RR is certainly not setting a new low in communications skills, but she still managed the defensive whine that suggested most of the problems are not her fault or Getty's responsibility. She started with the "you need to help by being nicer" insult and ended with the transparently ridiculous "sales are dropping 'cause there's too much content" coupled with the notion that she had real work to do so wasn't going to continue communicating.

I thought the majority of posts in that thread were (a) touching (b) sad and (c) a goldmine of business intelligence handed to her on a platter which she apparently has just turned her back on to go do her job...

You couldn't make this stuff up.

It does remind be a bit of the last days of the US election where the soon-to-be-losing camp was convinced it was winning and just would not look at any of the poll data that predicted accurately how the outcome went. That is giving RR the benefit of the doubt that she actually believes the stuff she's saying.

Do other people remember past "state of the company" speeches where management talked about how the company was growing - not "meeting expectations"? If you're not using the word growing, I think it's because you're not.

If you right click on an image, don't you see something like "Copy image URL"? I'm using Chrome on a Mac and I've fogotten the exact wording on the PC, bu there will be something similar. You want the JPEG, not the HTML

Don't post 14. Think about them and choose a maximum of 6 for folks here to look at. Self editing is hard, but really important.

I remember that thread, your ire was mine as well. In re-reading it it made me think, what the heck ever happened to pastorscott? He was so vocal and now I realise he has not been posting for a really long time. Do you know if he was banned as well?

I don't know. He's not around any of the groups of iStockers in off site forums anywhere that I "see" him. Even those not banned have generally figured that they should save their breath to cool their porridge, so to speak. Until Rebecca decided to try and stir the pot, anything said in the forums was just wasted.

Couldnt it be that the 34.00 is not the correct price to start with as she keeps going on about the decimals not being correct

From her note this morning:

"The file download for $34.00  for Dec 4th is correct in the royalty payment."

Here's the history:

Dec 4 2012

On the subject of stupid questions (  ) I'll ask another one. I wonder if iStock is calculating our royalties correctly - or alternatively, how they came up with $5.80 as my royalty on an XXXL sale this morning?

I get 17% royalty

That size (Photo +) is 20 credits or $34. If it was a cash sale I would have received $5.78

If it's credits, the most expensive credit pack (12) is $1.67 per credit. Working out what the buyer paid per credit given my $5.80, it's $34.12 (.1176 without rounding) or $1.70 per credit. I thought they were ripping us off on foreign currency transactions and paying on a dollar basis and pocketing any extra, so I don't think it can be a buyer outside the US.

I haven't asked contributor relations as I generally get useless answers that it's correct and because of privacy they can't explain anything. It might seem insane to complain about a number being too high, but when things aren't accurate, that's the worrying part, not whether they're over or under.

Dec 11 2012

So I received a reply from contributor relations this morning about my query on the $5.80 royalty. The person's math skills are apparently hopeless as the reply - which said my royalty was correct - included the following:

"The file was purchase at the $19.00 price Point (USD) not at the $34.00 price point and you have received the 17% of that amount."

I received $5.80 and 17% of $19.00 is $3.23, which I pointed out in my reply. I had mentioned the $34 price point as it was the maximum possible you could pay for that file and yet even that wasn't high enough to make a $5.80 royalty - a point apparently lost on the rep.

I'll post if I get any further response - it's like wading through molasses dealing with them...

Dec 11 2012


After several more exchanges with my friendly support representative (and it's nice that the responses are swift), I'm in some insane Alice-in-Wonderland situation that leaves me wondering if we have ever been paid correctly for anything at iStock.

So, after establishing that the rep was looking at the wrong sale and that the one I was asking about was indeed a cash sale for $34, the rep insists that $5.80 is right for a 17% royalty. I write back saying that 17% of $34 is $5.78 and that wrong is wrong, even if it happens to be in my favor this time. I then get a reply including the following:

"Due to the complexity of our royalty calculation we do not use the two decimal calculations for royalties therefore you will see a mathematical round up or down of your calculation as your home calculator does  run on a two decimal system."

I think what she's referring to is that they use floats not integers in their software - there was an earlier forum rant about how wrong they were when they were found to be underpaying on subscription sales.

Here's what I sent back to them:

"Thank you for your answer, but that doesn't correspond to the royalties that I see all the time - just look at all the other royalties for this file.

There are royalties for 52 cents, $1.37, $5.52 - I could go on, but I think you get the point. There are many, many royalties that are not rounded up to the nearest 10 cent amount.

And there is no rounding required to calculate 17% of $34.00 - it comes to $5.78 exactly - no fractional cents.

There is something wrong here and possibly the software engineers need to look at it. They are calculating the royalty on $34.00 incorrectly, albeit in my favor in this case."

I received back a reply:

"They are not being rounded by the ten cents( you are still basing your calculations on a two decimal system which is rounding to the  ten cents.)

I have confirmed with our Dev team that the royalty calculations are being done correctly."

Deleted. I'm making a new topic for this

Welcome.

If you have portfolios on any of the microstock sites, you can put links to them in your forum profile (Profile menu, Forum Profile item). That way people can get to "know" you a little bit via your portfolio

Interesting listening. Thanks for posting - I do read the Guardian online but had missed that.

The comment about volume, not unique content, was their differentiator was interesting. As was the flywheel comment about how buyer searches and contributors noticing trends via sales and responding through more uploads to what they saw, in real time, was selling.

I think the idea that if you can get search right, you can have a huge collection and still present buyers with what they're looking for - no wading through pages of results required - has merit. I do a fair number of Google searches (not for images) and it's uncanny how often I get the drop down list finishing my sentence for me even when it's not a search I've done before. If you get the volume of searches high enough, the data you gather really helps you do smart things.

So you build the smarts from searches and volume, not from CVs and tight editorial control. It may be that the wheels will spin off the wagon at some point, but it does seem like it has the potential to be a real shift in how agencies run things. Previously it was just making a digital version of what they'd been doing for ages with slides

I sent a note to support this afternoon because I had an XXL sale today with an 87.5 cent royalty. That means the buyer paid 35 cents a credit. I looked back over November and December XXL (JPEG) sales and they were all within the $1.50 to $2.50 range.

I'll post when I get a reply, but you might want to check out any abnormally low numbers on XXL sales in your own records. I find it hard to imagine that the error they found and fixed last time is the only such error.

I don't want IS to fail - I make good money from them each month. I would like them to fix their busted site, drop the RC system and scrap all the Getty zombie images on the site - with a decent, working site and 20% royalties things might look pretty decent as a #2 earner in the monthly sweepstakes.

I don't submit to 18 agencies and I can't imagine there's enough return from most of those to make it worth it. However, no exclusive has an easy year ahead of them if they switch to being independent - there will be a temporary nosedive of income while sales pick up elsewhere.

And as for not wanting to have to compete with exclusives elsewhere, I'm not worried about that. I'm already competing with them at iStock and would just do the same elsewhere. I think it might even pull more buyers to an agency like Shutterstock if there were some great new work there from former exclusives. Rising tide lifts all boats thus benefitting me too. Come for the newbies and spend a few dollars on my stuff as well

I looked at my stats just now and the subs tap has been turned on and credit sales turned off (for me at least) in the grand rotation of things that DT appears to pursue.

16 of my last 20 sales were subs...

If Envato had been so kind as to follow your schedule with crediting to me the earnings from the bundle, that might have been a great idea.

But they say it takes 10 days to figure out how much to pay me  (bundle sales were Nov 13-20) and then credit the earnings to me conveniently after the cutoff for the month...