Quote from: lagereek on June 05, 2011, 11:01

Its a confidance-trick just to make you more productive.

Then it has completely backfired!   

that's just the tip of the iceberg.

we're talking about an "agency" who doesn't make any keywording in-house, who doesn't allow more than a bunch of uploads a week, who does absolutely nothing to promote its own photographers, who has been hacked by credit card thieves, who ban every critic in its forum, who pays the most rock bottom royalties in the whole stock industry, and the list goes on.

and i disagree with those who think istock invented microstock, as selling digital products online for 1$ began in the music industry a long time before istock, see Beatport and many others who now have a kind of monopoly in their slice of the music business.

thumbs up, thumbs down, +1, digg, bury, like, share, follow me, blablablabla i've really enough of all this web 2.0 "new-speak" .... why can't we just communicate in proper english ? many people will end up speaking in "sms" language in the future.

It's not just IS and SS forums, also Alamy promptly deletes any critical debate or anything touching the wrong buttons that means for instance why alamy sales are sluggish, why alamy is not advertising anywhere, why nobody outisde UK ever heard of alamy, etc etc they simply delete everything and leave no explanation.

That's why i said many times fuck it, just close these idiotic forums where only fanboys can post and let us have serious discussions outside the agencies here on MSG.

Typical corporate double-speak .. the only feedback allowed is good feedback, well * off there's plenty of people who has enough of their BS.

I've pointed out that they have the lowest royalty lots of times and I have never had a message from Lobo or a ban threat.  I must try harder

i guess he didn't liked me saying istock is "screwing us" ... 

I also saw a magazine in the architectural industry using Thinkstock images today.  Someone made a whole 28 cents for these

Yeah but their professional designer will still complain that paying 5 or 10 bucks for that photo was too expensive.
We've come to this.

Quote from: Black Sheep on June 03, 2011, 12:28

well i don't give a sh-it what they say, but i certainlty like their business model :

20% cut for them, 80% for the photographer, exactly the opposite of istock !

mess splitting the profit fairly if there's no traffic. All that I care about is the sum I get from a certain agency, not the prices or royalty cut. Sure, generally I'm all for it, just like anybody else, also for raising the prices, but if I (still) get less money at the end, than there's no use for all of that.

wait until istock lowers your royalties to 10% for you and 90% for them...

Quote from: Black Sheep on June 03, 2011, 11:30

so i repeat : would i become rich selling RM patterns on photographers direct ? never ever, and they never request patterns from what i see so what can i do ? throw my patterns away ? try with alamy getty etc ? been there done that and sorry they never sold once in years ... there's a place for anything in this world, RM in RM agencies, RF patterns in microstock, sorry.

I agree, there's a place for everything. I'm just saying that PD doesn't feel the same way, and if they know you're involved in microstock in any way they'll likely cut you loose.

well i don't give a sh-it what they say, but i certainlty like their business model :

20% cut for them, 80% for the photographer, exactly the opposite of istock !

As Sue pointed out, they don't want anything to do with anyone who deals with microstock at all.

they're over reacting.
most of their sales would never pass istock's QC nor you can find any of those obscure subjects
their clients request every day, i just received a couple new emails from them today, look at this
for instance :

Date         : 2nd June 2011
Deadline     : 21st June 2011
Request No.10382
Request Title: CHRISTIAN PILGRIM MAN WITH PILGRIM COAT
Request:
For a page opener in our book by Grayson Perry (the artist) we are looking for a black and white image (before 1960's) of a Christian pilgrim man wearing a pilgrim coat and on his way to a sacred place (Compostela, Lourdes or any other). It can be a group shot or not.
- Black and White images ONLY

Format       : either landscape (horizontal) or portrait (vertical)
Use          : editorial
Budget
Other Usage       : UK�50.00
Notes on Budget   : �50 for 1/4 page �75 for half �100 for full page English Language 20,000 copies. Size TBC

Buyer Rating : (no rating)
Country      : United Kingdom

I'm pretty sure Photographers Direct wouldn't want anything to do with you if they knew you were also selling anything in microstock.

they mostly sell editorial, nothing to with patterns or backgrounds.

I have a question for all of you who think the new system is bad:
Lets say all of the RC targets where now slashed in half. so for example to hit the 40% mark you would need 60K credits instead of 120K, 5.25K for 30% etc' etc'
and for the sake of the arguement all non-exclusives had a fixed 20% income, or a ladder of 20%-25% instead of 15%-20%.
Would you STILL think the new system is not fair and/or bad ?

And JS: Great so you found 2 top dogs which are not old-timers, how does that make my statment not true ?!?
"Quite silly realy, most if not all of the top dogs are old timers! I don't"

Fine, so I take the "all" back. Still, the VAST majority of MS head-honchos are old-timers.

people will keep complaining but getty is holding them by the balls and in one way or another they will have to accept
the new pricing scheme and even the next ones iStock has in store, or do you think they aren't already studying new evil
ways to further screw their contributors ?

it's a business, and their executive are paid to make profits grow, not stagnate.
they already raised the prices, launched new midstock collections, and made sure they pay
the lowest royalties in the industry, so what's next ? i'm scared.

Quote from: Black Sheep on June 02, 2011, 19:47

On the other side, i would never sell patterns and backgrounds on RM, never sold one so far

Well, clearly you can't have sold one RM if you don't offer them RM. QED.

I've a few hundreds patterns on Alamy, they never made a sale nor a single zoom so far, wasted time, or maybe it's just Alamy.

I disagree.

From a business prospective Istock is doing more than fine, nobody can blame them for screwing contributors while raising their global pricing, that's exactly what a successful business is meant to be.

Of course the growth can not be perpetual but there is quite a big space to both enlarge their stock market and to launch new products and their new collections clearly show there is a demand for diversification and higher priced photography or "midstock".

The big issue here in my opinion is they now realize more than in the past how much they screw the whole market by themselves : for starters micro images sold for 1$ should be just 1$ crap and not high quality edited material ! this is simply unsustainable and IS is rightfully raising the bar with Vetta etc. Secondly, if you think they're done with stock photos, vectors, and video think again, if they want they can literally start selling anything a designer would ever need : copywriting, fonts, outsourcing projects, assignments, etc in short they will "monetize" their customer base as much as they can, that's exactly what Getty did in the past after all.

hahaha ! paranoia abunds here.