Quote from: enstoker on March 28, 2014, 11:26

Quote from: KB on March 28, 2014, 10:32

It's really premature to place this thread in "Sites that no longer exist", isn't it? 

Finally someone who has noticed...

And no, it is not.
This is well known scenario, after small or zero sales, no payments, no communication...

Really then there should be a Not doing well, but are trying hard and with some luck who knows category.

That sounds better.   

And we can put ClipDealer and Revostock in there (among those I contribute to).  Well, except for the communication part.

The 15th fell on a weekend.  I got mine on Monday the 17th. Seems reasonable.

Gee, that's interesting. I got mine on the 15th (which did surprise me a bit).

Maybe they favor the old contributors? 

I didn't even realize they were speedometers. 

That's what I call 'em.  The official forum term seems to be 'gauge'.

I understand the fear of retaliation, but I think the anonymous folks should know that being anonymous in any forum greatly diminishes the value some folks will place on their comments. Especially in this business, where we talk about levels of success, portfolio performance, etc., knowing where the comments about those things come from can be extremely important. There is a world of difference between someone saying they are having problems getting new images to sell at whatever agency for example when that person has 10 images in their portfolio or 10,000. Even the kind of work people do is important contextual information in any discussion here, and without that it is often really difficult to gauge the significance of a comment.

I understand and agree this is a problem with being anonymous. The speedometers give at least a little hint as to whether someone is a complete novice, one of the top tier, or somewhere in between. Though it seems their use has somewhat grown out of favor recently, for some reason. Even if one has portfolio links, I think the meters give a quick visual cue as to the poster's ranking, and I wish more people would use them.

As an IS exclusive, I wouldn't write many of the posts that I do if I couldn't be anonymous. Being totally dependent on one site (owned by a company that seems determined to run it into the ground), it would be even more stupid to make negative comments about them that could result in retaliation of some kind. I'd rather not post than have to post non-anonymously.

Quote from: KB on March 14, 2014, 10:32

Quote from: tickstock on March 14, 2014, 10:09

Go to iStock.

Completely off-topic, and certainly not Tickstock's meaning, so I apologize in advance.

But am I the only one who read that as "Go to hell"? 

Again, sorry.

LOL, it wasn't meant like that.  The royalties are listed on the iStock website, not the thinkstock website.  I was being lazy, I didn't want to go find the link but here it is:  http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/rate-schedule

Of course I knew that. It's just that sometimes I feel I am in (microstock) hell, so telling someone to "go to iStock" equated in my mind to ....

Quote from: KB on March 12, 2014, 17:36

So I fully expect that credit sales will plummet even further (much further) than they have.

They will enroll the new iStock sub. model in April. It will take 2-3 months for a buyers to finish their current credit balances and to switch to the new sub. model...
I expect in June with summer slowdown we will see a huge drop in revenue and massive exodus of exclusives from iStock flooding the market with their ports.

Excellent point; it will take time for many credit buyers to use up their credits before switching over to subs. So we'll probably see an extended period where sales drop off more and more, gradually at first, and then accelerating.

Not something I'm looking forward to. 

<snip>
they'll be 75 cents and $2.50.  Not great at all but not Shutterstock levels yet.

Of course this is all speculation on my part, but I don't think sales volume will be SS levels, either.

Unless IS is somehow successful in luring away SS buyers (I hope so for my sake, but highly doubt it), what's going to happen is that the new sub sales are going to come from whatever few new buyers they can attract, but mostly from existing IS buyers that they convert to subscriptions. Who would be interested in that? The buyers who buy the most files now. So I fully expect that credit sales will plummet even further (much further) than they have.

And despite SS' Jon's assertion that 99.9% of their business is commercial, my own portfolio definitely has a large portion of non-commercial sales. So I also expect that many of those non-commercial buyers will decide to take advantage of Getty's giveaway, hitting my port with a double-whammy that it will never recover from.

Like I said, purely guesswork. But educated guesswork, IMO. And I do expect to be proven correct in the next few months.   

Here's a link to a The Verge article about it:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/12/5499584/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-search

The link is legit.

Colorado-based DigitalGlobe has sent two of its satellites to survey the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, targeting areas that haven't been covered by other satellites or where inclement weather could have hindered previous attempts. The company is also looking at the Strait of Malacca, after (disputed) reports yesterday suggested that the aircraft could have traveled far off course. The company's images should be available online by early Wednesday, where volunteers will be able to help scan them.

The images will be published on Tomnod, a crowdsourcing site where users help identify debris from natural disasters or other incidents. After DigitalGlobe published its first satellite images on Monday, the site saw an unprecedented influx of traffic � more than 500,000 unique visitors within 24 hours � forcing it to reboot its servers. According to DigitalGlobe senior manager Luke Barrington, 100,000 users scanned the first images, collectively examining each pixel 100 times over.

However, all the traffic has crashed their servers, and so they were down the last I checked.

An open letter to photographers

https://www.picfair.com/posts/an-open-letter-to-photographers

Why does this get so many positive recs? It seems to be saying what a lot of the posts that get negative recs are saying:
The web is awash with news that Getty is giving away all of its images for free. Relax. It isn't. Your work has not suddenly become worthless.

This is what has changed: people who were previously not paying for Getty images, and were never going to ... will continue not paying for Getty images.

Bloggers can now legally embed Getty image into their sites for non-commercial use. These images are a chunk of real estate that Getty can make money from at a later date.

It fails to consider that 1000s (10000s?) of bloggers who did pay for images no longer have to, as well as the possibility (yet unrealized) that editorial sites will switch to free images.

I think it's very short-sighted to believe that this changes nothing.

SSTK is down almost 4% today on the heels of GI's announcement to make their 35 million files available for free.

It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Does it recover, or is last week's high of 103.01 going to prove to have been the top?

If I had to bet, I'd be selling here.

If we exclusives needed another reason to think the end is near, this is it. 36c or 75c sales for XXXL sizes? 

It's inevitable now. SS is going to see quite an influx of new contributors.

Again, CC is dead.
Simple as that.

I had my first sale in several months a few weeks back.

I'm still hoping they make it, somehow.

That one looks ok (and for the price, very good). I think that aspect ratio (1920x1080, 16:9) is a bit less appealing than 1920x1200 (16:10). I find the extra vertical pixels to be very helpful.

But it's an IPS panel using LED back-lighting, so at least the display should be decent enough (though it may need calibration for accurate color rendering). This one has HDMI, VGA, & DVI input ports, so it should be good to go. If you choose another, make sure it has the input port that your current computer cable supports, or you'll need a new cable or adapter. Bring the cable along if you aren't sure what type it is.