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Messages - sharpshot

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426
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 25, 2016, 13:57 »
It doesn't take much time or energy to request istock to close your account.  It would hurt istock much more if 800 of us did that.

Would it?

If 800 people quietly close their accounts, what will it do? How would anyone know? Surely by now, after round after round of royalty cuts over the years, with mass deletions every now and again, at least 800 people must have closed their accounts, and many more have deactivated huge portions of their portfolios, me included.

Did it matter to Getty? Of course not. Nobody knows it happened but us.

What will matter to Getty is losing buyers. And being able to show them that thousands of artists have signed a petition about royalty cuts is useful.
Buyers put images in to lightboxes or they go back and buy images again.  If they are gone, they might try and find them on other sites.  I'm sure all those missing images makes a difference with Google.  Istock used to be on a par with Shutterstock for non-exclusive in the earnings poll here.  People leaving might of made a difference but they are even behind Fotolia now.  So I have to disagree, Getty might not think it matters but they are wrong.

427
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 25, 2016, 10:52 »
Update.  It looks like they finally closed my account and it only took them 27 days.  I guess I just have to trust them to send me the correct amount that they owe me.  So today I am thankful to finally be done with those rotten, greedy bass turds.  ;D
I will be joining you soon.  Still can't quite believe that the response of lots of people to the prospect of getting $0.02 is to sign a petition.  There's so many better places to sell for non-exclusives, this is a great opportunity to get away from istock and send a message to the other sites that they wont get away with paying us almost nothing.
Same as its always been. Signing a petition is easy. Even though there is only a slim chance that it would even work, most do not really want to do what it takes...leave entirely. Instead, they will continue to take the peanuts, and just whine about it. For the life of me, I do not understand people who continue to accept abuse.

The petition gives Getty/iStock (and others) an idea of how many contributors they might lose, gives them an opportunity to respond (unlikely) and sends a message to other sites that we won't accept a slash in royalties. It's also something that you can point buyers and media outlets to so they see it's not just one or two people upset about the decrease in royalties but something that affects the income of thousands of artists.

Close to 800 people have signed it now. If everyone signed it we'd have thousands of signatures, which would give people an idea of the impact this royalty cut has.

Whining here does nothing. At least the petition gives us a public voice. If it doesn't work, hey, I'll pull my port. But then I can tell the many, many buyers I know how hard we tried to get Getty to change its mind.

I think it's ironic when people who can't be bothered to even sign a petition have the time and energy to whine over and over again about how it's not gonna work.
It doesn't take much time or energy to request istock to close your account.  It would hurt istock much more if 800 of us did that.

428
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 25, 2016, 04:49 »
Update.  It looks like they finally closed my account and it only took them 27 days.  I guess I just have to trust them to send me the correct amount that they owe me.  So today I am thankful to finally be done with those rotten, greedy bass turds.  ;D
I will be joining you soon.  Still can't quite believe that the response of lots of people to the prospect of getting $0.02 is to sign a petition.  There's so many better places to sell for non-exclusives, this is a great opportunity to get away from istock and send a message to the other sites that they wont get away with paying us almost nothing.

429
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 24, 2016, 15:03 »
so far i haven't seen any of this 0,02....even when people see a lot of 0,1 0,06 i never saw nothing less than 0,28....
now i'm ready for 0,15m as minimum...o will upload less....also stock review seems a lot slow with non exclusive.... and see.
if i begin 0,02 simply i will leave my image there and not upload nothing more. very simple.
petition and useless fight are time consuming and will not end to nothing.
i see fotolia increasing a lot their sale and shutter stock recovering in the last 2 months...strangely i have my best month in stock from a long time. i repeat till they grow my per month income i will upload if not bye bye.
in my opinion they are simply moving their effort to exclusive contributor.
You will get $0.02 when they make the change and if you leave your images there, it will only get worse.  They presume a lot of people wont bother leaving and they have been right until now.  The problem is, why would other sites pay us more if we tolerate $0.02 with istock?  Staying with them is going to cost you a lot of money.  I remember saying this when they cut below 20% and I was right.  Shutterstock used to give us a raise every year and that stopped.  BigStock, I23RF and other sites have cut the amount they pay us or made it impossible to reach the levels we used to get paid.  At some point, contributors have to take action or we will see all the sites paying us less until there's no point in uploading.

430
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock search change??
« on: November 24, 2016, 14:50 »
Something must of changed because so many of us are now getting sales from new images when we were getting almost none before this week.  New images seemed to be almost invisible until this week.  I'm also seeing some really old images that haven't sold in almost a decade selling.

431
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 24, 2016, 08:31 »
I have zero confidence in a petition working with Getty/istock.  Leaving now seems to be the only sensible option for non-exclusives.  Any non-exclusives putting up with 15% and subs as low as $0.02 will be risking the other sites going the same way.

432
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock Royalty Change
« on: November 23, 2016, 18:02 »
I'm getting out of there.  Sent a request to close my account.  The thought of still selling for almost nothing in 2017 was just too much.

433
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock petition: Please sign and share
« on: November 23, 2016, 12:18 »
Getty/istock wont care but maybe it will get some publicity and people will find out about the pittance they want to pay us.  Buyers might realise that they wont get the standard of content they are used to if all we get is $0.02?

434
Alamy.com / Re: Payment Threshold
« on: November 23, 2016, 07:01 »
The payout threshold has never bothered me but its another nice gesture.  I upload a lot of images exclusively to Alamy, even though they don't pay more for exclusive images.  It just feels right to help a site that is so contributor friendly as much as possible.  If everyone got behind Alamy and the few other sites that pay us 50% and did something positive to help them, I think we would be much better off than spending all out time complaining about sites that don't deserve our images.  Not that I don't enjoy complaining about sites that treat us appallingly, venting is good but doing something positive is better.

435
StockFresh / Re: Sales at Stockfresh
« on: November 22, 2016, 17:24 »
A lot of sites spent too much on marketing and are no longer around.  I don't mind the few that haven't spent much but have been around for years and pay 50%.  They aren't exciting but over many years they still make enough money to keep me uploading.

436
The worst that can happen is that there's a complaint and you're blameless because you're selling the images with an editorial license.  Not something I would lose sleep over.

437
Alamy.com / Re: Submitting editorial images
« on: November 22, 2016, 07:55 »
You can contact them and ask them to change it to RM.

438
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock petition: Please sign and share
« on: November 21, 2016, 17:32 »
For whatever reason momentum seems to be picking up. I just checked and it's well over 600 now, so a whole bunch of people must have signed it this morning.
I wasn't going to sign it, because I think its a waste of time but Rose Tinted Glasses persuaded me.  He's done a great job getting more people to sign it :)

Looks like he's gone now but no doubt he will be back with another anonymous account trying to defend the indefensible.

439
General - Stock Video / Re: Oasis 'Supersonic' Film
« on: November 21, 2016, 17:21 »
A lot of books put our names in the credits along with the agency they bought the images from, I think films and TV should do that too.

440
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock petition: Please sign and share
« on: November 21, 2016, 11:59 »
Exclusive are non exclusive for rights managed image licences.  Some exclusives have been very non-exclusive for royalty free as well.

441
iStockPhoto.com / Re: iStock petition: Please sign and share
« on: November 21, 2016, 11:35 »
The petition doesn't say that the cuts apply to all photographers and illustrators, so I don't see a problem with it.  The bit about the industry standard 40% is annoying but its a bit late to change that now.

Even though I think this is a waste of time, I signed it anyway.

442
Good to see this place is still the same.
And you haven't changed a bit :)

443
I think Alamy are one of the best places to sell.  There's no silly rejections, they sell new images and sometimes you can earn more from 1 sale than an entire month on most of the microsotck sites.  Don't expect much from the first year, it isn't an instant gratification site.

444
StockFresh / Re: Sales at Stockfresh
« on: November 20, 2016, 18:35 »
They don't sell a lot but I only spend about 10 minutes a year on the site and the amount they make is worth it.  As they pay 50%, I will carry on uploading when I have nothing better to do.

445
So now the only option left is to leave.  I will wait and see how bad it gets, they don't have any of my most commercial images now.  If I start seeing my average earnings per image deteriorate to a point where I can no longer tolerate it, I will get out of there.

446
General Stock Discussion / Re: MICROAA association
« on: November 18, 2016, 18:57 »
... all we have ever needed is a site majority owned by contributors and if that's not possible ...

Why do you think it is not possible? Because SymbioStock community is so small and their search engine is pitiful? Or the problem is not in the engine? Is it about SEO?
Symbiostock isn't one site, everyone has to pay for their own site.  I never liked that idea.  Why have so many people spending money on hosting and having to constantly work on their sites when that time and money could be used on one site for all of us?  Lots of individual sites is a pain for buyers as well.

Ok. How do you see "owned by contributors" in the reality? Owned by Microstock Authors Association? Owned by some company where all the shareholders are photographers and illustrators? And its CEO is a photographer?
Perhaps the easiest way would be for a group of contributors to get together and buy a 51% stake in one of the smaller sites.  I haven't thought about the details much because there isn't much point unless more people are seriously interested.

447
General Stock Discussion / Re: MICROAA association
« on: November 18, 2016, 08:11 »
... all we have ever needed is a site majority owned by contributors and if that's not possible ...

Why do you think it is not possible? Because SymbioStock community is so small and their search engine is pitiful? Or the problem is not in the engine? Is it about SEO?
Symbiostock isn't one site, everyone has to pay for their own site.  I never liked that idea.  Why have so many people spending money on hosting and having to constantly work on their sites when that time and money could be used on one site for all of us?  Lots of individual sites is a pain for buyers as well.

448
General Stock Discussion / Re: MICROAA association
« on: November 17, 2016, 17:53 »
When I saw micro AA, I thought of people with a small alcohol problem, probably quite appropriate.  I don't like the idea because all we have ever needed is a site majority owned by contributors and if that's not possible, I don't think an association is going to help.

449
PhotoDune / Re: Submissions and access gone at Envato
« on: November 16, 2016, 09:44 »
I haven't taken a lot of notice of what's going in on this site, only to go in and get a pay out from time to time.  I have just been and had a look and of about 140$ earnt in the last 30 days about 40$ was deducted in tax and 77$ deducted in fees leaving me with 23$ !!   I'm sure it didn't used to be like that.  Has something changed.  I think I used to average about 70$ a month before not 23 !!
They decided to make our lives complicated by declaring themselves as a market place, rather than the agency they really are.  There are possible tax complications and I decided it really wasn't worth selling through them when they did that.

450
Yaymicro / Re: Yaymicro - Legal solution ideas
« on: November 16, 2016, 09:31 »
That's good to know, tried the same thing.  No idea why all sales, even on the 3rd party sites stopped.  They used to be a good site but I can't believe that huge list of 3rd party sites all stopped selling.  I'm uploading directly to one of those sites and get sales, so something is wrong.

Same. So I decided to just leave them my 2 euros and move on.
My account was closed quite quickly.  I left them a few more euros but there was no chance of hitting another payout if they aren't selling anything.  Such a shame because they were doing better than some of the other sites I use at one point and paid 50%.  Another one bites the dust.

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