But I need creative breaks to keep my sanity and get back to shooting for enjoyment.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that. What did you do for your 'creative breaks' and 'keep your sanity' before the internet?  You make it sound as if you are poncing around in a frilly shirt with a silver cane.

In retail it's generally the retailer that takes the hit not the supplier because the idea of loss leaders is to introduce the consumer to more profitable lines irrelevant of the supplier and thus boost the retailers nett profit.

Being as we almost invariably get less than 50% commission from the agencies that offer free images then surely the 'retailer' is taking a bigger hit than us from these free downloads? They also have to pay for the marketing and the bandwidth to supply them in the first place. FT is even offering to pay us for our proven non-sellers __ something that obviously no other buyer has done for the couple of years they've been online.

Having said that I've personally never given any free images to those agencies as I just feel too removed from the transaction. I've given occasional freebies to the few regular commercial clients I have but that's on a much more personal level.

I'm not advocating one route or the other, but you could consider uploading to everywhere that doesn't have a time hold (i.e. avoid DT and BigStock). That way you keep your options open while you explore.

Sorry but I wouldn't agree with that. In my view a decision such as this should be taken with a view as to what might happen to the industry over some years, not just the next few months, which makes the DT lock-in almost irrelevant. Microstock is still a developing industry and in my view should be fully explored before committing to exclusivity with one site or another. DT are an important agency and without uploading to them you will be losing a significant proportion of income as well as the experience of the agency itself.

I've been doing this for 5 years and when I check my stats it is amazing how much has changed __ even in just in the last 3 years. Who knows where things will be in another 5 years? Who will own the various agencies by then and what will they do with them? The industry now generates something like $500M per year and is still growing fast so maybe we'll have another major player or two prepared to invest heavily to grab themselves a significant piece of the action.

Good news but very difficult to estimate the actual increase we will see to our monthly incomes there, especially so with all those subscription sales.

But, like you said, what point is there in keeping nonexclusive files up front if they are making less on them.

Because they said this;

"We're also hoping to encourage the strongest talents in stock today to consider bringing their best work to iStock exclusively."

I think they'll also want plenty of the lower-priced images highly visible to counteract any customer dissatisfactions about the price hikes.

Those that remain independent generally do so for reasons of finance, stability and security. Istock would have a pretty hard time convincing them to go exclusive if they keep screwing around with the best match and artificially suppress their sales. Many of us suffered badly in previous amateurish dabblings with the best match and have long memories.

Speaking personally I'll be making my plans based more on what I think might happen to the industry over the next few years rather than the next few weeks or months. The micro market is still in it's infancy and a lot can happen yet. For starters it does rather look as if Istock is 'being fattened for market' (as one of m'learned friends put it via site-mail) and who knows what further changes to canisters/commissions a new owner could make if they wanted to recoup their investment quickly?

I'd need a sizeable financial incentive and a lot of confidence in both the stability of the site and the moral conduct of the owners (to not keep hacking away at commissions, T&C, etc) before I put all my eggs in their basket.

The new nonexclusive best match search placement sounds a little scary. Not sure how that loss would be replaced.

We have no idea yet what effect it will have on the best match __ all they've actually said is that the Exclusive+ collection will be promoted (just as Vetta is now). They haven't even said how many images will be in the E+ collection. If they are so keen to reduce the average % commission, which it appears they are, then it would make no sense to hide independents' images on which they pay the least.

We also don't know how the customers are going to react when faced with such huge price rises on so many of the images. An 'average' sale of a Medium exclusive image is going up nearly 70% __ in this climate! It could end up being the biggest gift to the other agencies that they've ever had. It is also conceivable that many lower-canister exclusives could give up their crowns in protest if their commission is reduced __ another gift to the competition.

It is certainly going to be interesting to see how this all plays out with both customers and contributors.

The account has been deleted.

Hi All

 If you are going to compare apples to apples when comparing what an RM shooter makes in RPI compared to a Micro shooter you should compare the top two agencies to one another. I think that would be a much more realistic account on the difference of return. Using the two biggest companies for comparison, Istock and Getty Macro.
 I am not sure what Istock returns in it's lifetime on an average RPI but Macro RM at Getty pays into the 4 figure range by the time you are done if you know what to shoot. Even an RPI of $400 would blow my Micro sales our of the water.
 My third party Macro RF companies are returning me over $50 RPI a year for the past 6 years without any new uploads for 3 years, that's an RPI of $300 in RF without constant uploading and they are still selling at $50 a piece with a 95% acceptance rate on edits. Please let's put aside poor comparisons to make a situation that seems more threatening than ever for todays photographers, it is not true.
 Micro is great but so is the real Macro companies for returns its more where you are happy because all three markets make their photographers money. Try it you'll like it. Ask jimmy, he'll eat anything : )

Best,
Jonathan

Your comparison is unrealistic for a number of reasons. For starters most shooters can't just 'choose' to be part of Getty/Corbis so if the choice isn't there in the first place then any comparison is fairly meaningless. From what I understand, even if you are accepted, then they are much more picky about which images they'll accept __ maybe one or two from a series rather than the 10-20 you might get accepted on the micros. If both options were to produce the same income for example then the macro images would obviously have a much higher RPI  but the money in the photographers pocket would still be the same. We have several regular contributors here who are on Getty/elsewhere and none of them report stellar earnings in comparison to what they get on micro.

You are also speaking as if the situation were static __ which it isn't. Both Getty and Alamy have been reporting plummeting sales for some time whilst the micros are booming with no sign of a slowdown yet. IS have just reported that they have 125K new members joining every month. There's only one way the market is heading and it's moving fast.

When you talk about 'lifetime RPI' are you talking gross or net figures? I note that macro shooters always seem to talk in gross terms whereas micro shooters always use net. I've no idea how I am supposed to work out what my 'lifetime RPI on Istock' is as I hope all my images will continue to sell for a long time yet.

There are also several examples of very experienced stock shooters who seem to know what they are doing __ MonkeyBusiness, Yuri, Andres, etc, etc __ who we know have explored all outlets for their images and yet they mainly appear to concentrate their efforts on micro. Why do they do that if other outlets are so much more lucrative? Judging by her sales MonkeyBusiness generated about $200K in her first year on micro and that figure will more than double in this her 2nd year. She's spent most of her lifetime in the industry and is a very astute businesswoman. I can't think why she would be wasting her vast effort and resources, averaging over 850 new images per month, if she wasn't pretty confident where the future of stock lay.

The last option (Other) is made for those possiblities. It would be nice to hear those "other" paths that some contributors would follow.

Isn't 'I'm not sure yet' and 'Other (inc D/T lock-in)' basically the same thing? Surely virtually every independent is with DT and therefore there's nothing they can actually do for the next few months anyway?

Not such a bad thing as they can firstly monitor how the price rise is swallowed by IS customers and how the other agencies react too.

Maybe a better poll option would be 'Stopping uploads to DT until we can see the effect of IS action'

I suspect that the Exclusivity programme has proved far more popular than they ever expected. It wasn't until multimedia.de's chart came out that I was aware that 80%+ of contributors of Gold and above were exclusive __ staggering really. There seems to be such an overwhelming desire for Exclusive status that maybe they feel they don't need to try too hard.

Istock do appear to be treating the lower canister levels with a certain distain. They probably cost a little more in terms of admin, relative to the income they produce, and reducing their commission is one way of clawing that back. They've been quite frank that they are targetting Diamond level independents with this latest move.

As has been mooted before this all may be part of H&F's exit strategy. This may be the last time that Istock can impose such a huge increase in prices (without frightening away the buyers) and the exponential growth that they've enjoyed for so many years must begin to flatten out sooner or later. I wouldn't be surprised to see Istock sold on sometime next year.

October '08 I think it was that istock decided to encourage contributors who were 'sitting on the fence' (rogermexico's term I think) about exclusivity by favouring best match even more towards exclusives than usual. istock dropped to number 5 position on that poll over on the right, independents got totally hammered, and exclusives still remember those heady days when the dls never stopped. I think that's what's about to happen again.

If your sales plummet at Istock then surely it is going to make you less likely to go exclusive isn't it? You can only project future revenues based on historical earnings and that's difficult enough to assess reliably without assuming some unquantifiable best match 'boost factor' that you may or may not gain as an exclusive.

The huge swings of fortune that Istock created in the past with their crass modifications to the best match is probably the biggest factor in my remaining independent. I can cope with the seasonal swings to my income but I'm extremely reluctant to lay it all on the line whilst some unknown developer meddles and experiments with unknown outcomes.

I agree with that, image specific exclusivity would be very tempting on the iStock front.  I just think it would be too difficult for them to police, should some people be tempted to put similar but not identical images up elsewhere.  I think that is the main reason we see them sweetening the pot for all-out exclusives, and I expect we will never see the oh-so-desirable image exclusivity at iStock.  Its just too hard to make sure people aren't cheating with piecemeal exclusivity.

It'll never happen. The exclusivity programme was brought in to twart the emerging competition and the same objectives still apply.

Oh, I notice that I forgot completely to tell that the photographer claiming the copyright infringement is not a microstocker.

That is interesting. Sounds to me that this guy is going to have a big job on his hands trying to hold back all microstock sites though!

Actually I'm pretty disgusted that a 'major microstock agency' has caved in on this issue __ their access to legal advice/action is going to be far greater than any individual photographer. Which agency was it? I think we should be told.