Was it an editorial file? They seem to be lightning fast with them.

I cannot imagine anyone quit exclusivity in the last 12 months for stocksy. I certainly didn't, I didn't even know about it until leaf broke the news.

The place isn't open for buiness yet and has no customers.

I went independent because all the drama and bad management decisions of the last 2 years and especially the last 6 months. And then the Microsoft deal and the getty/google deal.

The traffic for istock is falling continuosly, it never goes back up. Istock must be losing customers on a massive scale. Everyone I knew who used to buy from istock has turned away over all the IT issues and the extremly high prices. Nobody ever goes back to istock.

And here in Germany many photographers supply Fotolia with exclusive content and do extremly well there. The best known blogger is averaging over 10k a month while being independent. And he stopped supplying istock in 2010.

His earnings and those of many others are growing well.

I think maybe 2 years ago, or 18 months ago probably as an exclusive you would have made more. But I believe with the continuing drop in downloads and focus on Thinkstock and Getty, the exclusives cannot win.

istock is just a brand fighting a losing battle for attention between all the other Getty brands. They have fired a lot of high quality staff, they have closed the office in Berlin and even the German forum no longer has a dedicated moderator and community builder.

If they don't even have money for that, than for me as a European contributor it means I have to pay attention to the agencies that are investing and building their presence in Europe.

I know it will take time to build up my portfolio on other sites. But in the end I simply have to go where the customers are going.

I have waited a long, long time to see if they will reverse the trend, but I don't see the slightest indication that the customers are coming back.

AHA!!! Nearly 50% after 9 months and you still have thousands of files to upload. Very encouraging!!!

Could you post this table on your facebookpage (for the public) then I would repost it on my own page for cobalt stock.

This is very good news, indeed.

Hi Lucato,

if you write to depositphotos that you have many files but have little time they will help you upload and edit your files to get them online faster. They just made me that offer last, I am sure they would offer the same to you.

I wrote back that for now I want to try doing it myself, but because deposit is a smaller site, perhaps I will take them up on that offer.

@aeonf

I have seen many exclusives go indie "dump" their portfolios quickly on the other site, often with the help from the agencies themselves and then be very dissapointed with the results. And since they have great content my theory is that they just sent them up too fast and best match seasonalities worked against them.

But if you put your files online fast and then share your results we can all see what strategy works best longterm.

It also all depends on how many new files you can generate. I can only do 50-100 a month, so I wanted to  add the older files for regular uploads.

Why so long? Because your files need to move into customer lightboxes and your images need to rise in the search engines. There is lots of superb indepedent content, the customers have not been waiting for you.

It is the same way like opening any other webshop, or a store on amazon and ebay, even if all your products are available for sale immediatly, you will not earn as much as in 2 years when you have a loyal following of repeat customers.

The other thing is best match. If you upload all files one month then all your files have the same "time stamp". If files from that particular month are out of favor, you're 5000 files will all rise and drop together in the time factor of a best match.

Anyway, good luck with your system. If you can of course then continue to keep adding high volumes of new content every month, maybe it will work.

Please let us know your results.

The financial drop on istock comes from the much lower prices for indie files and the lower percentage. Basically you will immediatly earn 75% less, even if you have the same number of downloads.

My understanding of Lucatos table is that in February the earnings from all the other sites combined was around 80% of his istock earnings. But since these are just 25% of what he used to earn, he now gets around 40-50% of what he used to earn from istock when he was exclusive.

However, he still hasn�t uploaded all his 7000 files. And i don�t know how much new content he uploaded along the older files.

Actually if in 9 months I can get 50% of my last istock earnings with just a fraction of my portfolio I would consider it a great success.

That is very, very useful information, thank you very much!!

This is my first week of independence, well first few days, actually. So I am trying to get to know the agencies in general and I want to make sure I get something like 300-500 interesting images up on all sites in the next 4-6 weeks.

Then I will continue to upload a mix of video, new shootings and old files and I will, like Lisa suggested, give more importance to the sites that actually sell.

According to your table that should be Shutterstock.

But the one thing you haven�t tried to raise the visibility of your portfolio, if I understand correctly, is to give exclusive series or files to the different agencies.

Again, thank you. I will share when I have some new info, but it will be a few months before I have enough data about the overall market.

Hi Lucato,

thank you very much! I am a little shocked that Dreamstime is performing so poorly. From the site itself and the web traffic I would have thought they are a good agency.

And what has your experience been with fotolia?

If jsnover was able to recover 85 % of her 2010 earnings than she is already making more than many exclusives, who stayed exclusive and keep uploading.

I will try to get 600 files up in the next 2 months and then I will focus on mixing new and old while I shoot and upload.

Let's keep reporting our results, because many people are watching us

I agree, this sounds like the images are all basically free by amateurs who just want to see their name printed. It doesn�t say anyhwere that these are commercial stock images and that you MUST buy a proper license if you want to use the files outside of a google drive document.

Google and Getty cannot solve this by adding a few words nobody will read.

Getty is selling our files to 425 million for 12 dollars. That is completly unacceptable.

They are basically turning them over for free to one fifth of the internet population.

Together with the strange "pay per view" deal it looks like Getty is moving away from actually selling files. Maybe they feel it is too much hard work to compete with all the other agencies. But of course they can "rent" the content or make supersize deals that give them millions and leave less than the illusion of peanuts for the individual artists.

I just downloaded it and will be testing it with video later today. Will share here how it went.

@ticketstock

the other sites are not cozying up to Google and handing over files for 12 dollars to 425 million people.

The Getty/Google deal changed things quite dramatically and not just for me. I know the other stock agencies are no angels, but here in Germany Fotolia is the biggest and best known site by far and I know a lot of people who sell really well there. Since I live here, I can shoot local content and Fotolia allows me to keyword in German, I hope to take advantage of that. Shutterstock also seems to be interested in expanding their presence here and Pond5 just bought a European agency. On the other hand the istock office in Berlin was closed...so as a European contributor...which agencies should I be interested in? The ones that invest in Germany/Europe, or the ones that move away?

And all the other agencies are TALKING to me. I have now been trying for over a month to communicate directly with gettyimages about my house contract and I simply cannot get a reply even to easy questions. And what Getty does, soon will be done on istock. They have already killed the telephone support and many contributors report being stuck in an endless loop between forums and the ticket system. Again, I know this can happen on other sites as well, but if you are exclusive,  communication problems are just beyond frustrating.

I had no intention of going independent when the year started, I could have easily been happy between video independence and photo exclusivity.

But with all that happened...I might as well be independent and have more control over my work. All the drama on istock is so distracting, I really want to focus on production.

@Sue just a silly marketing thing about how the bad best match match was like a bad experience with an online dating site and then they sent out a bonus code...forget it, it was silly. But we have seen things like these several times.

Anyway, thanks for the kind wishes, also on my website. It will be a long journey, but so many people are going independent, I won�t be climbing up that mountain alone.

This is good for Sean, at least he gets some room to breathe. Since they seem to have no problem closing other accounts (Ivar) I would take this as an indication that after the adrenaline power kick they are waking up to the mess they created. Although I really don�t see how they can go back and recover but maybe if they talk to Sean they could find another solution that makes more sense from a business perspective.

Anyway, my exclusivity is ending in 2 days and I look forward to some peace of mind. I am already enjoying my work a lot more than before. All the drama of istock was so demoralising and frustrating. And just today I read their latest marketing gaffe about "online dating with istockphoto". The place must be run by teenagers or people who deep down really hate the company and just love to embarrass istock internationally. They would never do anything like this to gettyimages. They know instinctively  that to embarrass Getty means they lose their jobs.

So glad I can move on and work with companies that are maybe a lot smaller but genuinely trying to build a longterm business. It will be more work but I already feel safer knowing I will never again be dependent on one companies managers (that I have no influence in choosing).