I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Top right of those screenshots which Sue posted is the glaring clue:

"This site's metrics are estimated"

Estimated is a euphemism for meaningless

Employees come from schools that teach how to use the software that is the industry-standard - Adobe. Art and Design schools as well as technical schools teach only with the Adobe programs. That will not change. I will mention again that these programs can be customized for special industries. For example, I work in textile design for a billion dollar company and there is an Illustrator and Photoshop plug-in to create fabric prints, sweater knits, wovens with textures and thread counts, auto generation of color swatches and more. There are no other programs that offer that feature. I also worked in print publishing and there were special plug-ins that would do ink separations, embed swop parameters for special papers, pre-flight files to look for errors and much, much more. The cheaper programs don't offer these options. I worked in catalog production and the integration between Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign was seamless. What other programs can do that?

You are absolutely right that there are specialist industries and specific cases in which it is hard to imagine Adobe products being replaced. In the same way as Avid, Premiere and Final Cut have dominated video production.

But Adobe as it exists today is not sustainable on the basis of a relatively few , relatively specialists users.

For that reason I would suggest that the survival of the products is a different question vs the survival of the business in its current form. Because a few very high end users are not gong to be enough to satisfy the expectations of investors and markets which expect continual growth.

I do not see a bright future for Adobe. Most of the customers who will buy an Adobe subscription are now on board. They are not going to grow the number of subscribers much further.  They therefore face a growth issue. Investors want to see growth.

They may believe that they can meet expectations by gradually turning up the price of subscriptions. In order to do this they are likely to be looking for ways to increase the perceived value of an Adobe subscription (because in terms of features the products are already, frankly, bloated). Personally I doubt that users want clumsy content integration.

Bad news for Adobe is that perhaps 70% - 80% (this is my guesstimate) of their customers are using less than 30% of the functionality of the Adobe products. These core features (and more) are going to be included free on the software which ships with Macs, iPads etc. Or a cheap (and often less bloated and more modern) app is good enough - now that print is dead, bar the shouting. Eg - the latest Pixelmator costs less than $30 and is now fully 16 bit.

If you're licensing content with iStock Credits, you can purchase an Extended License when initially licensing content or anytime afterward by calling Support.

http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses

Terms of original sale. Seems to me that contributors implicitly accept those terms (and the responsibility to the client) irrespective of deleting their content or later leaving.

I have to say that both downloads and revenue have absolutely plummeted at Istock for me since the changes. I'm seeing the fewest sales numbers on weekdays that I have for nearly 10 years (since I first began uploading). So far this month I have yet to make double figures on any day. A few years ago, even as an independent, I was selling 50-60 licenses per weekday.

On the other hand sales at SS have gone ballistic and if it keeps up then I'm on target for a massive BME. In particular sales of On-Demand-Downloads have increased hugely.

Can I be alone in wondering whether the two events could possibly be connected?

I think that almost everyone (apart from Tickstock obviously) will now agree that you were right all along with respect to that thing about eggs and baskets.

Oh well.

:-)

Subscribe? Does Leaf offer subscriptions?

Profile -> Actions -> Paid Subscriptions

I hope that my previous was not misleading - subscribing won't get rid of the ads for you. I am simply speculating that perhaps if more people subscribed there would be less need for the ads.

I am not normally bothered with camera reviews because gadgets tend to be boring. But I enjoy Kai Wong's Digital Rev camera reviews from Hong Kong.

This review of the new Fuji X100T is interesting and I think worth sharing. They have filmed it at the street protests in Hong Kong. It is not a definitive camera review - and it is certainly not pretending to be a definitive piece of journalism. But it is quite interesting. I never saw a camera review which had the potential to also be a little bit of history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bsIkwQVvnw

Not so super rich and elitist after all.

if it was what it wants to be then it would never advertise. People would just know about it and invite each other.

my frustration has evolved to near anger over the continued decline in revenue, not just on Alamy but on the micros as well.

The market has declined whilst the number of contributors and the availability of content (often free) has increased. Greater availability = fewer sales and lower prices, inevitably.

The same will happen with video. Also - I keep hearing anecdotally that the market for video is being hit by a bandwidth costs.

What I have not seen is anyone offering a single example of a what a typical "microstock" shot is compared to "what sells" on Alamy or other macros for that matter.

I think that Alamy can be a good outlet for editorial specifics connected with current themes. Where as RF micro/stock tends to be more about generic themes. Clearly there is going to be lots of cross-over.

eg - a picture which is specifically and authentically about recycling in some particular city in China - vs a picture which has a recycling theme in general.

If I had a set of pictures which were specifically about recycling in China (or anywhere else) then I would be more inclined to send them to Alamy as RM - rather than to RF.

Something I do if I think I have a set which should sell sooner or later - is see how much is already there which is specifically about the same theme.

(I am RF exclusive at iStock. Editorial (apart from product shots) is not a main thing for them from what I can tell. And the prices they pay are quite low. So that is another factor. Also - the controlled vocabulary does not always lend itself to editorial specifics.)

ETA: but I am a very small fish - so what I say might not be the full story

An Australian company does not collect revenue for England. Scotland can vouch for that.

You need to charge TVA/VAT if you are selling to EU clients. Even if you are outside the EU. And EU clients will need invoices detailing that when they come to submit their company tax returns.

It does not imply that you are collecting taxes for a foreign govt. That's not how it works. Your lawyers and accounts should be able to explain this to you better. All companies selling digital goods into the EU are required to charge TVA/VAT. Have a look at how the established sites do it.

Back to the topic and the thread.  40 images at Shutterstock vs. iStock would be about the same give or take a few dollars. ETA:  Never mind they cost exactly the same:  $376 SS and $376 Istock

Except that the buyer Sue quoted (and many of the customers complaining on the web) only wanted medium size images. And the SS price for 60 mediums is $229.

Which brings us back to the single month sub at iStock being the better deal - that much content and more for a lower entry price.

As I said - it's a good offer that iStock are making and it is odd that they do not promote it better given that presumably they want customers to use them rather than going somewhere else.

the one month plan at iStock is probably worse for buyers than the one month plan at SS, 250 images for $200 compared to 750 images for $249, if I was given that choice I would most likely opt for the 750 images.

If you were the customer who Sue quoted then the iStock deal would represent a much better offer. Not many customers actually need 750 images in a month. That's overkill. Price of entry is often (mostly) going to be more important.

The iStock offer has a lower entry price. It's a good offer which they are failing to sell. And it's a better offer even if you need many fewer than 250 images (I doubt many users even need 250 images in a month).