I don't understand why they make it so easy for their competitors to point out all the issues with "exclusive images" that are available elsewhere for 83% less.

They must really believe the customers have no connections with the designers that upload the content, or that the design world is not interconnected. It would have been easy to do this in the eighties, but now where customers can compare prices with a mouseclick?

But maybe it all works well and they find their way back to the top....who knows...

Yuri going exclusive is in principal a good move for them.

That is one of my all time favorites!

But the forums are not visible to the public. I think their facebook page is more active.

The upload process is too unintuitive. Most tools are there but very hard to find and could really benefit from a redesign. SS has the best system, IMO. The only thing I like is that I can add the mediaboxes on uploading.

I hate visible downloads. there are many files that I will not send to pond5 because I have very bad experiences with people copying my work. especially because we can set our own prices. So I get a file that sells, then somebody copies it and just makes it a little cheaper...so please keep our business results private. The numbers have no value for the customer because we sell our files on many sites, so even a file with zero downloads on pond5 could have a 1000 sales on SS. So the only person benefitting from the numbers are those who like to copy ideas.

Please give us usable business data. Are the views even being counted?

Please get connected with stockperformer. Nearly all of my sites are connected to their system, the only one really missing is pond5.

Thank you for listening.

Doesn't Getty make offers like "300 free credits" if you buy a thinkstock subscription?

Having a nominal high price for credits on the website, makes offers like these very attractive.

Does anyone know the value of those free credits for contributors? What do we earn, if the client gets the credits "free"?

I agree that they won't run after clients for a 50 dollar package, but they can litter the internet with first time buyer discount codes.

But I see this as a way to enourage small time buyers to go to photos.com.

http://de.photos.com/products?isource=viewplansHome

They have different plattforms, so they can push photos.com for the budget conscious intrnet customer. The problem here for me would be that I don't consider the ite by itself very competitive to the bigger agencies out there.

And of course contributors only get 20% or less royalty.

But they have an agency for every price point. Just personally I believe that fragmenting your marketing leads to overall lower brand value on the internet. Obviously they are all competing with themselves and against other agencies.

Quote from: cthoman on July 02, 2013, 11:46

But, it's always been that way with the credits. Shouldn't this have been written like 5 years ago? I'm not a fan of credits, but I'm just not seeing the big revelation here.

Well, one the "minor" changes is that there seems to be no small credit packages anymore. There used to be 12 credits, for some time even 6 credits for $9.99 or something like that. Nowadays it's 30 credits for $49.99 - this is excluding a large number of buyers from buying through credit packages and having to buy single images.

That is on top of the huge discrepancy between credit price and single image price for the main collection files.

Both of them are very new.

I ahven't followed their advertising but it wouldn't surprise if they balance that by offering huge discounts or time limited entry packages. getty has a history of working with high list prices that they then lower drastically, especially when their sales team calls the client.

Without the high list prices it is probably very difficult for sales staff to sell direct.

My earnings for June from the new agencies is 88 Dollars in total, up from 65 last month. This includes both photos and videos.

It is my third month as an independent.

For photos, the average earnings per download were as follows:

stocksy: 12.5, istock: 1.40, Dreamstime: 0.95, Fotolia: 0.60, Depositphotos: 0.30, Shutterstock 0.27, 123rf: 0.22

By sales volume the new agencies rank like this:

Fotolia(15),Shutterstock(13),Depositphotos(12),Dreamstime(3),Pond5(2) and then stocksy and 123rf both had one download.

No sales on alamy.

I am uploading my old portfolio slowly, always mixing new work with older files by theme. I have around 150 - 230 files on the different agencies. Acceptance is around 90%.


Total number of downloads on istock: 154 from 3400 files

Total number of downloads from new agencies (including video): 32

I am averaging a round 18 dollars per download on ss. The subscriptions also give higher prices than I thought, 6 dollars or more, they don't sell them for 30 cents.

ETA: my last footage subscription sold for 21 dollars.

For my humble portfolio the sales volume is also higher than on the other sites, but on pond5 my average download is higher because of the 50%.

I certainly hope that they move indie files soon to a higher price band, but in general the very low royalty means my best work will have to go elsewhere.

However,  since I do have an established portfolio on istock, I want to keep feeding it and hope I can supply something useful for my repeat customers.

I am not sure if I have the right strategy how to make that work, but I am thinking of a combination of very simple files, objects on white, that I could also survive if they end up on google drive or other "deals", and maybe some of my more specialized images at medium size. Maybe a few L sized images. The royalties and prices are so low, I really don�t benefit much from having a sale in XL or higher. The full size files will go to the agencies that offer better royalties, so they get the advantage there.

I don�t understand why they offer less than 20%. Even for videos they only pay 15%, so I am not surprised that the best work is going to pond5 that offers 50% and control over prices. Even pros with large portfolios will have a hard time moving up the royalty ladder. And now that Pond5 also takes photos, I am sure they will be successful in that field as well.

Only the many files I have from the Lypses will go up in full size. But I will wait until they offer S levels for indies and when they have sorted out their changes.

The low prices for main and the extremly low royalties for indies, means the next 12 months have a terrible price war coming up. I am sure the other agencies will be lowering prices and royalties as well.

Quote from: cobalt on June 27, 2013, 16:35

Quote from: lisafx on June 27, 2013, 16:30

I don't even see how exclusives could be happy about this, since it makes exclusive content seem even more overpriced by comparison. 

That was my first thought. People have just recovered, that their royalties will not be slashed, now they will see that their files will have to compete bitterly with bestselling independent content.

I like the new design of the site though. Glad those flames are gone and it all looks much cleaner.

They are going to raise prices on a lot of the better nonexclusive content.

Exclusive images would make more sense. Better for istock, because they are not promoting content to a higher price band that can be found cheaper elsewhere, better for the contributor because they will presumably get more royalties and they can decide to build a dedicated lightbox on a theme and shoot specifically for that.

In the istock facebook group Shaun just said the numbers are a mistake and that nothing is changing.

Only if the files are in the higher priced collections. But for files that get moved to main, you would be stuck with a 7% difference with no option to make up for it by sending the files elsewhere.

For S and above the difference will be more than the % makes it appear, I agree.

But those rates still wouldn�t look attractive to me.

I hope it is not true. This will just force people to leave istock. There is absolutely no way they can "spin" this into positive news. Together with the loss of E+ and control over prices, this will be a disaster for all those who do stock full time and feed their families from this income.