I came upon this blog entry today where Getty is talking up Thinkstock subscriptions. At the end they say they're offering 67% off monthly subscription prices through the end of 2012.

Although what they pay contributors is too low, it's unconnected to the price they charge buyers, so in this case, if the promo brings in lots of new buyers, there's the potential for us to see a boost in PP sales for December. The only possible wrinkle would be if the business transferred from SS subscriptions, but I'm guessing it's more likely it'd be from other Getty sources.

Not sure if the discount means they aren't getting the customers they want for Thinkstock or they are seeing growth and are hoping to boost it further by making it cheap to try for a month.

...I would become a fan boy of SS if they guaranteed a minimum 30% commission for the next 10 years but without that, it's hard to be confident about the long term future for contributors.

Any commission guarantee isn't worth anything unless it's a percentage of the gross. We've already seen the games played by others - iStock most recently - where they define your percentage as coming from a "net" that they get to calculate, thus making it completely flexible.

In the call to analysts, SS talked about a virtuous cycle - that contributors earning good money is what brings in more content for them. I think they get that if they stop feeding us well, their new content drops off as a direct result. If SS gets bought by H&F or the like, we're probably hosed. The bigger they get, the less likely things are to be good for contributors, but right now where they want to steal some corporate business from Getty, I think we could stand to make out very well over the next few years (assuming they're able to eat a part of Getty's lunch).

You can't. I think it's unfortunate, but other than writing support, you can't do anything. You'd ask support to change the status back to pending for you.

When they reject it, you'll be able to attach the property release without re-uploading - status goes back to pending your edit. My general experience on these partial resubmits (for a forgotten model release in one case and a request to change the category in another) is that they don't take as long as the 10 days or so for the first inspection.

Quote from: click_click on November 16, 2012, 12:05

Revenue per download = $    2.26

So assuming everyone gets 38 cents per download we're officially at 16% commission?

 

It's more like 30% or $.67 a download. That's about what I average. Still not great though.

Quote from: nicku on November 16, 2012, 12:01

$204-208 millions projection for 2013... that means one thing: increased sales and revenue ( even at the same commissions ).

Or just smaller slices of a larger pie. 

So the last couple of months, my average has been around 80 cents per download, which is about 35%, and given the volume SS is able to generate, I think that's more than "not great". As long as the SS share is in part being spent on growing the business (versus just paying off private equity) I'm happy for them to keep a big chunk in return for all their work on flogging my stuff.

The CFO's statement said their cost of revenue was 38%, the bulk of which was contributor payments, so that seems to match up reasonably well with my numbers. They say they have 35K contributors, but I'm guessing that it's like other agencies where there's a huge pool of people who contribute and sell very little that account for the bulk of that number.

I read the transcript of the earnings call and there were several things that I liked in there.

They are increasing their efforts to reach large companies. Jon noted that 70% of Fortune 500 companies had at least one SS account, but spending with SS was a small fraction of those companies' total image spending. They want to increase that, and as long as that isn't done via discounting (elsewhere the COO talked about keeping the prices flat for subscriptions, which I think is code language for not discounting them) that seems like very good news for contributors.

"On the sales side, where we are just getting started penetrating agencies and large enterprises, we had our best quarter ever. On the agency side, we signed our third global master service agreement with a large agency network, and we grew adoption and usage across all of our agencies. On the enterprise side, we signed more deals than ever and we also expanded our selling footprint by adding new team members in the US and Europe, including our first sales office outside of headquarters."

I don't think I know what he's talking about with agency networks - is that where the growth in OD and single/other sales is coming from? Does anyone else have a clue what this is referring to.

As IS has closed the Berlin office, it's nice to see SS adding people in Europe.

Regarding the comment above that revenue only grew in line with growth in the colleciton, the CFO said that revenue for Q3 2012 was up 36% (39% in "constant currency terms"). The downloads in Q3 2012 were 18.7 million, up 26% from Q3 2011. In other words, revenue is growing faster than the growth in downloads or the library, which is good.

They've added staff (up 35% since the beginning of 2012) but 40% of the additions have been in their products and technology group "...folks that sort of build products that we deliver to customers..." according to the CFO. R&D spending is up too.

From the Q&A, the CFO made a comment about subscription growth versus on demand: "And what that has been generally is the subscription plan, pricing plan has grown a little bit more slowly than our overall growth, and on-demand growing a little bit faster, and that has continued to drive the mix shift, but we have seen consistent and steady growth from both overtime. We expect that to continue."

I'm happy to see more and more on demand as that is going to continue to drive up our returns. In response to another question about price increases, this was the answer: "As we have mentioned, we have held our pricing for our products flat over not only Q3, but really over the last few years, because our focus is really on increasing share. We are the significant price advantage to some of our competition and we believe that�s the right place for us to be right now. Long term, again, I think that we have talked about, there is probably opportunity, but we are very focused on increasing our penetration at this point."

This seems very much like amazon - amass a big market share and then you can focus on improving your returns. Clearly Getty will want to fight them on this, but I'm hoping that SS holds them off (given that I think that's my best chance of seeing some of the money; Getty has too many vultures to pay off).

On a question about the 2013 projections which beat the analyst's models, it included this lovely phrase "...how you balanced your 2013 outlook, given what�s been a little bit sort of a mixed bag from some of the agencies..." A little bit of a sort of a mix bag??? funny!


All in all a very positive report, IMO

Quote from: ShadySue on November 16, 2012, 16:49

Apparently they're having a marketing campaign, starting on Monday.
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=349075&page=1

Am I the only one who finds this sentence interesting:

We are asking our customers to use up those remaining credits in their accounts and download a few more files so that we can reach our goal of 50k extra files sold before December 13th.

At face value, it's so they make the $50K donation, but I wonder how they calculate "extra" downloads to meet that target.

 I could make all the downloads count by saying that my "normal" was zero. Extra doesn't say over and above what.

Certainly you could try to get buyers to purchase so you made your goals (so you wouldn't get fired) with the sweetener being the charitable donation (which probably comes from another budget account).

I don't understand having artists put up banners - they're not buying so "my downloads count" doesn't make much sense.

It's lovely that they're donating to charity, although if it's dependent on sales, the charities better hope the IT folks don't roll out any "fixes" or they'll see nothing at all but a 503 page...

Not one dl today. This is beyond a joke.

Today has been much quieter than Mon-Thu at IS - but then Fridays are often quiet as it's the weekend already in Asia.

This week has been much better than the last few at IS (not great, but  much, much better). Not sure if this means it's a swing to indie content or just Christmas-heavy downloads. Nearly half of yesterday's downloads were Christmas images.

It may be that the odd forum situation (I don't spend much time there, but had gone to look because someone elsewhere had mentioned things running amok with no hammering in sight) means some sort of change is coming. As long as they keep the site cobbled together enough to keep selling through Christmas...

I have used the beta for a while and I think there's a good start there (once the inevitable bugs are fixed).

I imagine that your primary market is iStock exclusives, but I think the pricing seems high and awkwardly configured. Even if you don't want the extra features, you have to pay for them if your portfolio is over 1,500 images.

My portfolio is about 2,400 at IS, and I would then be at the $89 level even if I didn't want more than stats. To be blunt, I wouldn't pay $89 for that. Not to mention you are at IS's mercy for the software to keep working. I think that having a choice for limited features regardless of portfolio size might broaden your market a bit.

Wow. So they're actually looking for new programmers and developers? So maybe some heads are rolling after all? That's a little hopeful I guess. But maybe it's too late... 

It's possible they laid off the person responsible for updating the job listings...

Photo Dune EL prices are completely unreasonable. I opted out of ELs from day one and the small price increase made no difference from my perspective. Given that they have an opt out I think it's a very simple proposition. If they get buyers asking for ELs and enough contributors have opted out so they aren't available, they may be persuaded to bring their prices into line.

If they stick with their current EL pricing, I don't care as I'm not participating. We do have to watch that they don't in the future change the regular license to include things that are in the typical EL (one new agency was proposing that approach and I'm not at all in favor unless the price goes way up).

Congratulations...I think

70 cents for XL is just nuts. Even if they say they're trying to match other sites, SS pays $2.85 for XL sizes on demand. Who are they matching for 70 cents for XL?

I have no idea whether it will help bring in sales, but I have used the "See more ..." features on IS for a long time on the assumption that it probably can't hurt and might help.

I don't think you can currently change the order. I'd like to at least be able to control which four got picked for the set next to the gallery thumbnail when you hover over them. I'd rather have a choice of sort orders (as maintenance might get too hard for a custom sort order; BigStock had tried that ages ago and in addition to a truly dreadful UI for setting it up, you then have the chore of adding new things to the organized list or theyr'e dumped at the end). Popular, New and Downloads would be my sort order choices with a default to Popular.

Redefinition of payment, immediately and agreement solves so many problems...

But I'm in a mellow mood as my PP sales included two ELs ($24.02 each) for October 29th - I can be bribed