Quote from: Lizard on September 01, 2010, 10:28

Quote from: LostOne on September 01, 2010, 10:23

Quote from: peresanz on September 01, 2010, 10:11
Sorry, you're wrong. On Fotolia the withdraw only for sales in the US. At least for me...

You submitted the form right? I didn't and they withdraw tax on all of my sales.

So , u go and fill it , even if u are  a non-treaty contributor they will stop withdraw tax from each sale.

I decided I don't wanna send my info to IRS. If you take that into account it's interesting to see that SS only taxes royalties that came from US buyers only and FT taxes all the royalties. (just to clarify: I didn't send the form on SS and also not on FT).

Quote from: peresanz on September 01, 2010, 10:11
Sorry, you're wrong. On Fotolia the withdraw only for sales in the US. At least for me...

You submitted the form right? I didn't and they withdraw tax on all of my sales.

Quote from: gostwyck on September 01, 2010, 09:35

Quote from: Dreamframer on August 31, 2010, 18:51
So, Dreamstime is going to withdraw 30% from now on for all residents on non treaty countries?

No. If you read their statement any tax witholdings will only apply to earnings from US sales. As a European contributor your US sales are likely to be 15-20% of total earnings. If so, for a non-treaty contributor, your witholdings will therefore be closer to 6-7% to total earnings.

At least that is one point that SS appear to have learned from the mistakes at SS & FT.

Thanks Lisa for the heads-up on this issue.

On SS it's also only US sales but on FT it's all sales (it still is, they haven't changed it). I really don't understand why it comes to this difference?

So it's just a discount on images from emerald and up non exclusives and for bronze and up exclusives.

I also decided against exclusivity at the last moment. I could have gone ex. about two months ago but the negative trends made me rethink my decision. Especially the "How was your July" thread was an eye opener.

Quote from: thesentinel on August 12, 2010, 09:22If you change the search term istockphoto.com to istockphoto or istock you get a very different graph, of course if you take the .com off photos.com the result is very different yet again!

No mather which one you choose you can see a downward trend for IS and upward trend for photos.com.
(well expect if you use "photos", since its a generally used noun and has a much higher index because of that). It's also interesting to notice that this years summer slump on IS is much lower than last years.

I'm not sure why India is so dominant in the photos.com reports. Maybe there is a very aggressive marketing campaign going on there?

Quote from: djpadavona on August 12, 2010, 03:55
I'd believe it if Thinkstock actually had some clout.  Which they don't given their pitiful Alexa numbers.  They are growing, but their numbers are still laughably low.  SS was undercut by FT in my opinion 2 years ago.  The other agency sub plans seem to undercut SS too.  Everyone seems to want to blame Getty on this issue.  I bet they only wish Thinkstock had that type of industry power.

Here's another interesting statistic:
http://google.com/trends?q=istockphoto.com%2C+photos.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Guess who owns photos.com?

I don't understand what Getty wants to achieve. Why do they direct buyers towards sub sites? It must bring less royalties to them and ofc also to us. The only plausible explanation is that they wanna eat into Shutterstock sales. But is SS really such a pain in the ass that they are prepared to sacrifice IS?

Here's part II:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/07/2010_tour_de_france_-_part_ii.html

A couple of great picture from Tour de France. Any cycle fans here?
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/07/2010_tour_de_france_-_part_i.html

Quote from: gostwyck on July 15, 2010, 14:02
^^^ The other sites make plenty of changes too. It's just that they usually happen so seamlessy it is hardly noticable. We always know when IS makes a change because it screws up some aspect of the site for weeks or months afterwards. It must have taken them 18 months before they very recently fixed the 'loss of title/keywords data on image upload' that they self-induced on a previous modification.

Let's see what happens when they make the BIG update. Anyone up for a bet?

I'm having an awful month on DT. Half month over and it looks like I'll be down 60% at the end of the month. I have to add that July was my best match of the year though.

Some pics:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/07/2010_world_cup_comes_to_a_clos.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/halfway_in_-_2010_world_cup.html

I'm using windows live mesh. 5gb are free, works like a charm. The thing I didn't like with dropbox was that you need to have everything in one folder (sym links work on linux, shortcuts don't on windows, junctions do I think). I just didn't want to move everything to one folder. Other than that dropbox has a few advantages like delta syncing don't remember the others anymore

No IOTW this week?

Yeah, check your direct messages.

Funny hats:
http://www.crowdreel.com/search?q=%23istock10

Found jsnover:
http://www.crowdreel.com/post/11PJL

Quote from: sjlocke on April 07, 2010, 04:21
Note to OP.  Next time, announce it like this:
"We're happy to announce a new service for buyers.  We are partnering with X, who will be providing upsizing and retouching services on a custom per image request basis.  The price for this service includes a bonus amount for the contributor supplying the original image."

Then it wouldn't seem so ridiculous.

Yeah, this way you could expect a bunch of woo-yays!

Can I upsize the images for you and get the "lost" 37% of commissions? I swear I won't redistribute the images. Pretty plz!

132 was my max.

Quote from: lisafx on March 29, 2010, 20:39

Quote from: Magnum on March 29, 2010, 19:15
Crestock

I stopped contributing there.  Is Crestock officially dead, or just on life support?

I'm waiting to reach payout and then I'll delete my images there, so I'm also interested. They said they can't pay out the rest of my royalties even if I close my account.

Any results yet? 

No it doesn't. I've had my queue full for a couple of months and never saw any faster review times.

About my previous post: looks like it was just a few batches of images that got reviewed faster, now non-exclusive files have much lower ids.

Great stuff there. Love the ideas and the post work.

Quote from: sjlocke on March 22, 2010, 20:36
Nice looking stuff, although on close examination, some look a little rough in the comp.

On close examination you can find noise, banding, artifacting on some of them. Looks like inspectors made an exception due do the great ideas presented.

I just checked how many images are ahead of mine in the review process and found a funny thing. Highest file IDs of newly accepted non-exclusive files are about the same as for the exclusive files. Some non-exclusive images that were uploaded yesterday are already online Just some (new?) reviewer who started picking images from the wrong pile?

PS: I'm not complaining, as far as I'm concerned it can stay that way.

No, I just think they tolerate it with exclusives doing it but aren't prepared to increase the queues  even more (or pay more inspectors) to do it for independents. They should have some benefits since they've put all eggs in one basket.

Besides maybe major offenders might get some kind of a warning about spamming?