the leaders of the industry. Actually thinking about it, are they even doing that? If we don't look at individual contributors, but look at the files, I'm guessing that a very large proportion of files would maintain 50% or go above 50% for the artists who own these files. None of these guys will be upset by this or remove their files or stop uploading because of the move 123rf are making, heck with the amount of files they have they wouldn't be likely to remove their files or stop uploading even if their royalty rates were reduced by 123rf.

Ok fire away. 

There's a bit more background information on Instagram's "need to monetise" in this report from the Beeb;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20767537

"The fact is that Facebook has critical mass, and is quite confident that such moves may cause uproar, but not a flight of business."

ThIS sounds familiar.

Looks like it is now Instagram and Facebook!

Tyler has locked the thread about it so everyone needs to deleted whatever they have on FB and or delete your account both there and at Instagram.

Quote

Facebook wrote:   
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

He locked a duplicate thread of the same subject. I see you've found the other thread now, here it is for anyone else. http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/instagram-can-sell-your-pics-under-new-tc/

I am trying to decide which agencies to join and see which are the ones that i am going to blacklist.

Can any veterans here tell me Which Agencies is the most Stingy and cheapest so that i can blacklist and avoid.

123RF, at 20cent per downloads???

Well if you're starting out you will be getting 25 cents for subscription downloads on Shutterstock, for full res. images. In terms of stingiest as Leaf says, "If you want fewer sites because of a poor deal for photographers I'd probably cut out iStock, then Fotolia."

So will these 3 agencies be on the blacklist?

When IS were giving 20% to contributors, most people were happy as sales were great, now they give as low as 15%, which isn't massively different from 20%, but there then followed furor that commissions were outrageously low. This furor continues to be fuelled not because people are outraged by commissions as low as 15%, but because their sales have been declining. The real term money they get has been falling. However, IS was at the top and despite falling they are still making people money. Most people will only leave them if they are no longer an earner, few will leave them and few will not sign up with them because they are stingy.

'Changes in the way we communicate to the iStock community'

"This thread has been locked."

 

Level 3 image sells medium size for 12 credits. A few days later the same image, now level 4, sells large size for 10 credits.  I probably wouldn't have noticed except that the same image was involved but seems like it should have been 15 credits for the larger sale - Error? More experiments? Sale prices at contributors expense?

I wonder how time consuming it is for staff to answer queries from contributors such as these, given that they probaby also spend some time trying to work it out themselves.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 10, 2012, 21:15

Quote from: cidepix on December 10, 2012, 21:13

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on December 10, 2012, 21:10

If IS went under I wonder how a massive flood of new images at SS and other sites would affect everyone elses sales.

it can't be good for us.. if all of them were to go non-exclusive they should also lower their expectations as there is gonna be a lot of competition..

Well, anybody that's hoping for IS to fail may want to think about how that would affect them.

well, if IS goes bankrupt, there will be some buyers to come to other agencies along with exclusive contributors.. IS still have some buyers..

I would rather have them shop at agencies that pay %50.. we should try our best to redirect those buyers to agencies like stockfresh..

exclusives pool is not as big as you are worrying about.. vast majority of IS content is still non-exclusive..

Stockxpert which was an excellent marketplace and gave good commissions to its contributors sold to Jupiter, which was later acquired by Getty who then put Stockxpert images onto Thinkstock. I couldn't think of a worse outcome. The former owner of Stockxpert then created Stockfresh, which has the potential to be an excellent marketplace also. But the track record indicates that he might not keep it once it becomes a great marketplace, and then we're back in the same situation.

This is I know is a worry about all the agencies not just Stockfresh, but at least the criteria to give more support for an agency should be to those with good commissions and where the owners have never sold.

It is clear that when they screwed us, they screwed themselves more.

IS screwing its contributors does seem to have had negative effects for them. But IS are by no means screwed yet.

 And it is bizarre that most do not see that we are truly in the driver seat.  What most of these sites have failed to realize is that a significant portion of their buyers are also independent contributors.

I say let them burn in hell, they deserve what is coming to them!

Most aren't though. It's a very small percentage of contributors who provide most of the content. It's in their hands, but these few have never utilised the power that they have. Arcurs made a stand by creating his own site, but it's not much of a stand really. If those few top dogs had got together and coordinated something, which wouldn't be difficult really, companies like IS could have been long gone and other agencies wouldn't dare to pull the antics that IS did.

Quote from: JPSDK on December 08, 2012, 05:21

I didn't know who she was, so i googled her:

http://www.businessinsider.com/difference-between-men-and-women-managers-rebecca-rockafellar-istock-photo-getty-images-2012-11

Wow! Look at this:


"I was asking some colleagues to help me crystallize what makes me different as a female leader versus some of the male leaders in our organization"

Am I alone in reading that as "All right, underlings, tell me why I'm the most wonderful person in the business".

I think she was just asking if they could see any differences in leadership between her and male leaders which may be because of common gender traits. 

And, sure enough, "a male colleague called out is that I am able to gain the trust of others by just being very visibly confident in my own skills without boasting"

Give that boy a Christmas bonus!

Note the "called out", it wasn't a private chat, apparently, it was a question to a full room.

The answer seems like a valid one, as I personally believe that in general men tend to boast more, need to show how smart they are more than women (I'm a bloke in case anyone was wondering).

She obviously liked the comment which is not a problem and although it seems boastful that she reiterated the answer in this article, the article title is
"An Exec Tells Us 3 Ways Women Leadership Benefits A Company", so mentioning the answer which was called out is relevent to the article. What we don't know is if questions of gender were put to her by Business Insider, or if she was asked to choose a subject and this is what she chose.

p.s. I can't believe I just defended the general manager of iStockphoto. I do apologise everyone. 

Quote from: luissantos84 on December 06, 2012, 13:22

Quote from: etienjones on December 06, 2012, 13:01

Quote from: aspp on December 06, 2012, 12:56

Quote from: gostwyck on December 06, 2012, 12:28

It was dinner in Munich on Monday too;

http://www.facebook.com/Shutterstock#!/photo.php?fbid=10151323624526278&set=a.76665266277.112054.8333641277&type=1&theater

It's cool that they do this and I take it at face value. I think they are genuinely friendly and bright people. That's been my experience of dealing with them recently too. What a friendly contrast vs the arrogant snarkiness we get from IS these days.

Absolutely true.  Mr. O is a down to earth kind of guy who will continue to treat contributors with respect.

are you the tallest guy with moustache behind Jon?

How did you know? 

Everyone is looking at the camera and ur looking at Jon's hair. Any explanation for this? 

A new thread was started this evening about discussing search results (by best match) on iStock.

If you look at the example searches that were mentioned in the earlier thread - some one phrase, some searches refined with additional keywords - they work just as you'd expect on Shutterstock, and on Thinkstock (and probably DT, Google and many other places), but the IT person's explanation makes it sound as if they really don't understand why they're getting horrendously crappy results when they're supposedly continuing what they've been doing all along. They appear to be lost. The comment that buyers don't see this suggests the IT person didn't read the heartfelt post of a former buyer here.

I guess my take on the "search team's" comments are that they are busy defending what they've done and I don't see any acknowledgement that the end result is just broken at the moment. The operation was a success; the patient died... As long as they're taking the view that it's working and they just need to do a few tweaks, I'm not optimistic.

They cocked up and they won't back down and they'll end up taking everyone down with them. It's a shame really, not to realise what they already had and not to make long term plans to improve on what they already had.

The feature I'm specifically talking about is in the Contributor area, "Site Feature" area.  I've searched the DT site and can't find any explanation as to what it does and why.  How many key words can you input?  Is it really helpful?

Many thanks,
Ruth

I've never noticed that before. It can only be to alert buyers (or anyone) when images which have specific keywords in them are added to dt. It's not directly in the Contributors Area, but in a shared area. Just enter the keyword 'business' and tell us if ur inbox gets flooded.

@David Ur right we don't get emails for flagged keywords, just notifications. It's not just age which brings confusion, but Dt. 

I didn't find anything new in these reviews . Haven't we read this on msg countless number of times.

Cons � The company is for sale and most teams and resources are focused on reducing operational costs to make the bottom line look better to potential buyers. Many long-time employees have been let go, entire teams are being outsourced. There is no longer any pride or upside to working at this company, the most talented people have already left and there is an ongoing exodus of the people that remain. This is a dead end career for all but the senior managers that own stock and stand to cash out...