"I'm astonished people agree to images of their location/staff potentially being used by local rivals, but there you go.

Absolutely right.  I believe I have an ethical obligation to explain this to business owners.  Once I have explained it to them, I have yet to have a single business owner or professional who is willing to be photographed doing their actual job.  I am skeptical that many of them would."

The ones I know, don�t care. Why would a local competitor advertise with their team? And if someone from overseas uses it, it doesn�t affect their business. I always explain in detail what stock is and that we cannot control who buys the file. Local baker, vet, restaurant, car repair, school teacher..only the generic images would probably be bought  by any competition and if it is generic it won�t affect them.

I�ve seen a lot of photographers do these "real people working in real environments" shots.

But back to the thread, sorry for the diversion.

I agree you have to explain stock carefully, but that is the same as working with any model.

Thank you for sharing Lisa!

Let�s see what the others have to say.

This could be an interesting indicator about active customer volume, in general.

Thanks Lisa!

It is difficult to interpret data like this, especially because as an exclusive I have no idea what other sites are offering.

But the traffic stats are scaring us all and in the absence of an explanation for what the stats mean from HQ we are all reading the tealeaves we have access too.

One thing that would interest me - do the other sites show how many times a free file was downloaded (yes, I usually vote to have them removed but...)

Again this could be an interesting indicator, at least about the size of the market that likes freebies :-)

It is not a photography story, but was our favorite silly customer experience at my old business.

We used to build speed warning displays that you install in front of schools or in areas with speed control. Our customers were usually cities, sometimes the schools themselves.

For one client we sold a combination package with Speed display, installation, software...and a laptop and printer. They wanted the latter to be part of the package because they had not been able to get it approved otherwise.

So everything works well until a few months later the client calls us up: "the printer is not working" they complained. "Well, what exactly is the problem?". "You can hardly read the print anymore and we get a strange waring sign". "What does it say?" "Something in English - about - ink?" "Well....this means your printer needs.... a new ink cartridge...."

"And when will you send us new ones??"...

We actually had a hard time explaining to them, that ink and paper they would have to provide themselves...it wasn�t part of our service package...

The copy cats are my biggest concern. I have lost thousands of dollars because of them. I sincerly wish that istock follows the Getty example one day and removes them from the site.

Or at least gives me a "privacy" option to protect my work. This includes hiding total donload numbers on my artist page.

At least give me the choice.

" Short of them staging an alien invasion, massive explosion or revealing they're all really zombies"

...just give them enough time...istock can do anything...

They certainly have "DRAMA" baked into the company DNA.

But when we always ended the year in growth it was more fun.

They are really down for maintenance. They announced it on the forums on Thursday.

LOL! Sue!

But you are right about the design of the maintenance page. I didn�t understand why they didn�t use the regular design with a normal "We�re down " notice.

But at least they have several languages and offer a discount for customers. So they got that right.

I am sure you can make good money there. But I do wonder why there would be such a strong drop.

So what you are saying is - you havent seen or heard of any complaints of sales dropping significantly in 2011?

Good luck!!

Fascinating!

I think I�ll avoid the museums, I doubt that is a major market.

But if I can upload images from a local and outdoor sportsfestival, like the cologne marathon, that might be interesting.

And if their news service is RM, if I see a good looking disaster near me, I�ll upload that as well.

deleted - sue was faster 

I am just browsing through the library - they have a lot of German content.

In RM I see images from trade shows, sport events, from inside museums - is there no legal problem with that? Or is everything covered with an editorial license?

""well over 100k" probably works out at $78,000 or $1 per image per year .... just the same as most other people."

Yes, thank you, I agree it looks like that would be the average. And like you say it is an unbelievable amount of work to upload nearly 80k images. When does he shoot?

On the other hand, a return of nearly 80k a year does bring in money to pay for part time help with uploading and keywording.

I am sure I can make a lot more money on istock/getty with RF, but I like the idea of adding a different outlet for images that I could not sell on istock.

I don�t travel as much as I used to, but if I can think of a style that might work for alamy, I can just keep that in mind when I walk around town or go anywhere.

I used to enjoy street shooting but stopped when I started with stock.

So I have already enjoyed adding a few images to the istock editorial collection and am amazed that from the 40 images I uploaded this year I got 13 sales.

I believe the istock editorial collection has a good future, but many images (sports, events) they don�t take. And they pay attention to good quality lighting, so you can�t upload everything (which is good - I don�t mind that they only pick the best files)

Between istock and Alamy it looks like I could squeeze every cent out of normal walk around day shots.

Thank you for all the good information everyone. I have been doing stock for 7 years, but I really don�t know much about the wider industry.