I am very impressed with the strength and passion of the Russian language initiative. I understand if people are disappointed by the slower reaction here. But I think this might just reflect that Fotolia is not such a strong agency in the English speaking world. If you just make 20 dollars a month with Fotolia, you will not give it that much attention.

Fotolia is a very strong agency in Europe/Russia, but has little market share in North America.

The German fotolia board has a very frank discussion, and lots of respect for the initiative. Without the protest the changes announced in the last two days wouldn�t have happened.

That sounds great, I got the invite as well. Too far for me, but I wish I could be there!

Jim Pickerell keeps tracking 420 artists and their downloads from istock. Their download numbers are pretty huge, these people must be bringing in the majority of the money. I think all agencies have just a small group of people that create the really desired content, just because 200 000 artists are registered, it doesn�t mean that the quality of the work is evenly distributed among everyone.

http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/many-istock-seller-stop-producing-new-images

I think the active stock business community, or at least the number of regular stock producers with interesting content is quite small, even if the agencies accept 1 million new files a month. A lot of that are flowers, pets and duplicates of known best sellers.

So I assume it is probably important for agencies to keep the small group of regular producers happy and pay attention to their needs. The forums and groups is where these people connect and exchange information about which agency is worth our time.

I personally believe it is useful for an agency to make people comfortable to post in their forums. It is a lot easier to see immediatley what is going on and what people are worried about. But maybe for others this is uncomfortable and they prefer forums with lower activity or just activity around happy things. To each his or her own. Agencies are fluid, people change, priorities change.

istock is finally doing some positive things, the first real light for the exclusives after a long drought.

It will be interesting to see the sales results for subscriptions next month.

ETA: shudderstock, I am not exclusive. I didn�t create these closed groups. I don�t care.

I post everywhere as you can see.

I just think it is sad that so many exclusives are scared to post on istock, that�s all.  You are the one who was suprised the thread with a valid question was deleted.

The majority posting here is largely a self selecting group which over time has fairly aggressively silenced those who do not go along with the largely negative groupthink.

Well the istock forums have certainly been cleaned up to stop people from posting negatively. But this hasn�t lead to an increase of a "positive groupthink majority" now being happily active on the istock forums. The top 1000 thousand istock exclusives, i.e. the people that are bringing in the money, are a closely knit group that all interact. But they have moved to closed circles.

I have read many times that there are people who assume, that if the majority is silent, this means they are all agreeing.

From my experience in community work, it is the opposite, there might be few voices active on the forums, but they tend to reflect the opinions of a huge group of people. A large number of the contributor community is also at a disadvantage because they cannot write well in English. But as we can see with the current discussions around Fotolia, this doesn�t stop people from coming to the logical conclusions when an agency does something that is negative about their income.

And only publicity will get agencies to change things that are not good for us. What other choices are there?

The internet is great for all kinds of customer/business relationships. Transparency is what helps you see the scale of a problem. wether it is patients who are conncecting via the net because their medication is giving problems their doctor didn�t know about or a company keeps denying that it happened, or stock artist who discover their files are being sold for 30 dollars and they only receive 30 cents.

Of course every company can choose to say "oh just a few people complaining let�s ignore them - or delete them...) Other companies look at the problem the community is complaining about and solve the problems.

Quote from: cobalt on April 29, 2014, 03:49

But Getty has a lot of "exclusive" content that is also being sold on other sites. Blendimages and others sell from their own website directly and getty also sublicenses their exclusive content to other agencies. So "exclusive" Getty content can be found on corbis, masterfile etc...I saw this with my own images when they were in the Getty House program.
Getty has a completely different understanding of "exclusive" content than istock does.

Do Getty claim to buyers that a faux-exclusive image is exclusive, or 'only on Getty'?

I have no idea what they write on their website, but I remember once talking to a Getty rep when I had my business and they claimed all the images on their website where handpicked and exclusive to them. This was many years ago, I have no idea what they tell people now.

When I discovered my images on other websites, corbis or Masterfile for instance, they were without my artist copyright name. Instead my files were attributed to "ocean collection" or something similar. We were told at the time that Getty is working with  their partners to have individual copyright names added, but 3 years later it hadn�t happened. I have no idea if the names are being attributed now. They did copy titles,descriptions and other meta tags, so it shouldn�t have been a problem to display our names.

My impression was that they use "cover names" for a collection to hide that all these images come from Gettyimages. The macro world is very intransparent, but they all sublicense their exclusive content to each other. Getty has hundreds of license partners, so your images are spread around the globe at many different price points. In principal there is nothing wrong with that. Obviously a local agency in japan with an office can give better support than an agency from the US. But the artist name should always be present and I found the missing names very disrespectful.

And of course this is why they only pay the artists 15-20%, there might be several middlemen agencies involved until the file reaches a customer and everyone takes their share.

It is refreshing to hear that Getty is now promoting istock. This is very good news for the istock exclusives. What a pity they didn�t do that 6 years ago. If they had given istock full support, who knows how strong the agency would have become.

I guess they must be losing a huge number of customers to SS to finally acknowledge istock.

ETA: Welcome to our world shudderstock. This is why we appreciate msg.

It has become very difficult to discuss subjects the contributors are concerned about on istock. Since not talking about issues doesn�t make the problems or concerns go away, the discussions have been moved elsewhere. And after what happened to Sean, Rob, Ivar, Alex Hibbert and others, many exclusive artists are scared they will be kicked out if they think too loudly. Traditional artists from getty seem to be more familiar with "using private channels" to very discreetly get problems solved, but the people that grew up with the internet and forums are using normal forum communication. They then got very frustrated with the aggressive responses they got from the new getty management. So the real discussions take place elsewhere.

The irony is of course that the istock exclusives as a collective group are bringing in a lot more money than yuri ever did, but getty prefers to subdivide them and focus attention on those coming in from outside.

There is so much more they could do with their exclusive contributors. They have some fantastic people.

The more deals they do with indie artists the more exclusives will be forced to put their energy into plan B projects. They have no choice, their files are no longer getting into the higher price bands and new content is basically cut of from the double istock/getty exposure. And in all price bands they are being squeezed out by indie artists, while the "special deal" getty artists get favored and their content is placed into higher bands automatically.

I hope they at least get some more sales if thinkstock customers migrate back to istock. Other than that, they aren�t being offered much to look forward to.

did you ever stop to think that GI and IS might not even know that yuri is double dipping without their knowledge?

Yuri having his images allover while claiming to be exclusive has been discussed for many months now. They are certainly aware of it. Maybe the deal was only about not sending and removing content from SS, who knows?

There have also been many exclusives asking about how deals like these are possible and if they can have exclusive images as well. The answer I have seen is that it "shouldn�t concern them what Getty does". Exclusive images and some exclusives have also tried to negotiate their own "special deal". But from what I have heard they have not succeeded (yet). I suppose you need to be a large stock factory with many employees to be considered by Getty for "deals"


msg is the best place for open discussions.  Sometimes the facebook group has some information as well. These days the istock forums are unfortunately not a place where people feel welcome or heard.

Shutterstock should introduce a few more higher levels. After 38 cents, what goals are there left for you?

I also saw a drop of around 80% when I gave up exclusivity but with only 700 files on the bigger sites and less on the smaller ones I am at around 35-50% (depends strongly on extended licenses and video sales) of my former earnings. I think if I had uploaded much more vigorously to Shutterstock directly I could have reached a much higher level by now. Michael got his income back in 6 months, but I doubt many people are as well organized and disciplined as him.

Some time in summer I�ll be able to focus full time on stock again, so the next 18 months will be interesting. The opportunities of an indie are amazing, but I understand it is not for everyone.

To really compare indie to exclusive earnings you need to add income from the macros you will be supplying to and symbiostock or your own webshop.

if you already have an indepedent contract with Getty or have applied with other macro agencies or stocksy or offset, that will make a big difference to your overall income.

The biggest change is the freedom to decide yourself at which price point your images should be sold.

I don't think it is very wise to just "upload everything everywhere"

For me SS and Fotolia are the most important micros in addition to istock. I certainly wish I had uploaded much earlier to SS than I did.

Pond5 is very good for video and my photo sales are also increasing there.

The most interesting agency is stocksy, but at the moment it is hard to get in. And I still don't have results from the other macros, bevause I just started out with Westend and it takes time for files to be distributed and then even longer for sales results to trickle back.

But there are many macro sites and edited collections...plainpictures,tetra,blend...I would take a look around, see what you can supply and talk to the ones that interest you.

And then of course there is symbiostock and selling direct via your own website.

If you are indie there are so many options, it takes tome to test them and find what mix works for you, but you will defiently be a lot safer because your risk is spread over several different agencies and business models.

Good luck with your journey.

And maybe if more people leave istock will offer a third path of exclusive images like Getty has. On Fotolia many german artists are giving fotolia exclusive series, often of the regional German content. That seems to raise the overall visibility of the portfolio and of course brings in more money.

That is a different thing. If you go indie your files on Getty will be removed. But the OP has a direct contract with getty that is independent from istock.

Many people are indie but have a house contract with getty. then only the content they send to getty is exclusive.

It�s the main reason i don�t understand why istock doesn�t offer a third path for exclusive images/exclusive series. This is what Getty is practising anyway.

getty itself does not have an artist exclusive contract, only image exclusivity.

I agree that having high resolution files is better for the customer. So with new work I often shoot two versions, a boring one that has a lot of things in focus for ss and fotolia and one image that I like with shallow dof. I still often downsize to 12mp. I really have no time to reupload things for them, it is too confusing to always check what got accepted where.

For the micros I am really not going to fiddle on single images, I need to produce volume.

I downsize many files from 24 Mp to 6 MP only for SS. It stopped all those rejections for focus. I use shallow DOF a lot and SS doesn�t seem to like it. So now they get nearly everything downsized.

I�d rather have a small file online, then a large file rejected.