same for ALT text, all automated with wordpress.

any decent CMS has automatic translation addons, try Wordpress for instance !

He has already proven to be a smart guy who makes right moves,so it looks  good for him.
as for us? well, dunno, I have lost my motivation long ago,subs,so little commissions,constant best match shifts  makes it impossible for me to foresee what will happen next. all i know, at least for me- good  old days  are  over. perhaps it is more to do with over supply in the market, not what Yuri is doing. also  almost all micro sites getting so much control over our images. shooting for . 38cents??? well?

well, you dig your own graves, guys.
now it's too late, it's all over.

by the way, you think this is the end ? no, it's the tip of the iceberg, wait for the crowd of stockers in poor countries to join the game, now they've decent internet and the young ones speak english enough to make a half baked keywording and captioning, filipinos in particular but also indians etc

in a few years SS and IS will have maybe 500 million images on sale.
how will you deal with that ?

and find me one single reason for why they should ever raise the fees to contributors.
2-300 bucks/month is a great salary in most of asia, if it suc-ks in the West well that's your business not theirs.

remember my words of wisdom !

I really wonder how the old school gettyshooters will react to such a powerhouse in their protected walled garden. Yuri will be like a force of nature they cannot compete with.

well, at the moment he can barely compete with BlendImages on Getty.

@jareso :

man, it's over, it's 2013.

and by the way, because of the recent new Google Images interface there's been a drop up to 80% in the number of visitors coming from Google Images.

no more free lunch with google, either you pay or you find a way to get your site linked by BBC, NYT, etc, good luck with that.

in plus, Matt Cutts announced the launch of Penguin v3 next month, that means another big mess in google serps that will only favour the top sites and sandbox even more anybody else with no way to recover.

you can keyword as much as you want but today if you're not linked by high-PR legitimate sites you count nothing and you'll be in page 100 for any query.

it's a big mafia and google is the boss, nothing we can do about it.

moreover, even if you pay it's not a guarantee that visitors will "convert" into sales especially if your products suck and if the site looks like sh-it.

Xanox I have read every single entry you placed on this forum on the last days (around 357 comments) and yep I am giving up and going to clean toilets somewhere, cheers!

hahaha.

you're young, one day you will understand.

As to Yuri, IMO he wants to move his business to the next level in terms of creation/creativity and he can't do that from micropayments.

it's a creative job, but nothing to do with ART.

he's on F1.4 primes, light walls, fake smiles, fake models, fake everything, perfect stuff for generic advertising, but nothing you couldn't find before in any RM agency honestly.

i'm not into that sort of stuff, i would puke at the idea, but he can easily sell 100x times more than me so i don't blame him and i respect him, to each his own, i'll be the own begging for money, not him.

and i think one of the very reasons for him to move upscale is that Getty allows a lot more creativity than micros.
many photos that would be rejected at IS or SS could sell once for a lot of money on getty, 100s or 1000s of dollars.

at this point there's no other level he can push his business apart quantity.
his direct competitors are now the other lifestyle agencies under getty, that's his new playfield.

i'm sure one day he'll regret having wasted time with micros, mark my words.

or maybe, considering his attitude, he'll pat himself on the shoulder and claim to having joined micro at the right time and left it at the right time.

well, i disgress, if he was good enough from the start he had to join getty from the start but it's not my business to judge his business.

as an RM guy i'm glad he came back home, so to speak.

stocksy is a special niche content agency and it is very, very early stages. Bruce has come up with a clever model and is not planning to add 30 000 photographers and 30 million images.

The world is very big place and I am very confident that stocksy will find it�s niche in the global market.

Think of trendy expensive organic food stores. They exist inspite of walmart.

but why so many of you guys are raving about Stocksy ?

first of all the founder is now a millionaire and his belly is full.
Stocksy is just his new playground, his new toy.

you say he's not seeking to make big money ? well and neither those joining Stocky will see any money then...

and in any case it's the deja-vu of Digital Railroad, a wannabe "boutique" agency, a sort of mid-stock, neither flesh nor fish.

as an analyst, i give him 12 months before crashing and burning, but since it's his personal toy he could keep it in artificial life for a few years just to boast around he's in the stock business and he runs an agency.

no offence but your suggestions were valid in 2005 maybe.

read some more SEO forums and see what i mean.

all your talking about is keyword spamming which doesnt work anymore since at least 3 yrs.

nobody knows exactly what it working at the moment, even the top SEOs.

the sad truth is our only option is to pay for advertising, which is exactly what you would do in any other physical business after all, so no big deal.

More BS.  You say nobody can survive selling subs on SS, totally ignoring the fact that SS is much more than a subs site.  My RPD there has gone up every year since 2006.  They sell more and more on demand, SOD's and lots more EL's than the other sites.  I haven't uploaded much for the past 2 years but my SS earnings keep increasing.  It's the opposite of how you would like it to be.  I'm sorry that the people that have been predicting the imminent demise of microstock for at least the last 7 years have got it so wrong and that they continue thinking that everything that happens is bad for microstock contributors but it clearly isn't true.

I'd like to see the end of commission cuts and it might be more difficult to make a living from microstock in the future but the same could be said about macro.  Alamy have cut my commissions twice now, lowered prices and competition has drastically increased.  I don't think Getty contributors have had it easy.  We all have the same problems and idiots that still think microstock is the only problem after all these years are deluding themselves.

i've NEVER predicted the end of micro for agencies !
what i predicted from the start was that agencies would have scr-ewed photographers big time, and that's exactly what happened over time, ALL my predictions became reality.

and actually i was a bit optimistic, i could not imagine IS would pay fees as low as 15% as they do now for non exclusives.

neither i predicted Yuri's bombshell.

i instantly smelled sh-it when he launched his agency but i told myself, hmmm maybe it's just a way to diversify, it would be a bombshell if the microstock's hero actually leaves micros to join getty or corbis or whatever !

alamy : yes they cut commissions but i also see a raise in views and sales so it's quite stable.
at least they're doing something, many other agencies are dead now, it's a Getty world.

The END of microstock? Because one man leaves?

When you throw too much  big stones in a mountainstream the water will simply search other ways to flow down the mountain. But it will flow.
You forgot one thing: contributors are the OWNERS of the content that stays with the agencies.
When agencies go too far with the ongoing lowering of paying their contributors, photographers  will search other ways to sell their images and when they are able to make a living otherwise,  they  will leave and take their images with them.

There will allways be new  starting contributors, but  how long does it take for them to �stand out from the crowd� and to be able to produce the highest  demanded and high valued images AND enough of them on a regular base? (And when they reach that point they are likely also going Yuri�s way.)

This is not only about Yuri�s decision, it's also about Stocksy, about Symbiostock� No one is able to predict today if  this leads to somewhere and how and where  this leads to �This will also not happen within a short term, but over time the stock industry will probably show  big changes.

Of course it will not be the END of Microstock. There's still a growing demand for images worldwide and even a demand for images that can be easily produced. And when there is demand, there will be supply.
But yes: for the over suplied low-end market it will be harder and harder to make more then �pocket- money�.

The END of the dinosaurs? Perhaps!

ok, maybe it's not the END but it's the beginning of the end.

first it's Yuri, tomorrow some top-20 microstocker, and little by little the so called "factories" will move to greener pastures or close down or move into a more profitable market niche.

i mean .. 0.30$ per subs ? we're in 2013, this is not the '90s.
the point of non return has been reached since a long time in my opinion.

do you know how much is the price of a coffee or a beer in places like London or Paris ?
even cleaning toilets will get you 1500$ per month in UK, that means thousands of downloads on micros.

how do you see you 5 yrs from now ? we can all see the numbers ... there will be tens of millions of new images on micro agencies, but your portfolio will not cope with it, you'll not be anymore in a position to "feed the beast" as in the past.

of course it's not the end for agencies, they're doing great actually !
but it's the beginning of the end for photographers.

we're just a COST for agencies, NOT a resource, either you get it or you dont.
you think we're special ? wait a few weeks, they'll not even write a single line about Yuri leaving the scene, same as they did with Sean.

because, they dont need them, they only need the buyers, and their buyers are bottom feeders, price is everything for them, quality comes later.

they dont shop for a specific famous artist and never will, if they could they would shop at Getty but they're broke and pennyless that's why they buy subs in the first place !

new contributors have picked up the very worst time to join the scene.
they will quickly realize how hard it is to make even beer money with micros, and they will soon go away with a bitter taste in their mouth.

I thought of this thread today as I was searching SS/Canstock for some realistic photos of a business meeting and all I could find in the first 5 pages were with a white background and people looking fake and smiling at the camera. So I wanted to chime in PLEASE no more isolated on white photos!! I'm sure people use them but the market is over saturated with them. I agree with fiftyfootelvis - I'm always looking for  candid photos of people in realistic situations and backgrounds for my graphic projects. I do a lot of non-profit work and that's the worst because it's hard to find 'real' looking diverse people to fit the not-happy-shiny-smiling content I'm designing for.

try Flickr, Instagram, 500px, they're a goldmine and most of them will give away the pics for free.

problem is, it's gonna take a long time to find the diamonds in the rough, hours, or whole days as the images are not properly keyworded ... and of course they dont have any model release so it's a gray area in case you need it for advertising or commercial use and the risk is all yours.

All due respects, but if you grow up living in a cage you can't see the fact you're in a cage. Granted CT isn't anywhere near as bad a Jo'berg but seriously, you've seen how the rest of us live, right? My family in JB can't even go to the loo in the middle of the night cos they have alarms everywhere. I guess you just get used to the fact that you can't randomly take fish n chips to the park, enjoy a bottle of wine and laze about while your children run around...

after all even Pistorius was sleeping with a rifle under his pillow and he ended up gunning down his own wife !
looks like a very safe place eh ! ?