Haven't you ever heard of Lynda.com?

There is definitely money to be made selling tutorials!

I've used lynda.com and in general I think their tutorials are of very high quality, but I can't see crowdsourcing the sort of thing they have - and I can't see paying for random tutorials from random contributors given the mass of stuff already out there.

The lynda authors are "brands" for the most part - people folks already have come across in some other capacity and know their expertise. Plus they follow through with a whole series on a new release of a product, or all products in a suite. As an example, a few years ago, I came back to using Illustrator after a long break and I watched a series of stuff on the current release.

I don't know how Kelby is doing in competing with lynda.com, but I wasn't as impressed with their stable. But there's NAPP to promote Kelby's stuff, so perhaps they're making headway. So you have two big names in that area already slugging it out and Shutterstock thinks they can knock them off their perch somehow? Doesn't make any sense to me at all.

On top of which this variable "royalty pool" scheme that they're proposing to pay contributors is the same thing 123rf started with in 2005. It wasn't long before they had to make a minimum payment - why would you knock yourself out creating something for an unknown and variable payment?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I think this isn't an idea with legs.

As a serial entrepreneur (and I knew he'd had a company before SS; I didn't know he'd had so many and that he'd never had a "real" job) I think the biggest threat for SS contributors is that Jon gets involved in some new venture and turns the bulk of his energies elsewhere, leaving SS in the hands of a manager who's just doing a job.

I'm guessing as long as it's an interesting challenge for him, hel'll stick around. He's never taken a company public before - this is all new ground for him and thus (I hope) interesting. I think it's entirely possible it seriously isn't all about the money for him, except that the money is a measure of his success and thus of interest to him.

I think (and I may be incorrect) that what he's saying is that the word was only in the IPTC data (which iStock doesn't read) and not in his submitted keywords.

But iStock does read the IPTC data.

IS allows contributors to have words that aren't in the CV. You're allowed to have codes for models, for example, and species names for critters and plants. My guess is that what you had didn't look like a code or special name; independents can get keyword rejections.

It's a pain that they don't have a spell check like SS does, but if you use Deep Meta, it flags things in blue that aren't in the CV (it doesn't flag them as misspelled per se) so you have a chance to fix things before upload. Or you upload to SS first to get the spell check on your IPTC data

I can't reach them - and they owe me 31 cents!!!

I keep hoping someone will become a viable challenger - nothing like a healthy competitor to knock some sense into a complacent market leader - but clearly it wasn't them

There's quite a lot written about Photoshop and its memory management - see for example here, here and here. Note the references to using the purge command to clear a large clipboard item if you no longer need it.

And 4GB isn't very much RAM if you have a large file (I consider a file large if it's over 500MB; perhaps that number's different for you). Note the comments in the above about looking at the efficiency indicator to see if you're using a scratch disk - because you're out of physical memory.

As soon as you go over $50 - but perhaps make it a bit over in case they take back any refunds - delete your images. You don't need to wait for the end of the month.

After you've been paid you could close your account, but I'd leave it open with no images. You never know what will change, who might buy them or other things that may leave you in a better position if you go back to an account that had prior sales. In their current scheme, it wouldn't do yo much good as it's a rolling 12 month scheme, but as we all know things change...

Hi Eco,

We detected the error much much earlier than any complaint, but we needed more time to continue the download - as I mentioned we did not want half the downloads to be registered at a different price than the other half.

But AS SOON AS we finished the entire download, we got our IT team to correct the error and explained to all contributors affected.

It is not true that all adjustments are made in our favor. In my 6 year history with 123RF, I remembered quite a few incidences in the past when we detected miscalculations, errors, omissions, refunds that were meant to be deducted but weren't. Our management decided to absorb them as they were well in the past errors and did not warrant making such adjustments. For those incidences, 123RF absorbed quite a substantial amount of money.

But in any case, I still hope that you'll be with us in 2013 (and beyond) and I always welcome any form of dialogue.

Thank you very much,

Alex.

So it is true that so far each time I've contacted 123rf about an error that they have eventually corrected it.

However, (1) I have had to follow up each time after the support person said they'd be in touch after they investigated. I always wait one week before complaining a second time. I don't want to be unreasonable. Support just drops the ball on contacting contributors about errors . In the case of the ELs, if you knew about the error with the ELs before you were contacted, why not e-mail contributors or post here about it? Get out in front of problems and it'll make it easier for contributors to trust you.

(2) I came back to 123rf in 2011 after a stint as an iStock exclusive to find I had a negative balance of $26.28. A refund had been made in April 2010 (I hadn't contributed since August 2008) and support explained it was a "one-off mass audit". Not sure how that squares with refraining from deducting really old mistakes or frauds.

(3) The two earlier problems I brought to support's attention were unrelated to this EL "mistake". One of them referenced an API problem with a partner sale. Both of them said the problem had been "fixed". Are you tell me that for those you had already found them, not notified me or corrected my balance and then when I contacted you, told me you had to "investigate" the problem? Again, what you say above just doesn't square with my experience over incorrect amounts for royalties.

It may just be really sloppy controls versus some big effort to divert funds, but things are not right. When you couple that with the introduction of this new royalty scheme, perhaps you can understand why trust in 123rf is evaporating.

...I can understand H&F 'harvesting' the business for short-term profit but surely it is now in Getty's interest to operate Istock with the longer-term future in mind. Yet they don't seem capable of it. According to RR the IS forum is "widely read" at Getty HQ. How is it possible that they read the thoughts of so many unhappy contributors and buyers ... and then press on with the same course regardless? Uncanny and yet apparently true.

Jonanthan Klein has repeatedly been contemptuous of iStock and its "amateur" contributors - there are tons of quotes, but here's one thread, and another and another. I haven't been able to find some of the juicy ones I remember, but I need to run.

I think Klein figures that as long as he has the market sewn up, all roads will lead to one Getty property or another (and he doesn't care which). If there aren't enough other outlets, suppliers will come around (in his view) as they have no choice. I don't think he's right, but I think that's why they just don't care about unhappy iStock contributors much

Another iStock user has been downloading images today - PayPal is working again, apparently.

In the last case of an exclusive passing on all the information to compliance enforcement about a scam sale (that they made to try and get the account closed and the problem taken care of) it took a week or more, but the sale was refunded as expected.

I don't understand why they haven't been able to shut this site down given how long they've had information about it and examples of it in operation.

I think it's interesting that Getty folks are seeing income fall. As with iStock contributors, Getty shooters are looking around for something to blame for this decline and latching on to ingestion of micro images and the fact the Getty contributors aren't complaining enough.

Possibly Getty's traffic as well as iStock's is on a downward trend? If they're busy pushing Thinkstock perhaps it's a migration from one part of the Getty empire to another and the Getty Images contributors want even less to do with Thinkstock than they do with the disliked iStock.

I'm guessing he does certain searches to see how his images are faring and is seeing a lot of E+ stufff. Sean, you only have 344 E+ images out of over 12K. A number of contributors have talked about maxing out their E+ slots as a way to maintain income as downloads fell.

I didn't see the recent charade in the iStock forums as the blogger did. I didn't see people getting what they wanted, although a few crumbs were offered (I liked Rob Sylvan's thanks for shaking loose change from the sofa cushions). The Getty shooters perhaps saw that differently as they couldn't really see the massive gap between what people were asking for and what Getty "gave".

What I do think would be good is for more Getty contributors and iStock contributors to exchange notes about what they see going on. Not sure if they'd be able to change more things, but more information would have to be better than less as Getty continues to try and keep its profits up.

Quote from: Morphart on November 28, 2012, 20:48

On my side, selling mostly (95%) Illustrations on Canstock, they are my second best seller after Shutterstock, which means (for Illustration, and for me) they are doing incredibly well.

I have heard also the same from other Illustrators.

I always wondered how illustrations like in your portfolio can be sold as stock. Do you hold the copyrights to these engravings?

Copyrights expire. If the work is demonstrably old enough and the copyright is expired, you can scan a print and own the copyright to the scan. You'll see old engravings from various contributors at all the agencies