July was interesting - mostly in  a good way. SS had a great month, and for July, that surprised me; up 56% over 2012 (downloads up 17% so there was a real boost from SODs and ELs)

Alamy is hopeless - just one sale (not yet cleared, of course) "Usage: iQ sale: RF" where the maximum size sold. List price $315; actual sale price $45 (of which I get half). But it was hopeless in June too, for almost the same amount . They really ought to change the "list" prices as all it can do is deter new customers - no one ever pays those numbers in my limited experience.

DT is hopeless - down 36% on 2012 in $$ while downloads were up 8%. In another indication of how their pricing and other policies are hurting them instead of helping them, in 2012, SS made me 256% of what DT made me for July. In 2013 SS earnings were 601% of DTs - SS was six times what DT was versus two and a half times last year.

I have virtually no images left at IS so there's no real comparisons to make, but in several of the last few months the PP is making more than IS (with fewer images as there are no editorial on the PP). There was a little blip in June, but it was before the price changes and was just the ability of a few sales to skew the results when your portfolio there is tiny (only 147 left). Lord knows when we'll get the July PP numbers

123rf was about 1% down on July 2012. CanStock was in the toilet but a $32.60 "print" distribution sale on the 31st made for a last minute save. PhotoDune putters along - regular earnings but not much. Veer was about the same as PD and CanStock - no ELs this  month which is what boosts earnings there. I have only ~800 images there and don't plan to upload more but it's nice to see something regular from the images already there.

It's the Getty contract that has the audit provision. It's at their offices, and you pay for the cost unless it uncovers you've been underpaid by more than a certain percentage. You can only have an audit every so often (I think it's once a year) and you have to give them notice (60 days I think).

It seemed pretty toothless and potentially very costly - as I'm sure they intended it should be to discourage people from requesting them.

I don't think the IS ASA has ever had any sort of audit provision - and given their difficulties with keeping track of payments and refunds, it may be that it would be impossible to do one.

Other than echoing other people's comments that you need to get an editor to look over your work before you post it, I can only suggest that you keep a weather eye on your new business partner. Good luck beating the odds - their past performance speaks volumes.

I think you're way off base on the mobile photography business (and I have no real axe to grind one way or the other) but time will tell. If it is a big new thing, we all own the means to join in (a mobile phone) .

Your enthusiasm reminds me a bit of some of Bruce's posts after Getty acquired iStock. Just about every promise Getty made then has been broken, multiple times.

We'll certainly all be watching your progress with interest.

maybe SS should start strictly exclusive - to stop all this crap

SS has said repeatedly that they have no interest in exclusive contributors or content in their primary collection. No idea how Offset is doing or what the rules there are, but they could only do exclusive images at higher prices - to afford to pay the extra they'd have to to obtain images exclusively.

You can read through the discussions about this on MSG here:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/new-pricing/

and here

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/what-is-happening-to-istock-is-it-the-end/msg330278/#msg330278

Possibly I've not been paying sufficient attention, but when I looked at Pixmac after receiving a sale e-mail, I realized that I don't understand their pricing.

After the merger, I mentally figured that everything would end up at one site - Pond 5 - so I didn't keep tabs on Pixmac. What I noticed today is that there are at least two different pricing levels - 1, 3, 4 & 7 credits and 2, 4, 6 and 10 credits. Extended licenses are the same for both.

Here are two of mine as examples.

Cheap:
http://www.pixmac.com/picture/black+cat+by+the+stairs/000083327483

Less Cheap:
http://www.pixmac.com/picture/black+cat+by+the+stairs/000083327483

Pixmac has always rated things and I wondered if that was the pricing discrepancy, but it's not. The cheaper one is rated higher than the more expensive one. I also have cheap files that are 1, 3, 4, 8 (versus 7) - perhaps because it's bigger or 1, 3, 4, 6 (a 20D image that's smaller than my 5D Mk II) for the "Full Size"?

And one of the 1,3,4, 6 priced images has an extended license for 80 credits, not 40 - cheap standard license and double the price on extended?

http://www.pixmac.com/picture/christmas+living+room/000083859743

None of this makes any sense to me - I'm not sure I like random images priced at random amounts, none of which I can control. Feels too much like Getty's "we know what's best and you have no say in the matter".

Does anyone else have multiple prices? Anyone know why?



I also thought that we were supposed to get 50% royalties now (post-merger) but I have an extended license (which is 40 credits) which netted me 11.23 credits (which I think just means US dollars and cents).

If you need emotional closure, make a voodoo doll like object from the istock camera logo and burn it in the back garden (or some secure place). But leave your account open.

It's unlikely at this point that good things will happen with iStock, but you never know. Having an existing account can't make things worse for you in the future and it might be a help in some way.

I left all my accounts open when I went exclusive with iStock (in 2008).  With SS, that was clearly a win given their current royalty structure.

FT closed my account for me when they didn't like some things I posted here, but I had no say in that

Quote from: jsnover on July 19, 2013, 13:20

Quote from: wds on July 19, 2013, 12:32

One thing that helps mitigate that loss is the "promotion" of many exclusive files to S+ (or Vetta). Perhaps iStock calculated that they could take the hit in "demoted file" income (mostly independents) by offsetting it with "promoted file" income (mostly exclusives).

From the complaints I'm hearing from some exclusives (worst week/month since (some long ago year)), I don't hear a lot of happy exclusives. There may be some, but they're keeping awfully quiet.

May be a forced silence.  Shut up or get ejected.   

Reinforces my decision to avoid the forums.   

I'm not talking about the IS forums - they're dead. There are offsite groups for uncensored chat.

Like many other people, I see lurches from days with all subs to days with all credit sales. Once in a while I have a weekday with no sale at all; Wednesday and Thursday of this week I had no sales. Even for a summer month, that's a surprise. And SS has been having a great July so far, so it's not as if everywhere is in the doldrums.

Sometime overnight, one sale on the May 19th was added (to the one sale on the 2nd that appeared last Friday).

Looking at April 2013, even with my gutted remnants of my IS portfolio I had 20 sales, so I'd expect something similar for May

I looked at the 12 images of Glasgow on Scoopshot - a recent task to get interesting places and people for Visitors

https://www.scoopshot.com/v2/task/rbscsmmtgknqr

Other than the mall interior, which is a nice shot and not what you'd find on the agencies because of rules about property releases and, in SS's case, the idea that editorial must be newsworthy, I think what SS and Dreamstime have to offer is much better.

"Stale" or no, the 850+ Glasgow photos on DT and the 1,500+ on SS are a ton better than what Scoopshot has to offer. When there's nothing newsworthy or new in a topic, but people just need images for a web site or brochure, "stale" stock does just fine I think

The summer sandwich photos are equally dire, including (anyone remember this from Buy Request at iStock?) several that aren't of sandwiches at all. A pot of shrimp on a stove, a soda bottle on some blankets...

https://www.scoopshot.com/v2/task/dgzfjzmnbdlgj

You have to love the small, out of focus shot of a package of Oscar Mayer Bologna...

This seems (a) insane as a business idea and (b) an odd thing for Yuri to fund given that he has an interest in the existing stock business staying around.

People seem to greatly underestimate the awfulness of pictures people grab with their smartphones.

I realize whoever wrote the text on the Scoopshot web site is not a native English speaker, but there are several places that mention Scoopshot transferring the copyright (although there are also seemingly contradictory mentions of multiple sales being possible and only publishing rights being transferred)

https://www.scoopshot.com/v2/about/faq

"When you send your photo or video to Scoopshot, you give Scoopshot the right to use it in the Scoopshot service. All photos are for sale and cannot be used without buying appropriate publishing rights.

Scoopshot has permanent rights for transferring the copyright of the photo or video. Scoopshot will then ensure that you get the agreed compensation for the transferred rights."

I don't know if you remember the unlamented KK Thompson saying that iStock paid out $1.7 million a week to contributors in September 2010, and that he expected it to go up to $2 million a week in 2011:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=252322

Apparently weekly payouts are back to $1.7 million a week, unless Monday's Getty press release got it wrong (look at the end, in the "About iStockphoto" section)

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/15/5569175/getty-images-names-ellen-desmarais.html

Possibly it's just lazy editing (given the horrible pseudo English in the rest of the release, that's an option), but possibly it reflects just how much more Getty is soaking up from what customers are paying, combined with a drop in business.

I think Ms Dow Jones has no idea what she's signed up to try and fix - getting designers to come back and shop at iStock when you know squat about those businesses, designers, illustrators, etc. seems like classic business school hubris. Any business is the same as any other business; you just work a few levers and presto...

To all you native English speakers: Is there a difference between incompetence and malpractice? ...

There is. Not all incompetence rises to the level of malpractice Generally there has to be some standard of accepted practice that someone failed to live up to to call it malpractice. Sometimes incompetent people get lucky and do no harm in spite of their woeful lack of skills. Sometimes very skilled and competent people make horrible decisions and commit malpractice.