I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you. You can keyword your images poorly and spend 2-3 minutes per image. But for a good keywording of one image you should spent at least 5 minutes (if not 10). That means maximum 12 images per hour.
12x0.4=$4.8 per hour. Now find me someone who will do it for less. If you think this is a stealing, then sit and try to keyword 1000 images yourself

In my opinion, the only problem if you send images to Dreamstime for keywording, is that not all images will be accepted. So, you will again have some images to keyword manually.

i dont think i've ever spent 5'  on one image & generate 10-20 kw / image - if you have a good vocabulary,it's just not that hard - plus, i rarely keyword less than3-5 images at a time and even rarer are the times i have to start keywording from scratch -  i uslly have a siimila;ly   keyworded image that i can cut n paste

i average about 50 images an hour - that's writing captions, keywording, adding iptc info, but i wouldnt do it for someone else for less than $50/hr

s

Nicholas Kristof had a column addressing these issues last spring

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/three-proven-steps-to-advance-the-worlds-women-on-international-womens-day/

Well however you look at it a stable population is one where births=deaths. Clearly at the moment births>deaths as the population is increasing. The last thing you want to do is reduce the right of the equation even further.
 If anything, not enough people are dying of starvation. Sorry that is what a stable population looks like under the current conditions until someone has the moral courage to face up to the facts. The nicest thing to do is to try and reduce the number of births by placing limits on the number of children people can have. Failing this, at least don�t make it worse by trying to increase resource production!

as others have said, the populations AND standards of living in india and china have increased over the last 50 years, thanks in large part to the green revolution which now allows these countries to feed their people - neither has had a major famine in the last qarter century - the worst famines that have occurred are usually due to politics - from stalin's purges to china's great leap and cultural revolutions.  afica is the only continent where the green revolution hasnt been as spectacularly productive and again politics not agriculture is the main cause for hunger.
see wiliam shawcross quality of mercy for a detailed discussion of the politics of disaster relief

by far the MOST important thing to do to lower pop growth is to educate women - in cuntry after country as women are given education, they improve their living standards and the birth rate drops

steve

In 50 years they may cured AIDS and cancer but what will they do about people dying from hunger and thirst and killing each other for a handful of rice?  We cannot sustain ourselves at the rate we're growing.

actually bioengineering of the plant kingdom is probably the major emphasis right now --

the Green revolution was made possible 40 years ago by bio-engineered crops and while the GR has problems, it has had tremndous effects in reducing hunger

similar results are being achieved today with corn that fixes its own nitrogen, and the pest resistant strains  - reducing need for chemical fertilizer and pesticides.

steve

i looked at it, but it doesnt really do much for me at  the moment -- i just set uploads at the end of the day;  my bottleneck is clicking thru indiv images on dt, big,  to add the worthless categories or on ft to tfr keywords that yhey could EASILY read themselves since they capture all the info.   you still need to do that with isyn

i played with video a bit last year, but with 100 clips, only pond has shown any results - not a sale at ss, revo; but i decide to try again, isyn will definitely be my choice

s

esp'ly funny consider the title!

but i can imagine at least one innocent but sloppy way this could happen - they probably used a comp for early versions while the book was in production, then no one noticed when it wasnt replaced in final version.  i doubt amazon spends much time, if any, looking at publishers' images

s

i think alamy may be the best market for your archival editorial work. one plus about 123 is that they are not restricting their editorials to just news events, but to also include street scenes, which is a bit more creative.

actually all the places that take editorial DO accept non-news images, you just have to play the game -- eg, SS has VERY strict rules on what the caption looks like; most want at least a dateline, and that the caption reads like a news event, even if it isnt -- eg, in my tribal villager images, my normal caption would be "Bonda tribal woman", but for editorial they want "Bonda tribal woman poses for a portrait" and then these are accepted by SS, DT and BigStock


123 has been very fast in reviewing editorial - usually a day or 2, comapred with weeks for the regualr stuff

s

april was my worst month in the last 6, but may's looking to be 2 or 3rd BME.  overall, sales this year are +50% higher than last year

IS is my 6 or 7th in terms of revenue so an up or down month there doesnt affect me much

s

Quote from: cascoly on May 12, 2010, 14:04

if you're paying 50% taxes you need a better accountant -
the avg american pays 15-20% in TOTAL taxes --  and as a business, much of expenses become deductible, further lowering taxes.  $200 per day is $52K per year, which is well above the median US income; not suitable for everyone but certainly livable

My deductions amounted to about 8% of my gross, and my taxes were effectively 31% of that.  There's no "better accountant" - this year, we did all we could.

50% of Americans pay ZERO taxes.  Apparently, I'm helping to cover for them.

if your effective tax is 31% you're obviously earning more than $50K which is what the OP asked about

my response was to your earlier statement, not your personal finances --

you said

Heck no.  After taxes, that would be $100 a day, plus all the expenses of insurance, equipment, etc.  That's not nearly enough cushion in case of unexpected drops or anything else.  You need to figure out what you need to live on, add in all the costs associated, and then double it.  (and that still wasn't enough for me to quit my job yet)

and taxes on $50K would not be 50%

steve

Heck no.  After taxes, that would be $100 a day, plus all the expenses of insurance, equipment, etc.  That's not nearly enough cushion in case of unexpected drops or anything else.  You need to figure out what you need to live on, add in all the costs associated, and then double it.  (and that still wasn't enough for me to quit my job yet)

Unless you're single and living in your mom's basement or something where you have absolutely no risk at all.

if you're paying 50% taxes you need a better accountant -
the avg american pays 15-20% in TOTAL taxes --  and as a business, much of expenses become deductible, further lowering taxes.  $200 per day is $52K per year, which is well above the median US income; not suitable for everyone but certainly livable

s

I think quality matters. And I think what happened is the saturation of the market. Your early pics sell well still, because of its good best match position gained with their popularity and numbers of downloads "long time ago". Try to upload that same pic now and you will see what will happen.

that's an argument AGAINST quality  - sure it helps to have a quality image but today a quality image can be lost in all thed existing versions out there - esp'ly if the search engine is using some irrelevant filter such as age or even worse, % acceptance or slaes by the photographer -- a buyer usually doesnt care who the photographer is, or how long the image has been around.  in addition, a qualti yimage also stands a chance of being rejected as 'too similar' or 'we already have enuf of this' reasons

all this supports the notion that most search engines today, at best, are marginal in producing the best fit for a buyer's search - eg, it's much easier to find an image on google that fits precisely what you need than on any of the supposedly more professional & specialzed agences

s

Look!  this is a pretty pointless debate anyway because everyone, every agency is in fact striving for just this, problem is that after years of allowing spamming into the files it will equally take years to clean up the mess.
IS.  BM2 and the Getty search when they finally start working properly is well on the way.

best.

i haven't seen any stock agency that's moving in the direction of more contextual searches for what the user wants / needs -- there's a really interesting article in a recent Wired that discusses googles evolving search routines which are getting amazingly sophisticated

steve

in your example, you want to ONLY show the most literal images found - but you're ASSUMING that the buyer wants just a closeup of the word -- showing a range of images that all contain the keyword gives a better chance of presenting what the buyer was actually looking for.

similarly for the keyword 'apple' - the result should show not not only a closeup of fruit, but an orchard, a box of them on a truck, or a store display.

the search engine should expand the buyers options, not limit them - give them more than what they were asking for, to present ideas they hadn't thought of

s