Depending on your work - have you considered talking to the smaller macro/production houses? agefotostock, tetra images, plain pictures, blend...

Did you apply to Offset?

I do wish there was a stocksy for the masses, but I guess if the collection is not edited to a very specific, recognizable  style it will be difficult to market.

Otherwise, shutterstock, istock, fotolia, dreamstime. For the micros you need mass production, depending on how you work, you might need to adjust your work flow.

Good luck!

But why would iStock create a new landing page saying
"Explore millions of stock photos, vectors, videos and music clips you can�t get from the other guys"
if they wanted or expected exclusives to leave?

Because they are talking about "exclusive content from getty".

The exclusive content does not have to come from the istockphoto exclusives. For the advertising they can just use content from getty , either their house collections or people they have "deals" with like the exclusive content from yuri.

When you see anywhere something written about "exclusive" content, it does�t mean they are talking about the istock artists.

Like others have said, they just need to keep the top contributors happy, maybe 100 people? everyone else is just supplying content they also have in their own exclusive getty collections. they only pay out 20% for that, so why should they favour artist from istock with a higher royalty?

I also doubt they will just cancel the exclusive program, but by not paying RC�s on subscriptions, they will certainly be moving many artist to a lower royalty level (unless they grandfather them again). But a significant part of the sales will be coming from subs, if it doesn�t, they are not competing successfully with SS.

I would expect them to market the subscriptions heavily, and not just to compete with SS but because whatever royalty is being paid on subs will have a royalty they are comfortable with.

Of course we will never know how much that is, because at the moment Getty is not publishing this data.

Have you ever seen a contract that was clear to anyone but a lawyer?

Just look at all these new definitions of "promotional use". Don�t see anything in the contract that allows to embed files millions of times for free across the internet.

by the way, rich people don't care about art, they just buy it as an investment in order to diversify their assets.

I know, which is why a lot images you see in the "art world" is just a different form of stock.

The artist are producing for the investment market, it is just as much production and assignment work as we do.

Building up the "persona of an artist" marketing the artist and his or her story...etc...

Unless you are very professional and customer targeted in your approach you won't make those big dollars.

eta: as for customers paying the right price for stock...you of course need to manage production costs with returns, like any business. And find a partner who puts energy into selling your work...like stocksy...

No, they won't. They have almost 100K Flickr photographers who willing to do anything just to be be able to post Getty Artist badge on their Flickr page. There are good bunch that have huge RM ports. The embed program will not affect this group too much because they are not interested in small sales, and this campaign might give them the right exposure as their photos stand out and there is potential that buyers could be coming back to them. However, the majority are amateur with mediocre and replicable portfolios, have no where to go.

I remember the "istock charts" that had over 30 000 names of contributors entered and where we were ranked by sales. I was in the top 300, number 272, until I stopped uploading for a while and others overtook me.

I really don't think of myself as a top level artists, just good nice useful solid stock production.

So if I can make it into the top 1% of that list, I really don't think the masses of 100 000 flickr producers worries me.

The number of people who produce useful stock on a regular basis is very small, even if a huge flood of files enters the sites every week.


It is the top 5000 artists from all media types, those that regularly produce sellable content, that the agencies need to keep happy.

Maybe that is still enough "mass" for them to ignore us and treat us like idiots, but I believe the agency that can tap into the talent pool will have a distinct advantage. Especially those agencies that treat us as independent web shop owners and give us the tools we need to work.

All we need is a good plattform, the market is self organizing.

And how many shop owners want to have their products used for free by the world, even if their name is below and there is a backlink?

The loss of control is the biggest problem. Like we have established before - if this move was really about advertising and increasing sales, it would have been easy to offer an opt in.

You only force people into something if you know they don't want it and when they can benefit immensely from having everything available at once.

In this case a new business of data collection and ad space, built on the back of 500 dollar files.

The correct way to do this would have been to pay the artists for every embedded file. If they want to offer it free to the bloggers, then Getty should be the one paying, at least a sub level royalty for every embed.

To say "the files would have been stolen anyway so you don't deserve any money" is  wrong because the value of the blogs and articles is increased by the embedded image.

Congrats! I didn�t believe these SOD�s existed until I got 80 dollars for a simple easter egg image that had never been downloaded before on istock.

They are not a myth, they exist.

This is a decision that will make me more money

only on SS. You are not moving from istock to SS. You are going to get income from many sources.

But from what I hear the number is higher, but I guess that depedns on the portfolio amd the volume of regular uploads.

SS has around 300 million dollars in revenue and is growing, Fotolia around 150, so together they are already bigger than istock. Plus the other agencies, macro sales and video.

I am sorry to hear that. Losing nearly half your income from an agency in one night is very serious.

Diversification is really important for us all.

Quote from: cobalt on March 11, 2014, 20:43

Maybe we should really open a new thread. Best strategies to diversify on the micros and macros? How not to be dependent on just one agency? Best mix of photos/video and illustration?

Would anyone like to start that?

that's right, but it would mean we're accepting that we can no longer survive with our core business (photos)

and yet it still doesn't look profitable to me, who's going to pay the gas to go on location and all ?

The people here on the micros having been doing a mix of media and a mix  of different stores for years.

Where have you been all this time?

Some people also write apps, work for game developpers, write articles etccc.

msg is the domain of the digital media artist and internet entrepreneur.

How many people here also run ebay shops amd amazon stores?

Online business is our core business, photos is just one of the products we sell.

And of course when you have a portfolio you always look for additional ways to make money with it, many people have developped excellent combinations of photo stock and print products.

But opening a thread specifically dedicated to collect the current opportunities beyond stock agencies might be a good idea.

Eta: for instance the obvious trend for 2014 is smartphone photography. So what would be the best way to benefit? Which agency has the best offer, the best opportunity to make money.

But it really deserves a new thread.

Thank you for the list BD. It is good to hear your files are gone, i will check tomorrow for mine.

Well, that must be a relief. But many people payed thousands of dollars to have images placed there.

In general, what do you think will happen? Will it be the Getty artist that now stop uploading, like many micro artists did after the getty Google deal?