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Messages - stockastic
3826
« on: May 26, 2009, 11:21 »
Well I got excited by all this great news, signed up at CanStockPhoto and submitted a bunch of images. 6 days later, nothing reviewed.
My enthusiasm has been curbed.
3827
« on: May 26, 2009, 10:02 »
Someone from SS posted on their forum yesterday, responding to speculations about their search algorithms. It was a good post, informative, and seemed sincere but it contained one statement which I thought was very revealing:
"We have a large library but there are still many areas in which we need updated, high quality content."
The implication being: in most areas, we are already well covered and do NOT need updated content, thank you. So what does this say about the future? What happens when the remaining "areas" are well covered?
3828
« on: May 25, 2009, 21:01 »
My wife works in a large medical office and sees a lot of glossy promotional, informational and insurance literature. She told me she recently started noticing photos of the same model showing up all over the place. (I did not bother to research this and try to find the source). For me this was a concrete example of how the Mathew effect (thanks Flemish) in these searches causes buyers to end up with the same images. Is that what they really want?
3829
« on: May 25, 2009, 11:33 »
"Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news"
- Billy Holiday/Arthur Herzog, 1939
I'm no mathematician but it isn't hard to see that as the archives get bigger, new images will have less and less of a chance, unless there's a ratings boost for new images. And it seems that on one site after another, the boost for new images is going away.
3830
« on: May 25, 2009, 10:57 »
Ok then, what does "image level" mean? Just the view count, or some number derrived from views, downloads, portfolio size, longitude, cosmic background radiation...?
Whatever they've done, it killed my sales too. I'm just been in this a few months and have about 80 images online. I was making way more sales back when I had just 30.
3831
« on: May 24, 2009, 20:19 »
What really bothers me about this is: companies turn to tacky borderline scams like this when they're on the ropes. This is a bad indication for Fotolia.
3832
« on: May 24, 2009, 18:19 »
I have no idea how DT search engine works. Therefore, I have no idea what to change to take advantage of searchs.
well of course, they're not going to reveal the details of their search algorithms. No microstock will tell you that.
3833
« on: May 24, 2009, 11:01 »
Warren, don't bother posting anything critical on the DT forum. They're extremely thin-skinned and always watching for negative posts, which they'll just remove. I once received a nasty warning from them hinting that retaliation is possible, so don't mess with them if you want to continue selling there.
3834
« on: May 23, 2009, 11:09 »
If a seller knowingly sells fake perfume, he's committed fraud. But if a buyer sprays it in someone's eye's, the buyer has committed assault, not the seller. We aren't responsible for all the uses to which our photos might be put. The law has concepts like "intent" and "good faith".
3835
« on: May 22, 2009, 21:29 »
The key is to keep moving the price down in small increments over time, so there's never a point at which contributors get angry enough to pull their photos. The net effect of all these increasing convoluted pricing and marketing schemes is that we gradually accept lower and lower average returns per image.
Here's the story you'll read a year from now:
"Google today announced the launch of its new GoogleStock service, a free source of over 10 million stock photographs and images, all searchable by keywords, topics and categories. Google has completed marketing agreements with the major existing "microstock" sites who will now make their entire archives available through GoogleStock in exchange for a share of advertising revenues, which will be generated by targeted banner ads for products related to the search terms entered by the user."
3836
« on: May 21, 2009, 18:10 »
Yes.
Yes.
3837
« on: May 21, 2009, 16:56 »
"Today, the struggle is over"
Yeah, I guess.
These companies will take stock photography to its natural price point, which they believe is zero. They plan make it on ads.
3838
« on: May 20, 2009, 16:09 »
Yes eventually styles change and stock photos taken 10 years ago no longer cut it.
With regard to image quality the situation is less clear. Magazine pages aren't getting any bigger, offset printing resolution isn't increasing (correct me if I'm wrong) and as content migrates to the web, resolution is even less important than it was on paper.
CD audio quality (12 bits at 50 kHz I think) turned out to be more than good enough for most people - higher definition audio formats never sold, and todays downloaded MP3s aren't particularly high quality. So while a 4 MP image is definitely out of date, it's not clear that 12MP won't be enough, anytime soon.
3839
« on: May 20, 2009, 15:22 »
I think if we spoke off the record with some people in the microstocks, many would agree with RT and say "of course we always want new images of better quality than what we have." But those would be the creative types, and their bean counters would be playing a different tune.
3840
« on: May 20, 2009, 14:47 »
Every microstock site will continue to take quality both in terms of technical excellence and image subject because they have no reason not to
Sure they do - it costs money to review new images, and their numbers might show that "better" images won't necessarily generate significantly more sales. If they can reduce the number of reviewers they're paying without significantly impacting sales, they make more money right away. These aren't art galleries. Their sales are probably limited by their crappy search capabilities, more than the quality of their images. They already have a few roses that are good enough. They'd probably be better off spending time and money weeding out the junk from what they already have, and improving their search algorithms, than reviewing and adding new images. They won't shut the door completely, though, because if they simply announced they weren't accepting new images, it would be a turnoff for buyers. What they will do instead is streamline their review process so more stuff gets rejected right off the bat without a close inspection ("welll covered") and increase other barriers to submission. But they aren't going to keep paying reviewers to do detailed 100% inspections of 50,000 new submissions in a week.
3841
« on: May 20, 2009, 13:06 »
Are you guys using FTP? If so why am I getting "host not found" on ftp.canstockphoto.com?
3842
« on: May 20, 2009, 12:52 »
Well this sounded good, so I decided it was time to give CanStockPhoto a go. I just submitted my application. About 60 seconds after the upload completed I got an email saying I'd been accepted. Wow! (I think...)
3843
« on: May 20, 2009, 11:30 »
lisafx, I believe that's what's happening.
Microstocks want to cut reviewing costs. They know what buyers search for vs. what they actually buy, and think they already have 95% coverage in their archives. So they'll focus on improving the search results for existing images and on new marketing schemes. Continuing to take in redundant and 'niche' images may not be worth what it costs to review and store them.
Your new rose shot may be better than any of the 100 they already have. But if the numbers show that all the buyers who search for "rose" end up happily buying an existing image, why does the microstock need a new one?
There will always be some buyers who like new images just because they're new, and a market for creative shots that are borderline as stock. But the existing microstocks will become ever more focused on just selling what they already have.
3844
« on: May 20, 2009, 09:33 »
I guess what it comes down to is if we want to use IS we have to put it in a different category. We routinely upload everything we do to FT, DT, SS. But not IS. Then we choose a few that we think might work at IS, keyword them and submit.
Apparently IS only wants the subjects that are already in their vocabulary. How boring is that?
3845
« on: May 19, 2009, 22:24 »
I have a photo of an old electric hair clipper once once used by a barber. Together with a comb and scissors it made a nice shot. But there's no "hair clipper" or "hair trimmer" in the CV - the closest was "electric razor". And I can't use "barber" or "barbershop" because they're not actually in the picture.
3846
« on: May 19, 2009, 20:51 »
Yes exactly.
I guess my point is that for me, anyway, it's just too much work, for just one site, and I'm burned out on it. If the whole microstock industry could get behind one "controlled vocabulary", then it would make sense. That will never happen of course.
3847
« on: May 19, 2009, 20:37 »
Some of these images - that I can't get into IStock due to keywording - are doing pretty well at other sites. I understand that IS is trying to bring order to the chaos of keywording. But a "vocabulary" has to be expandable, as needed, or it's a dead language.
They're trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to pre-define all the keywords and exercise strict control over how they're applied; but they want the submitters to keep doing the actual work of keywording. If they really want to manage keywording this tightly they should do it themselves.
3848
« on: May 19, 2009, 20:00 »
I've gotten a couple dozen images in IS and made some sales. I'd like to continue but I find I'm losing interest and it's getting harder and harder to make myself grind through their keywording and categorization, especially knowing they'll only end up accepting half the images for whatever reason, and that if I guess wrong on the keywords they'll reject it for that reason alone.
I do mostly objects, I look for unusual ones and the IS "controlled vocabularly" is just too limiting. Under their new rules I can only describe the object itself, not the activities or people that would use it,. If the object itself isn't in theire vocabulary there's nothing left.
3849
« on: May 19, 2009, 19:36 »
Interesting thread. I haven't submitted to BigStock and based on what I see here I don't intend to.
The microstocks seemt to think that the commission really should be 0%, and that they'll get there eventually. You all know the old story about how to boil a frog - if you turn up the heat slowly enough he never jumps out of the pot.
"Crowdsourcing" and "fair to contributors" are apparently incompatible ideas.
3850
« on: May 19, 2009, 16:00 »
Today 'Admin' showed up on the StockXpert forum after a long absence. He gave brief noncommittal answers to a couple of long-standing questions about licensing and subs - but carefully stepped around the big thread at the top of the forum about 'no views on new images'.
Just totally weird. It's like some goons from Getty took control of the office and herded everyone into the back room.
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