|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - gostwyck
4526
« on: October 16, 2009, 13:33 »
Plus I am exclusive which jacks it up even higher. My rank has actually been slipping though. I was in the top 100 for quite a while. I don't think the rank is based solely on sales though. I've been trying to figure it out for a while but it's still a mystery.
I thought it was entirely based on credits earned, in total for 'Absolute' and over the last 7 days for 'Relative'?
4527
« on: October 16, 2009, 12:37 »
More 'practical' to just upload a few more images isn't it?
4528
« on: October 16, 2009, 10:07 »
No, it happens all the time and it's just coincidence __ even with obscure stuff. Some instances may be related to a breaking news story or article or seasonal trends but probably not that many.
4529
« on: October 16, 2009, 07:06 »
You might as well try it as it costs you nothing anyway. Whether you are successful or not you will certainly benefit from the feedback you receive. Don't submit any of your 'isolations' at IS though! IS are very picky on those and they'll need to be virtually perfect to pass.
4530
« on: October 15, 2009, 16:35 »
I believe that in the case of Shutterstock, you need to have a minimum number of images online, something like 600 I think. An the pay is indeed minimal at best.
A friend's daughter did it for SS a couple of years ago. The 'pay', if I remember correctly, was 5c per image inspected.
4531
« on: October 15, 2009, 06:44 »
I get a bit annoyed with all this. No company, regardless of its reputation, embarks on this sort of behaviour. People do. People in the company do.
What has to start to take place is the names of the INDIVIDUALS responsible in these corporations need to be made public so their friends, family, their kid's friends and family, and everyone in the world knows who exactly these people are and what types of behaviour disorders they exhibit.
For far too long we hear "the business has decided ...". That is crap. A business is inanimate, it cannot decided diddly squat. An individual or a group of individuals decided ... and their names are: ...
Companies undoubtedly develop their own culture and that culture determines to some extent who gets recruited, who gets promoted and it also strongly influences the behaviour of the team. Try flying over the pond with both British Airways and Virgin for a good example of radically different cultures in action. They both fly out of Heathrow and recruit from the same pool of people __ and that's where the similarity ends. Personally I'd avoid flying with one of them at almost all costs, the other I'm always delighted to do so. Btw, this is what the Virgin flight crews look like; http://www.virginatlanticstillredhot.com/popup/tv-ad.html
4532
« on: October 14, 2009, 21:23 »
i was referring to the 'growth' of micro outstripping mid or macro stock. that seems the real trend and the source of threat to the pros. i don't know what its absolute share of the market is though. minuscule?
No __ far from it and the gap is closing almost daily. It's difficult to get an accurate handle on the figures because micro is growing incredibly rapidly and macro sales are shrinking just as quickly. Alamy for example recently reported that US$ sales had shrunk by about 70% in the last year alone __ of course they blamed it on 'the recession' rather than competition from elsewhere. My guess is that total micro sales will outstrip macro within the next couple of years. Five years from now nobody will even be discussing it. They'll always be plenty of 'high-end' agencies trying sell into niche markets at high prices but they'll be tiny markets and relatively little money to be made from it. Guys like Yuri and Andres are the real litmus test of where the industry is heading. I'm sure they'd both rather be flogging their images for hundreds rather than single $'s and it seems unlikely that any significant agency would bar their entry __ quite the reverse. Yet somehow they've both uploaded well over 300 new images apiece to the micros already this month. Like it or not micro is the future and where most of the money is (already?) going to be be in the future.
4533
« on: October 14, 2009, 18:54 »
^^^ Excellent!
4534
« on: October 14, 2009, 18:18 »
Apparently microstock stills don't count as "creative". 
No they don't. Bizarrely, to me at least, microstockers are still largely regarded as 'amateur photographers'. When you look at what was considered to be 'high-end' professional stock photography just a few years ago it really puts it into perspective. Check out the wholly-owned content at JIU/PC for example. As one of their many acquisitions Jupiter bought Banana Stock just over 3 years ago. They paid $20M for a collection of about 15K images which works out at something like $1300 per image. You can check them out on the link below __ I wonder how much they'd be worth today? http://www.jupiterimages.com/collections/BananaStock
4535
« on: October 14, 2009, 17:13 »
This month is looking like a massive BME from my figures. FT in particular are going ballistic and strong sales at IS too. Certainly no sign of a decline.
NB: When Klein was saying this;
"... traditional creative stills continues to decline, and even if we see a bump in revenue here after the recession, we must expect that the trends will continue for it to be a smaller part of our overall business."
... by 'creative stills' he was referring to Getty's primary offering of high-end photography __ not microstock. It's clear if you read the full statement.
4536
« on: October 14, 2009, 15:18 »
Unofficial estimates put IS at over 50% of the market by itself - which I would be interested to see verified
IS has about 50% of the market in terms of revenue however they are probably only about 30% in volume of licenses sold. BigStock is probably less than 10% the turnover of SS and even together they'd be less than half the size of IS. I reckon FT is coming up on the rails really fast though and are seriously pushing SS for 2nd place.
4537
« on: October 14, 2009, 14:30 »
For the Bloggers we need, optional Paypal with no website registration and Pay-Per-Download, and Plug-ins for Firefox, 'Live writer' and WordPress.
While you are there a website Plug-In like Adsense targeted images that website visitors can purchase, and Website owners and Bloggers can make affiliate commission on any sales
Then you have most of the market covered, Well done!
Great ideas. They should hire you as a consultant!
4538
« on: October 14, 2009, 12:32 »
Getty may come in with a strong subscription product which goes head to head against SS.
Yes __ Klein has already stated so. Have a read of our honourable friend Sean's thread at IS; http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=127691&page=1Unfortunately for us all Getty's chosen vehicle for subscriptions is JIU/PC.
4539
« on: October 14, 2009, 12:23 »
I think most, if not all, of the 'sources' are actually stock agencies that they bought out years ago __ that why so many of the images look dated.
StockXpert are still proudly claiming '46,504 images added this week' and that takes a lot of money to achieve __ probably half a dozen full-time employees going balls-out reviewing images.
Reviewing images is a significant cost and is an investment that will hopefully be recovered sometime in the future. If Getty had already decided that they were going to close StockXpert down there would be no point in continuing to make that investment. I suspect StockXpert is being run very lean, to make it as profitable as possible, and little or nothing will be spent on marketing.Our first warning of any impending change might be if they stop accepting new submissions.
4540
« on: October 14, 2009, 08:58 »
^^^ More or less the same here. JIU/PC sales represent about 2% of my total stock revenue so hopefully I won't starve to death when they go. If their customers were prepared to pay Istock's prices then they'd already be doing so. If they miss the 3M-odd images that they are about to lose (including over 20K of Yuri's for example) then they can always stump up for a subscription at SS, DT or FT.
JIU/PC subscriptions appear to be priced to attract the bottom of the market, not the sort of accounts we should be chasing IMHO. The site facilities are very poor in comparison to most micros too. For example, because they don't name the artist, it makes it impossible to search for more images in a particular series. There's only one search-order option too, you can't search by age, popularity, downloads, etc. The search-order also promotes their own wholly-owned content above all else too, most of which are horribly dated and rubbish by today's standards, presumably so that they don't have to pay any commissions. If you try a search on 'business team' for example then you've got to jump to page 25 before you get to see the modern quality stuff. It'll be interesting to see if they do anything about the fact that all IS files' keywords are CV'd but, at least at the moment, JIU/PC do not have such a system in place.
I still can't understand why any IS exclusive or independent contributor would support this plan. At best they're likely to increase their income by about 1% (because it is only their non-selling rubbish going there) whilst allowing JIU/PC to promote themselves with the IS name __ basically turkeys voting for Christmas.
4541
« on: October 13, 2009, 22:46 »
For Fotolia: Does anyone there notice the number of contributor complaints about inconsistent and annoying reviewing standards (more so than any other site, by far)? Any hope of educating reviewers towards implementing a focused, coherent, and clear vision of what is technically and aesthetically acceptable (and conveying same to contributors as well)?
Actually I find FT about the most consistent agency out there. Virtually the only rejections I've got in the last year, out of something like 700-odd uploads, are if I upload a view of a property without a PR. Ergo, I don't. Simples. Much, much better than all those imaginary 'artifacts' or 'isolation too rough or too smooth' nonsense from IS __ which basically means you just uploaded an image that might seriously compete with one of the inspector's own images.
4542
« on: October 13, 2009, 22:35 »
Hi All,
Try working on a photo of an american dollar bill in PS4 and see what happens. I had a shot of a till drawer open showing the money all neatly in it's separate slots and even though they were covered with those metal bars that hold the money in place PS would not open or work on the file due to the fact it was to clear a shot of american currency, it is built into the software to keep counterfeiters from copying the bills.
Best,
Jonathan
Wow! Impressive or scary?
4543
« on: October 13, 2009, 20:28 »
For all: will you implement flexible pricing - set by contributors - so that quality images with niche appeal can receive acceptable returns?
Yes please. Good one.
4544
« on: October 13, 2009, 20:06 »
For Istock: When are they going to increase the miserly royalties they pay the contributors who built their business for them?
4545
« on: October 13, 2009, 17:40 »
I wonder if photos.com customers will be satisfied with old istock files? I don't think they are going to like the change, lots of great portfolios will be replaced by old images, how can that be good? Hopefully they will discover shutterstock or perhaps they will just use StockXpert subs?
True enough. To be honest I don't really understand why anyone would subscribe to Photos.com unless they were completely unaware of the mainstream micro's. Once those 3M StockXpert files disappear they'll be even less incentive.
4546
« on: October 13, 2009, 11:52 »
Hi Rob,
I've been doing this about 5 years (just under 200K licenses) and I am starting to see a fairly definite pattern developing in my annual sales.
If you count the average month in a year as '1' then over the full year each month is worth approximately the following value relative to the average.
Jan 0.8
Feb 0.9
Mar 1
Apr 1
May 1
Jun 1
Jul 1
Aug 1
Sep 1.2
Oct 1.2
Nov 1
Dec 0.8
It is almost impossible to define hard figures though as it is also dependent on % portfolio growth and also price rises by the agencies. Clearly small portfolios can grow much faster than large ones. Price rises have been hugely significant over the last few years too but we are already seeing that slow down.
The above figures really only apply to my last two years anyway __ before that growth accelerated throughout the year as I increased my portfolio.
4547
« on: October 13, 2009, 10:27 »
At 100% it's not good even ignoring all the blow-outs!
I really wouldn't like to try using a 2007 P&S for stock photography today. It's not impossible to do but you'll be restricted to only working in ideal conditions, having to shrink your images down (to try and get them crisper) and even then you will probably have a painfully high rejection rate. That camera was built for happy-snaps and that's what it does best.
4548
« on: October 13, 2009, 10:05 »
I've tried it and it is surprisingly good overall. Well done!
I have found that in the annual calculations though it is rather over optimistic and I think the flaw may be that all months are considered 'equal'. This of course is not the case as December can be 30% down from the peak of Sept/Oct and November can be bad too relative to the growth throughout the year. My Decembers are generally about equal in earnings to the January at the beginning of the year.
I've already estimated my own years total (based on previous years experience) and your calculator's annual total is likely to be about 5% too high.
This error is then compounded in the 'Next Year' calculations which I think are roughly 13-14% too high. (I'd be delighted to be wrong on that though!)
If you could somehow factor in those seasonal variations then I think it might be quite an accurate tool.
4549
« on: October 12, 2009, 21:18 »
Tell me about it. I wish I could get just 3 or 4 of my totally different, proven well-selling, food images from the same series accepted by DT.
DT do seem to have a bizarre inverse-skill in identifying the best-selling ones though __ they'll be the ones they reject. Almost invariably they become the best selling images everywhere else. Hey-ho.
4550
« on: October 12, 2009, 20:01 »
Interestingly enough, I just noticed that "iofoto" hasn't uploaded to iStock in a year or so.
Or anywhere else. Seems to have pretty much given up on microstock for the time being. Total contrast with Monkey Business though who is still going balls-out __ 300-odd images already this month on DT and averaging nearly 900 per month for 20 months consecutively. Phew!
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
