I like the idea of recognising that some images have additional value too but the selection method and pricing does seem a bit arbitrary.

I think they could learn from DT's Level 1-5 system in which placement/price is earned either through sales on an increasing scale or through being an assignment acceptance.

It just seems a bit odd to escalate the price of one particular image with no sales to suddenly being 4x the worth of other images that have notched up 1000's of sales.

Istock (and the artists) would probably make far more money by increasing the price of proven exclusive best-sellers than arbitrarily-awarded 'nice' images. Ultimately this is all about stock usefulness and saleability, not art. If an image hardly sells then increasing it's price by 4x is probably not going to help it much.

SS also requires constant uploading.

Another ridiculous myth being perpetuated once again. You only need 'constant uploading' if few of your images ever become regular-sellers and don't appear within the first 100 or so of a search. I do a lot of travelling and it makes relatively little difference to my income if I take a couple of months off or upload 100 in a month.

photos.com won't require constant uploading as far as we know.

As we already know sales are so poor there that unless you are uploading at the rate of 1000 images a month (for about an extra $20) you wouldn't notice any difference anyway.

... you're right though, I haven't worked with SS.

That's pretty obvious from what you write.

Another myth __ SS didn't actually 'invent' the subscription model either. There were several agencies, including SS themselves, that had been offering subscriptions for years but always with wholly-owned content. Jon's genius was to open the doors of a subscription agency to outside contributors for the first time. At the time he had 15K of his own images and had been trying to compete against other agencies with 200K images. The rest is history ...

Sorry to hear about that Lisa but honestly you'd be a lot worse off if you lived in Europe __ although that's probably precious little comfort right now.

Photo gear is much more expensive in the UK due to taxes and the cost of doing business. Of course I can order from B&H, which is much cheaper, but then have to pay international carriage plus 6% import duty plus another 17.5% VAT on all of that. By the time you've done all that there's not much of a saving!

Death and taxes eh?

A first?  Am I really the only one here who has and continues to have a positive business relationship with Shutterstock?  I suspect that's not true.  Shutterstock makes me money; they're only a little behind iStock in overall income, with a lot fewer hassles.  They are much more accepting of my work, generally rejecting only based on technical quality and letting the customer decide what's stockworthy.  Their upload process is quick and easy.  Aside from the recent explosion over tax withholding, which doesn't affect me, I can't think of a situation where their communication with contributors was anything but professional and well reasoned.

I'm appreciative of the efforts of most of the micros, at least those that make me money.  But yeah, I'd say Shutterstock is an excellent example of a site that treats its contributors well.  More, I'd describe it as a business that treats its suppliers well, whatever the industry.

No, you're not the only one. That's a very good summary of Shutterstock. They are an excellent agency.

I am not sure why I should be concerned for others? I would rather make a sale at 5c than someone else at 50c

Would you also rather that someone else makes 5c at the loss to yourself of 50c? If so you should be concerned for others.

If JIU/PC were to become successful then potentially it could devalue the entire market for all of us. In my view we should not be supporting them with our content.

Based on the experience of those that have been selling there for several months you'll probably only make about $20 per month per 1000 images you send them. Is that worth the potential loss of sales from IS that could result?

Unfortunately it seems like 900 000 images are already opt in. Can't understand why so many contributors would opt in..

Same here. According to 'The Wayback Machine' IS only had about 2.5M files in Jan 2008 (the earliest date that exclusive images can be included) so that means that nearly half of all qualifying images must have been opted-in already. Surprising.

I've noticed that both JIU & PC have made some subtle changes to their advertising blurb recently. Instead of shouting about the 'over 3M images' available a few months ago it now just says 'millions'.

Considering that the entire point of this exercise was to give a major boost to JIU/PC then removing 3M images overnight (even if they are replaced by 1M others) is really going to annoy their existing customer base! They say it takes 10x more work to obtain a new customer than to keep an existing customer happy too. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how things pan out.

^^^ What exactly is that supposed to be?

It's not going to sell unless it jumps out of a page of thumbnails as a good representation of it's subject matter __ and I can't tell what it is even at that size.

If you mean me, I am not happy about that and already made the same point up a bit further up in this thread.  And in addition to the diamond there is a high level, prolific gold independent who also said she's opting in.  Personally I think they are nuts.  

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Once they actually get to see the pathetic dribbles of income they get from JIU/PC it will temper their enthusiasm somewhat.

You did well stirring the pot over there too __ it brought out quite a few more heartfelt comments regarding the situation.

Getty have sacrificed a staggering amount of contributor goodwill in this exercise which will probably end up generating very little money for either themselves or contributors.

I really can't imagine how JIU/PC subscribers are going to feel when 90% (literally!) of the entire library disappears overnight in 3 months time. Yes, they'll get a few more from IS, but even if 10% of IS images are transferred over (which I doubt) then the 3M images they've lost will be replaced by 500K older stock images that have been largely ignored by buyers up to now. I can see litigation being threatened if customers had subscribed specifically to access the 3M images that appeared to be on offer. It's going to look like a 'bait and switch' job to them.

StockXpert is pretty good for me even without JIU or photos-com, so of course I am uploading as usual.

IS would be mad to shut StockXpert down completely.

I'd agree. The upload process via ftp is simple, quick and reliable and inspection is about the fastest of all agencies. I had a $50 EL sale there the other day too __ which was nice.

A shame it doesn't have IS

Trust me __ it's so fast you really don't need it.

SS has a thread on the StockXpert changes. On it jmci wrote:  "When I think of the furor they caused when they first started that scheme..."
I remember that. Before the tax withholding thing at SS, just about the biggest furor to ever happen in microstock was when StockXpert said it was going to sell its image thru Jupiter. People went insane with rage, stopped uploading, threatened to pull their port from StockXpert in droves!

Now when StockXpert says it's not going to sell through Jupiter, people are going to stop uploading again. We microstockers are strange group.
 

What actually happened was that the JIU/PC license included the rights that elsewhere would have required an EL. Hardly surprising that contributors didn't want to sell EL's for 30c and thus the furore. I've got a feeling that the original offering was not optional either.

I think we're going to need to see some images __ lot's of images.