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Messages - Hobostocker
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426
« on: November 07, 2014, 11:41 »
As BT has already pointed out 'they' can't be "preparing the company for a sell-out" ... because 'they' already sold it in an IPO two years ago.
For all we know Apple or Google (or any other potential purchaser) could already have been buying SS, share by share, for a couple of years.
usually when they want to buy a public company they make an offer to the shareholders, these deals are always dodgy and behind doors. however, it would be logical they sell to Adobe, but for whatever reason Adobe was never serious about stock, i think they don't see it as a big money maker and selling stock is not part of their company culture.
427
« on: November 07, 2014, 11:36 »
It's only a matter of time.
indeed. they need us only as long as there's some serious competition, once they're a monopoly we'll be dumped like a sack of potatoes.
428
« on: November 07, 2014, 07:34 »
The price is set by the market and that's what they value it at.
they've good reasons to market SS so high but it won't last forever, SS is not a tech/media company that is launching new product every year or that is doing M&As, all they're doing now is preparing the company for a sell out and yes the most obvious candidates for this are companies like apple/MS/google/adobe.
429
« on: November 07, 2014, 07:24 »
SS could take their market-share to 80% over the next couple of years ... and that would be a significant cause for concern.
i'm sure this is what's gonna happen, at this point SS has an unlimited supply of cash and nobody can beat them at their own game, certainly not FT or DT.
430
« on: November 07, 2014, 07:22 »
I'm not proposing it as a policy for them, I'm just saying that the insane rate of growth in the collection isn't necessary, if they added a million or two images a year it would probably keep things fresh enough for the buyers to be happy.
exactly ! an "infinity" collection with billions of images is just NOT necessary and a waste of time and money for everybody involved including photographers who are shooting stuff that has no value and will keep doing it as long as SS keep accepting their uploads. where are they heading ? like Alamy with millions and millions of unedited cr-ap that nobody wants ? "obscure" subjects ? hard to find stuff ? "long tail" ? in the past it made sense to have a few million images on sale, but now ? every possible subject and location and concept has been shot to death from any possible perspective.
431
« on: November 07, 2014, 07:17 »
There's a price beyond which it isn't worth paying
considering the actual 2.7 billion capitalization and their 44 million images it would cost roughly 60$/image which is laughable as 80% of those pics hardly sell once or twice in their lifetime. i think it's obvious their goal is a far sell out. 3 billions $ for SS is totally detached from reality, they've already squeezed the lemon to the bone, all they can hope for is gaining even more market share.
432
« on: November 07, 2014, 06:37 »
I hope you are reporting possible infringements to the original artist or agency. It doesn't do much good to simply post links in a forum. The only one who can take action on an infringement is the original artist who can send a DMCA notice to the agency.
on a positive note i've read a few days ago the spanish government proposed to fine every web site that doesn't comply with EU copyright laws, hopefully it could set a precedent and open the doors for a EU-wide tough regulation against thieves and scroungers, the medias called it the "google tax".
433
« on: November 07, 2014, 06:33 »
The producers of the content also have costs and also live in an inflationary world. An agency when doing well, could remember that contributors are the backbone of this industry and owners of the content. Should we not be a part of the success?
if nothing changes sooner or later people will stop supplying agencies and it will become universally accepted that microstock is unsustainable unless you live in a third world country, it's the same thing we've witnessed with the outsourcing of IT services to india, china, and south east asia. for someone living in the west these jobs have simply disappeared, it could be the same for micro in one way or another, especially in some niches. i mean look at australia where now you need 10$ for a burger or a beer and up to 20 bucks for a pack of cigarettes, it's going to be * hard to make a living in OZ off microstock but it's still doable if you live in Bali or Manila or Bangkok.
434
« on: November 07, 2014, 06:00 »
I think results in the future (for photographers) will be more and more on search placement (if it isn't already) and how good the search algorithm is on the site. How many website are there on the web - yet people are still able to find what they are generally looking for
yes but it;s a lot harder to design a ranking system for images. images in a stock agencies don't get linked from reputable and less reputable sites, all they can do is making a rank based on views/clicks/zooms/freshness and a few other obvious factors but that's all, so keywording will become THE only way to rank and keyword spamming will flourish even more. the simplest and most logical fix is for agencies to set a limit in the number of pics they store, or at least giving more visibility to new uploads, one way or another they have to monetize their collection otherwise photographers will quit and while they quit they will also spread the word around and maybe stopping buying there too, same scenario witnessed with istock already and in fact they're struggling to recover. if they think in the bigger scenario we're worthless they're right but they can't downplay the unexpected consequences of their greedy strategies.
435
« on: November 07, 2014, 05:55 »
They don't need to sustain the growth in the collection. If they stopped accepting images today they could probably still keep growing the business for years.
but the competitors would profit from that, they would push buyers into the "freshness" of their archive compared to SS's stale collection. for what is worth, SS could be even bought by google or microsoft or apple, it's a realistic possibility.
436
« on: November 07, 2014, 05:53 »
They don't need to sustain the growth in the collection. If they stopped accepting images today they could probably still keep growing the business for years.
sure, screwing their own suppliers which are also buyers in many cases, just like iStock did ... what could ever go wrong ? besides, agencies are not a search engine, they're not google, they don't need to keep in store billions of images that never sold and never will, they can pretty much set a limit like 50 million pics on sale and periodically delete the non-sellers, if your image never sold once in 5 yrs what's the point of wasting time and storage space ? claiming to have xxx millions of pics is just a marketing strategy after all, there's no technical reason to do that considering only 20% of the images are maybe selling decently and the remaining 80% could be wiped out and nobody would ever notice.
437
« on: November 07, 2014, 05:48 »
Its a matter of CYA for them. The more contributors and images they have, the more secure their business is, if people decide to pull out. They can slash royalties tomorrow, lose half the contributor base and still have 20 million images. Agencies are in power, we are just minions.
of course but time will tell if this is a winning strategy, look how many agencies closed down in the last 5-10 yrs, many of them were former market leaders with highly paid execs all thinking they know the score, and yet ...
438
« on: November 07, 2014, 02:05 »
I can bet that in 2/3 of the times they used the 'New files' filter. It will not get any better, especially for people like me who missed the last six to ten years.
sure but ultimately this factor alone WILL kill the microstock model because they won't be able to keep the promise of selling cheap but selling many times, you'll barely sell only once and for half a dollar, thus making it impossible to sustain the production costs. i'm the first saying in stock you need a big portfolio but once the leading agency is doubling or tripling the size of its whole archive every year you just can't stay afloat, sooner or later your portfolio will be irrilevant, a drop in the ocean.
439
« on: November 06, 2014, 23:42 »
- Image collection grew 44%; currently exceeds 44 million images and 2.1 million video clips
this is huge, how long they can sustain such a growth ? soon they will have 2-300 million pics on sale, how are we supposed to stand out or even to make steady sales there ? however, i'm sure most of the growth is in the top selling niches.
440
« on: November 06, 2014, 23:39 »
if stock agencies can't even catch infringers among their own pool of contributors how can we expect they fight thieves in the rest of the world ?
441
« on: November 06, 2014, 23:18 »
One great side effect of iStock's self-implosion - my sales at Shutterstock have been record high since September, more than making up for the loss of iStock income. This and similar anecdotes from others suggests that maybe there's an exodus of customers from iStock to Shutterstock?
yes, because the stock industry is a zero sum game.
442
« on: November 06, 2014, 02:08 »
the irony is micro buyers are quite cost conscious and they ain't fools, they know very well the competition is cheaper and better, the only thing iStock did wel was being in the right place at the right moment but apart that what's left for the average buyers ? RF stock has never as dime a dozen as today, there's pretty much nothing IS can do to diversify and earn back some market share.
micro customers are not loyal and price is everything for them, there's little space for marketing BS in this scenario.
443
« on: November 05, 2014, 14:13 »
SS doesn't appear to be having any difficulty selling images at their current prices
that's the point, they're actually SELLING and delivering and keeping the promise of microstock "sell cheap sell many times". iStock instead is totally lacking any vision instead, and they can't compete with Getty. basically, everything they tried in the last few years turned to sh-it. what's the point, really, wasted time and energy, clueless managers paid 6-7 figures and now what ?
444
« on: November 05, 2014, 02:16 »
iStock pages use javascript-generated hashes in the URL making it virtually impossible for a bot to crawl them.
wrong.
Google Bot is indexing rendered javascript pages since a LONG time.
You got a little over excited there.
it means the bot is rendering the page with javascript/ajax/css before indexing the final html. actually the reason behind this is anti-spam rather than genuine interest in indexing ajax sites. said that, it won't usually index stuff like comments stored into Discus plugins etc, and you can stop the google bot from indexing JS using .htaccess in the case of iStock probably they could not see many benefits in google search until recently.
445
« on: November 05, 2014, 00:45 »
Everyone with a Symbiostock site praised you for the SEO you incorporated.
the problem with SEO is that google is tweaking his algorithm every 6-12 months, often with dramatic domino effects. the realistic scenario is that sites made with Symbio can perform very well in 2014 and getting sandboxed into oblivion after the next google re-rank or update. everything now is considered good SEO is actually taken for granted in the actual google rank process, what google is now really looking for is not even links but just pages that have been linked by genuine high-PR sites, while having tons of links from directories, forums, blogs, and low-ranking sites has become worthless since at least 3 yrs, that's why even the top directories now are in disarray including Yahoo and DMOZ. there's spam everywhere, also on youtube and FB/twitter. the only reason photo sites still rank for some "long tail" query is because there's not much competition for rare keywords and long queries, but it won't last forever. after the next google re-rank you can easily lose 70-80% of your visitors overnight and there's absolutely nothing you can do to "fix" it. SEO should just be seen as a plus, it's crazy to fund your whole business on something so unstable and uncontrollable like google/bing rankings. to sell online you must plan spending at least 50% or your potential earnings in advertising or in ways that somehow can bring potential buyers on your site, there's are no shortcuts. stock agencies spend billions in ads, they know they can't trust SEO or begging google for a free meal.
446
« on: November 05, 2014, 00:35 »
iStock pages use javascript-generated hashes in the URL making it virtually impossible for a bot to crawl them. wrong. Google Bot is indexing rendered javascript pages since a LONG time.
447
« on: November 03, 2014, 20:15 »
I like new changes of iStock. Search results will be much better and buyers will buy what they need and more it doesnt matter if it is shot from exclusive contributor or not. Erasing borders between exclusive and non-exclusive contributor is the right step for business. iStock knows it and this is the reason why upload limits has been changed.
not to mention that exclusivity on microstock was a sad joke since the beginning.
448
« on: November 03, 2014, 14:33 »
Every idea will be read and considered.
listen, you guys have the most troublesome keywording in the industry and you're not even offering FTP. you're also not providing any tool for lightroom or other platforms. on top of this you don't provide paid in-house keywording services. as for Flash, of course everybody hate flash with a passion but i would stick with Flash rather a new buggy and half baked HTML5 replacement. it's ridicolous the amount of time needed to keyword for Alamy compared to its competitors and indeed something must be done.
449
« on: November 03, 2014, 14:25 »
Revenue US$ 327 billion (2013)
Image bought US$ 0.38c (probably)
Its freaking unreal, aint it?
in the past i would agree but in this case i stick with Samsung, this kind of imagery are dime a dozen, i mean the kid splashing in the water is certainly a holiday snap randomly taken on the beach, i don't think he did some serious studio shooting on invested hald a dollar on that. for this reason, he get his 0.5$ and he can't complain. now he can write in his CV his stock pics have been used in Samsung ads.
450
« on: November 03, 2014, 14:12 »
Well I have left just one video there. There's no logic to sell videos for 15% royalty rate.
the microstock model is failing because due to oversupply it can't keep the promise of selling cheap but in high volumes, now it's only selling cheap and on top of this the fees are the lowest in the industry. we finally reached the last stage of the microstock Ponzi scam, we and many other "trads" tried to warn you years ago but nobody would listen, actually they would even ban my comments in some micro blogs, hahaha, where are they now ? probably no longer in the industry i guess.
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