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Messages - Difydave
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526
« on: September 10, 2011, 17:08 »
It looks like we've sorted out on this thread what type of artists most photographers are! 
Drunk?
Not exactly the word I was thinking of, but it's the right idea. Lot of discerning palates here though. You lot of reprobates 'd be an expensive bunch to get, er, drunk with!
527
« on: September 10, 2011, 15:32 »
It looks like we've sorted out on this thread what type of artists most photographers are!
528
« on: September 10, 2011, 13:27 »
By shoveling tens of thousands of obviously sub-par images into the searches, and even slapping a crown on them, Getty is ruining the "ambiance", not to mention the perceived value of "exclusive" images, and will ultimately squander the last remaining draw that the site has.
Exactly. It's a difficult game to get right, and going for the biggest profit isn't really the right way to play it. It's not as straightforward as a "normal" retail business where you buy in mass produced stuff at a price and resell it at a profit. As far as the "Artists or not" thing goes, then OK we're not producing great art most of the time, but on the other hand it ain't baked beans either. The "Churn out enough of anything and people will buy it" thing just doesn't work. (Wholly owned content for example?) One thing about successful real world artists is no matter what they are producing they never miss a chance to tell an audience how wonderful it is. You'll never really hear them criticise their own work.
529
« on: September 10, 2011, 13:10 »
We'll have another round here please! 
530
« on: September 10, 2011, 11:24 »
Did somebody say Scotch. Mine's a Glenmorangie. A double please, as it comes.
531
« on: September 10, 2011, 07:25 »
What they don't seem to realise is that selling art in any form is not like selling tins of beans. You have to have a carefully targeted market, and "ambience" to appeal to and sell to a certain client base at a certain price point. Make it too cheap, and they'll go elsewhere because the perceived value is wrong. Make it too expensive and people will simply find the prices a turn off or find it too elitist. Put the wrong items in there, even if you keep the existing work, and watch the buyers walk away. "It's full of very ordinary stuff you can see anywhere"
There is a contradiction that while as a business it may be "all about the money" if you make that too obvious both artists and buyers won't like it. It spoils the ambience. The best galleries are run by artists with good business sense, not money men with no artistic knowledge.
I spent 20 odd years making and selling bespoke furniture, both to commission and through galleries. I've seen a number of real world galleries go one way or the other. Mostly through trying to introduce cheaper goods, bought in by the gallery to increase turnover and have a bigger mark up, and so losing premium sales when clients either see it as going down market, or can no longer find what they want because artists start pulling work from somewhere which no longer sells and / or gets the price they want. Sound familiar? I've no reason to think that selling online is really that different to selling in the real world.
The point about new work not selling is also very valid. How long can that be "sustainable" for we artists?
532
« on: September 10, 2011, 05:26 »
'edstock' is a collection of existing wholly owned Getty content from a variety of editorial photographers. It isn't one man or a team, and it's already keyworded and sitting on Getty. You're right though. Under 1k sales from 40k images show it's not really working.
Didn't Getty try this wholly owned content thing somewhere else with similar results a while back? I seem to remember reading something ages ago. They seem to think that if they jump this stuff off the back of an existing successful site it will take off, whereas what would seem more likely is that too much of it will upset the delicate balance of what buyers actually want, and cause the original to crash. To state the obvious it seems to me that they really are in danger of turning iStock into something that no-one will recognise any more, and which buyers may well find a turn off. Nobody looking for images wants to be told what to buy by the seller. They want what fits their needs best.
533
« on: August 25, 2011, 08:10 »
Excellent post from StanRohrer on the previous page. I couldn't agree more, and have raised at least some of those points in the survey I returned.
534
« on: August 19, 2011, 09:39 »
To be frank...
I just want the 40% I earned while I wasted my fingers, wrist, eyesight, back family time and free time... that I invested in getting there at almost triple diamond.
We had a contract and a set of rules which were changed mid-race in order to simply wipe the slate clean and post higher revenues. It is simply the ugliest thing any company or boss has done to me personally and why I simply have lost what made me love iStock in the first place, trust.
They can still backtrack and make it all back from today forward but I can't fathom that fairness is something they put in the equation now or in the future.
If iStock does 40% to us diamonds as we were privy before, we still have the lowering of revenues due to large competition. It does however only punish from a predictable side and not from the part of the equation that should be your agent and look after your revenue/work.
I know that many at iStock had no clue or wanted to do this so I am not generalizing on the good people there. They were handed a rotten egg basket and they had to color them nicely as much as they could to make the poison pill easier to swallow. They can still turn back the clock and re-earn their place of trust.
Very well put. Exactly the same here. I want the 40% I was promised to be "grandfathered" in to. Separating "canister" from "royalty level" was never part of the deal as far as I was concerned.
535
« on: August 18, 2011, 04:41 »
EVERY best match shift that i have been apart of results in older files selling for the first time.That's the reason the company employs the system.Some dunces believe it's to hurt contributors sales rather than refreshing content for the buyers.It has worked well for a number of years and will continue for the foreseeable feature IMO.
I don't believe the best match changes are ever intended to hurt the contributor's sales. Just to boost one set of content over another. The hurting contributor's sales is just an added value
Much what I think. It's to get the content they want out in front, any benefit or otherwise to the contributors is incidental. If they keep doing it long enough without taking anything else into consideration. . . Well look what seems to be happening there now!
Please don't ever presume to tell Istockphoto how to run there business,in this instance best match shift,as it will lead to frustration.
The new content coming before buyers in any best match shift is about timescales/periods when the content got added to the library.If you contribute on a regular basis for a number of years some of your content will be favoured in any best match shift.Reducing the Istock library over the coming months will help control best match and better define any tweeks.....
I don't presume anything. I'm giving my opinion based on observation of what is happening over there, which also happens to be more or less the same as someone else's opinion. You're the one who is always making statements about how the business should be run or is run, as if you have some special knowledge of the insider workings of it or are some sort of business guru. That's presumptuous.
536
« on: August 17, 2011, 13:54 »
EVERY best match shift that i have been apart of results in older files selling for the first time.That's the reason the company employs the system.Some dunces believe it's to hurt contributors sales rather than refreshing content for the buyers.It has worked well for a number of years and will continue for the foreseeable feature IMO.
I don't believe the best match changes are ever intended to hurt the contributor's sales. Just to boost one set of content over another. The hurting contributor's sales is just an added value
Much what I think. It's to get the content they want out in front, any benefit or otherwise to the contributors is incidental. If they keep doing it long enough without taking anything else into consideration. . . Well look what seems to be happening there now!
537
« on: August 08, 2011, 09:20 »
on iStock JJRD said:
With that said : talented & hard working individuals have nothing to fear - quite the contrary.
Does anyone else find this a perplexing comment? The July thread is full of people who are having their worst month in 2/3/4/5 years both in terms of DLs and $$ and JJRD comes out with a comment like that. It is either implying that these people who are tanking have nothing to fear (despite they are tanking) or it's implying they aren't "talented and hard working individuals" because they are tanking ... way to encourage people! And the response from contributors is "Thanks for allaying our fears JJRD!". It's like people live in a reality distortion field. Mystifying ...
I find a lot of the comments from iStock perplexing. It sometimes seems like trying to decipher a particularly oblique prediction from some sort of oracle. If they have some news I wish they'd just come out with it, instead of this all this wait-and-see mystery business. Why did KKT have to say anything about what the plans are for the future in his leaving statement? If he knows something, as I'm sure he does, then either say what is actually happening, or leave the new holder of his position (or whatever) to make a proper statement at the appropriate time. This "something is going to happen" thing they seem so fond of wore thin a long time ago. Going on past experience any changes are hardly likely to be of benefit to the vast majority of contributors, so they really are unlikely to be anything to get excited over. As far as the "Talented and hard working" statement is concerned perhaps they are people who's work iStock finds good enough to act as agent for.
538
« on: August 05, 2011, 13:50 »
They probably think that by putting better quality stuff on there they can save the site. I wonder where they'll get that better quality stuff from?
The very name "Clipart dot com" sounds very 90s to me.
539
« on: August 05, 2011, 12:06 »
I don't know about deleting my pf. I'm exclusive so that really would leave me up wotsit creek with no means of propulsion. It's getting harder and harder not to get pushed off this exclusive spot on the fence I'm sitting on right now though. :-)
540
« on: August 05, 2011, 12:02 »
I think it depends on whether her mission is to grow IS or manage it as a cash cow - i.e. not invest in it but try to squeeze whatever remaining cash she can.
As H&F are still at the helm and in spite of their $500M payout to themselves last fall they probably want to sell as soon as they can, I'm assuming no investment is coming beyond what's needed to keep the site running.
If cash cow's the goal, I'd remove any opt-in or opt out for contributors and would move content to other Getty properties to see what additional cash could be wrung from it. I'd make soothing speeches in the IS forums about how this was in contributors' best interests. I'd leave the exclusive program in place, but I'd announce more changes that would cut the number of people who make more than 20% as much as possible.
If investment were the goal, they need to get some real software expertise (perhaps via consulting vs. hiring people) and fix the site. They need some aggressive marketing to buyers with some programs to try and get them buying (perhaps something like a Starbucks card where they get something free for every so many they buy; and IS pays for that freebie, not contributors). If buyers come back and the site works, contributors will be more likely to hang around. I think they need to dump the RC system or revise it massively. At a minimum they need to remove the split between content types that crushed multi-media artists and give credit for sales wherever they occur (Thinkstock etc). All money brought in to Getty should receive RC credit if that's the way they want to measure contributor success. All special discounts to buyers below 95 cents a credit should come out of IS's hide, not contributors'. There's probably a ton more, but I don't expect them to go this route...
Good post. I'm cynical enough to think that cash cow is the goal. I've been wondering if and when the cut in the people who make over 20% will come for nearly 12 months now. Listening to some of the wooyays, and some of the "Money doesn't matter to me / I'm not in it for the money" posts I wonder if they couldn't get away with just cutting the exclusive royalty rate, and still have a lot of people say how wonderful it is. Whatever actually happens I'll be very surprised if there is anything that benefits contributors coming in the near future.
541
« on: August 05, 2011, 11:16 »
Certainly no cheering from me. I wonder what the catch will be in the next round of news when we get it.
Retrorocket that is a good point about us being checkmated.
542
« on: August 03, 2011, 08:49 »
Get Mozbackup http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/for making backups of Firefox and Thunderbird settings and restoring them. You won't regret getting Win 7 64. Much better and more stable than XP.
543
« on: July 26, 2011, 11:36 »
Yeah it's in the PP updates thread that they use for, er, updates.
The evidence in support of your last thought is rapidly becoming overwhelming. :-)
544
« on: July 26, 2011, 10:09 »
I think you may well be right, everything seems to give them server problems. In that case why say the payments were going to start yesterday?
The excuse that the script hadn't executed at the weekend was weak to say the least. Doesn't anyone check?
545
« on: July 14, 2011, 06:13 »
72% of the first page of any search from what I believe to be 1-2% of the collection is incredible.
All the searches look a strange mix and personally I'm looking to be dead in the water this week.
Every time it seems to be settling back to something like "normal" they change it again.
The whole thing really needs sorting so that buyers don't find it a complete turn off and disappear completely before it's too late. (How often has this been said now?)
The price filter is a welcome addition, but not if they are going to completely fill the unfiltered results with their preferred content, presumably to make up for the people who are using the filter.
546
« on: June 01, 2011, 09:56 »
And there was me looking at it yesterday and thinking some sanity had returned!
I wondered why the DLs had suddenly stopped today.
Curse. Swear. Expletive!
I seriously wonder how much longer exclusivity will be for me if they're going to rig the pack in this way.
547
« on: May 13, 2011, 11:25 »
I'm strongly considering dumping my crown, too. I appreciate everyone's input here in making my decision, which is a very difficult one. I've been exclusive to istock since 2007 and have never uploaded to other sites. It seems a bit daunting, but I'm tired of flatlining at istock. I feel like after all my hard work, my portfolio should be worth more than 20-30 downloads a day. I'll never know unless I try.
Good luck, Jo Ann! I'm pretty quiet on the istock forums, but I do read them. I appreciate you always watching we contributor's backs.
"Flatlining" sums up my own feelings pretty well. Exclusive since June 2006. never uploaded anywhere else. Tired of adding more and more images for no extra reward ( Even less rewards after the various recent-ish knock backs)
As you say a very difficult decision to make though.
Hi Dave!
you got two options. Either stay and ride it out, hoping for the best, or get rid of the crown and do like the rest of us, P+. Its a tough call and I certainly wouldnt want to decide.
best Dave. Christian
Hi Chris I'm going to settle for a beer in a while. It's Friday and thinking too much hurts!
548
« on: May 13, 2011, 10:45 »
I'm strongly considering dumping my crown, too. I appreciate everyone's input here in making my decision, which is a very difficult one. I've been exclusive to istock since 2007 and have never uploaded to other sites. It seems a bit daunting, but I'm tired of flatlining at istock. I feel like after all my hard work, my portfolio should be worth more than 20-30 downloads a day. I'll never know unless I try.
Good luck, Jo Ann! I'm pretty quiet on the istock forums, but I do read them. I appreciate you always watching we contributor's backs.
"Flatlining" sums up my own feelings pretty well. Exclusive since June 2006. never uploaded anywhere else. Tired of adding more and more images for no extra reward ( Even less rewards after the various recent-ish knock backs) As you say a very difficult decision to make though.
549
« on: May 10, 2011, 14:58 »
I don't know how smalltime webdesigner, freelancers working on small projects would relate to this...
just guessing...
magic wand and smooth mask, and who cares about models' hair loss?
no one will notice anyway when picture is reduced to web site
That's more or less what I'd guess as well. When you get down to small sizes a lot of stuff doesn't really matter. The trouble is though that (I expect) submissions will have to be perfect at 100%. Now if iStock will pay me up front for doing it OK (I actually laughed when I typed this. And no I'm not going to hold my breath) Otherwise I don't think I'll play at the moment.
550
« on: May 10, 2011, 11:51 »
Unless (as already said) there is something big and new on the horizon, then I don't see it as anything to get excited about. It looks as if it's great for rendered shapes, line art and the like, but isolating the sort of things I do for any background looks like being a lot of work.
I'll do it (where actually possible) if I'm going to get paid, but not on the off chance that I'm going to get paid.
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