the only reason you guys are "stuck" on microstock is because you're not good enough to produce photos saleable on Getty RM or saleable as fine-art in expensive galleries.

and the funny thing is this : there's plenty of GREAT photos on istock but as the market got saturated because of istock & the micros, these beautiful pics are worth what ? as low as 0.25$/download, and 5 or 10$ if you're lucky.

in short, they're worth the same as postcards, and that's what essentially you're good for as long as you only sell on micros.

microsotck is by a far margin the LEAST paying field in photography.

art, prints, and galleries are where the money is.

of all the evils done by google, google Images is certainly the worst !

just think what people could do without google images ... bloggers would go nuts and resort to Flickr ... others would start browsing stealing from other blogs or googling "free images".

image search should be BANNED right away as it's de-facto a piracy tool promoting piracy and theft !

as for rock bottom designers, they never paid for fonts as well, and 90% of their designs and templates are probably stolen or copied from somebody else.

there's a huge market for pirated artwork. stock photos, and any gfx on the web.

if every designer really paid for pics and anything else we would be rich now.

@hqimages :

cheap designers rarely buy RM images as they've small budgets.
RM works better for books, magazine, and publishers.

you can say what you want but once your client can not possibly find the image he needs,
his only option is either buy it on RM agencies or paying a photogs on assignment and trust
me RM can be 10x or 20x cheaper than hiring a photographer.

to me it's still not clear what Vetta really is.

as i see it, it looks just as yet another "creative collection", nothing to do with RM or MidStock or
pics you can't find elsewhere.

but then again, if your pics are good enough to go in Vetta why can't you just join Getty and sell them
as "creative RM" for 100x times more ?

i mean, from what i'm seeing now Vetta has nothing to envy from Getty RM, it's the price that makes
it special.

Negativity or reality?

it's typical of the american sub-culture.
all these buzzwords "think positive", "learn the I CAN attitude", "you can do it", and the list goes on...

but fact is, there's probably just a 100 people doing microstock full time, anyone else is starving
but won't admit it, after all they've no idea about any other alternative, they wouldn't even be
in this market if they hadn't heard about microstock.

for instance how many of you guys are selling prints now ?

doomsday ? kicking dead horses ?

i'm just analyzing the market from a broader perspective.

if you all admit nowadays is harder to get the foot on microstock, how and why should this change or improve
in the next 5 yrs ?

on one side istock is launching its "Exclusive Plus" option, on the other side they're pushing for super cheap subs with Thinkstock.

Alamy in the meantime announced its new "Creative Collection", and Getty keeps fishing new amateurs on Flickr.

Corbis never made a single profit in years, and is kept in artificial life because it's owned by Bill Gates.

Others are struggling to survive with wild discounts or trying to get bought by Getty.

IS, FT, SS, DT are getting bigger and bigger, small players are going miserably out of the arena.

in the meantime there's dozens of new sites popping up trying to sell overpriced prints & merchandising,
some are good, some have no buyers at all, others resemble more flickr or facebook rather than a serious
online shop.

and the good ones wants to be paid (see FineArtAmerica, or AllPosters/art.com) or accept only few selected contributors.

music labels are starving due to piracy, trying every dirty trick in their hope of catching the new "viral" hit of the moment like Lady Gaga and friends.

newspapers are in deep sh.. since years, 2009 has been their worst ever.
gossip magazine and paparazzi keep making million $ as usual.


so where are we heading ?

 Those buyers and sellers won't find each other through microstock.   But macro is broken - the prices are now too high.

not yet.
macro is priced right exactly because you can NOT find those images elsewhere, and good look browsing Flickr
or google images for a few hours...

it's called "added value" or just plain "value".

on the other side micro is paying less and less because their images can be found in dozens of RF agencies
for as low as 0.25$.

who can blame the buyers if the photogs shoot themselves in the foot ?

and talking about niche images, shooting that stuff can only be sustainable at RM prices, it could never ever work
in RF.

the funny thing is FAO will probably grab some sh.. from DT for 5 or 6 bucks and pay hundreds of $ on RM for the missing
pics they need.

Macrosaur is clearly a troll.

On topic: DT just launched a new assignment: agriculture. Three weeks ago I was on an expedition with friends, lightboxes and models to the inlands of Bukidnon (a tropical plateau, where's a lot of subsistence agriculture). The FAO (UN) was interested in the shots, since the location and crowd is unique. I just said "thank you no" in the DT thread. That shoot amounted to 100$ in total (I had to feed an entire village since I'm a Caucasian - dirt rich by definition) and there is no way I'm going to give it to microstock for a meager 0.35$ sub. Microstock has gone too far... I'd rather give my shots for free on Flickr.

hahaha !

p.s.
so the FAO, who's receiving BILLIONS of $ from the UN is going cheap asking starving microstockers to shoot a whole reportage for just 100$.
weren't you guys telling me to "adapt or die", "micro is the future", "RM is dead" and other BS some time ago  ?

you certainly fly more than me as i like to travel overland and smell the stink of sh.. coming in from the windows.

in China i've met plenty of blond and blue eyed female expats.

the problem is they were very far from looking like models ...

plenty of fat yanks on business trips or teaching english,
and probably shy about the idea of modeling.

as for russia it's now as expensive as germany.
only ukraine and other eastern euro countries
are cheaper to live but it's not gonna last for long,
even in romania you need 1000 euro/month to
survive nowadays.

I agree with Leszek - and it's exactly what I've seen from the inside in the software business, for about 10 years now.   Guys in India and Russia are just as smart as I am, but their cost of living is a fraction of mine here in the U.S., and there isn't much I can do about it.  The only thing that held them back (for a while) was lack of broadband, and the cost of a PC, which is the same everywhere - but eventually things change so that anyone could get into the game.  It's the same with the cost of a DSLR.

If you think of people in less developed parts of the world as just "drones" who lack our "ability", I've got news - those drones are highly motivated, and they're going to get at least a big piece of your lunch.   And that's going to go on for a long time, until the cost of living in these various parts of the world starts to equalize.


  

well actually living in russia and especially in moscow can be more expensive than London.

and talking about china : they've excellent and very skilled IT guys there, computers are made
there and a lot cheaper than in the west, broadband is everywhere, 15$/month for a decent connection
with China Telecom.

India has slower connections but plenty of fresh engineers, i've never seen so many job offers
as if you search for India and especially Bangalore, i mean there's microsoft seeking kernel
developers for windows while in europe they hire salesmen and tech support guys.

the core production of microsoft, oracle, ibm, and many others is already in india and china,
the west now is only a market where they sell at premium price what they make for cheap
in the orient !

will it happen also for STOCK ?
i think so, the only problem for them is mastering the keywording with english words
but indians are already good at this.

Quote from: macrosaur on April 20, 2010, 08:00

end of the story : the only HP thing in your laptop is the HP sticker.

Plus the Western quality control, which makes all the difference.

no western QC as long as they're assembled and tested in Guangdong.

and in the same factory they do Apple, Sony, and Asus if that matter.

japanese in the '70s are to blame for all this madness.

before getting used to plastic craps sold for peanuts
computers were strong and solid as a rock, see the old
IBMs and HPs for instance, nowadays it's all junk as they
can't compete on price and they outsourced everything
in china, vietnam, and india.

same goes for cameras by the way, nikon and canons
are now made in china as well, lenses are made in
thailand or vietnam or even philippines and sold
for premium prices.

try to find me something genuinely made in japan
today.

Zeiss and Leica are still made in germany, as long
as you can pay 10x times more than a similar product
for the sake of being nationalistic.

Macronaur:  I was pretty sure that none of the parts were HP but was surprised that it was assembled in China.  Besides, it has been previous service and phone support from HP that sold me.  And,  , the phone support was from the Phillipines.  

i had 3 HP omnibook so far.

they're strong and reliable.

but try to unmount them and nothing is HP inside, not even the screws.

mainboard == MITAC (taiwan + china)
battery == sony
cpu == intel
ram == ??
hdd == toshiba/etc
TFT == sanyo or hitachi or samsung
touchpad == synaptics
dvd/rw == matsucrapa (panasonic)

so .. what the f... is made by HP ?? the keyboard ? the chassis ? i doubt it.

Quote from: macrosaur on April 19, 2010, 18:29

all i know is he's quickly moving to RM because it obviously pays more.

I see. How does that explain all the previous RM shooters that are now moving into microstock though?

Cathy Yeulet trousered $20M by flogging Banana Images to Jupiter in 2006. They paid her a staggering $1300 per image and those 15K images are now languishing on the scrap-heap otherwise known as 'Thinkstock'. Today she's operating as Monkey Business and would appear to be going 100% for the the microstock RF market. Obviously a clever girl who knows where the market is heading __ unlike your good self.

Just think how much you might have made if you'd sold your RM portfolio in 2006. Never mind.

no surprise Jupiter Images got bankrupt and sold at 1/100th of its previous stock value.

p.s.
my RM portfolio would be quite hard to sell as RF, i don't shoot bananas or dogs or ice creams.

recently by opposite i'm investing time in exploring new markets especially selling prints for 100$ a pop.
it was time i got the foot in the door of fine-art and galleries, we'll see how it goes.