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Messages - Sadstock
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526
« on: January 25, 2011, 13:19 »
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=296022&page=1
From the OP "This Getty inividual has apparently said you can download any istock image at thinkstock. " I hope this was a mistake not a plan for the future.
Getty employees have been known, historically, to put the knife into iStock with lies being economical with the truth, if necessary.
Like you, I hope that was just a lie.
Of course, the iStock admins will soon be on that thread to pour oil on the waters, but now we are so twitchy, we can't trust a word they say.
Surprisingly, that still hasn't happened. Maybe because there are no platitudes to offer?
This isn't the first time a Getty Rep has been caught saying something like this. Maybe they know something we don't...
---------------------------- I've no doubt that forcing everyone or almost everyone (not the 300 chosen) to put all their files onto TS is part of the long term plan, though I doubt very much that the random Getty sales dude is privy to such info. Would not be surprised if the IS response is being delayed by the internal discussion of what weasel words to use in the response. Maybe JJRD saying something like "That will never happen while I'm here" kind of thing, knowing he's got his exit bonus all lined up already.
527
« on: January 22, 2011, 11:01 »
You might do best requesting a critique on the Istock critique forum. Some inspectors hang out there and might be willing to give you some input on the likelihood of success with these images and how you can improve/change them to get accepted. http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_threads.php?forumid=26&page=1
528
« on: January 21, 2011, 22:07 »
Maybe he is trying to negotiate a special deal between himself & IS.
Makes one wonder if he is, perhaps, in the process of getting a special RF exclusivity deal with Istock and withdrawing from the other micros.
Looks like the same thing occurred to both of us 
---------------------------------------- My take on it is that he wants to start earning Vetta like dollars while not being an Istock exclusive, which makes sense given his cost structure. It sounds to me like he's trying to scare the non-exclusive sites into doing something Vetta-like by hinting that he's open to a big offer from Istock. Sounds like he has asked them to do so already and they are not interested, so he's frustrated and is getting in their faces a bit by pegging them as amateurs, hoping this will get things to move. Or maybe that we will start pressuring the non-exclusives to move on this. I think its also very interesting later in the interview where he says if this does not happen, the independents will fade, Istock will dominate, and he will go independent selling from his own site rather then go exclusive with Istock. Seems to contradict his hint at being interested in an exclusive deal, but again seems designed to push the non-exclusive micros to evolve with the times.
529
« on: January 21, 2011, 14:55 »
JJRD
Posted 12 hours ago
Quote
Ok first things first. I believe in iStockphoto, thousands of our artists (unfortunately the silent majority) also believe in iStockphoto... and I hope these answers will help clarify the conversation. I also fully hope that soon, we will be in a position here to prove that remaining an exclusive at iStock is the way to go for our talented Illustrators. Perhaps the proposition will be surprising at first glance, perhaps part of that proposition will be a different offering starting with the letter V... who knows? I just want everybody, especially our Illustrators, to fully realize that you are a radically important part of who we are as a community of artists.
------------------------ To paraphrase KK I think what JJ meant to say was "I believe in iStockphoto, thousands of our artists ( unfortunately the uninformed silent majority) also believe in iStockphoto."
530
« on: January 21, 2011, 14:07 »
I have to agree with the OP. Istock, is now the time for a civics lesson?
Given that the site appears to be almost a the point of collapse, this policy seems to me more designed to get people who complain about Istock to stop posting then because of Lobo's stated reasons.
531
« on: January 19, 2011, 00:42 »
what happened to the site? lost css file?
Getty
532
« on: January 18, 2011, 23:26 »
533
« on: January 18, 2011, 20:57 »
Thanks Sue. I had a scan but I didnt see any mention of 0% royalties. Oh well, its only an xsmall. May as well kick back and wait for someone to wave their wand.
Of course, if the commission is wrong, the size could be wrong too. We really have no independent way of verifying any microstock numbers. IS could be selling images at any size, any price, and paying us whatever they chose to - or nothing. It's all based on trust. Which is now gone.
Getty allows contributors to request an audit once a year at the contributor's expense, unless they find a substantial mistake. Don't know that Istock has any such provision, but its clear they need to make such a provision at the very least. Of course as jsnover has asked repeatedly, full disclosure of credit purchase price and all the rest on per transaction basis would be the ideal, but I doubt Istock will ever go that route.
534
« on: January 18, 2011, 15:59 »
I never opted in as well. Effectively helps Getty undermine Istock's position as it seeks to sell much of the same content at very low subscription prices. I did not want to compeat against myself as an exclusive.
535
« on: January 15, 2011, 16:23 »
Not a coop, but a distributed model where the search engine is google or bing. Payments, PayPal or Moneybookers. Some sort of easy setup for a web site like the Ktools thing. I was thinking about the IS controlled vocabulary and how one might get something like that without an agency - to provide more useful search results when searching across many seller sites. Then it occurred to me that google already does a wonderful job at finding things even when people don't use a controlled way of describing what they want. Perhaps a CV isn't really all that important in the age of the super-savy search engine.
In a distributed model there'd still be issues of IP and model releases, and I'm not sure how that could be handled - anyone want to start a cloud-based service for that?
Although the administrative overhead of various small payments to multiple service providers is a bit greater than uploading to agencies, (a) it's not that much worse and (b) as there's multiple places earning small amounts of cash from us there is less incentive for any one of them to get greedy and start taking more cash when the business takes off.
Obviously the search engine is the big dog in the pack - and if they start fiddling with the order of results in could boost or hurt sales - but at least there'd be no more of the pleas to make the search for photos work more like google
------------------------------------- Maybe something like http://www.abebooks.com/ or http://www.alibris.com/ which are used book sites. Each site is a compilation of individual book stores selling their inventory through a common interface. You search for book x and get a listing a number of different individual vendors each of whom are offering a copy of book x for sale. You pick the one you want, and purchase it through the site's ecommerce feature. The order is transmitted to the bookshop who then ships you the book.
536
« on: January 13, 2011, 00:06 »
Davidm,
Just giving your software a try and I like the interface and the idea behind it.
One feature that would be really helpful is a title character count. I'm recently freed from Istock exclusivity and all my images are titled to comply with Istock's title restriction which is no more than 10 words. FT on the other hand will accept no more than 64 characters, so I have to edit each image individually to make it fit. If I have more than 65 characters, FT will truncate the title. A real time count of how many characters I've used would be fantastic.
Same is true with keywords. Going from Istock CV to anything else is huge pain as the whole philosophy of keywording is different. I've spent a lot of time prepping my keywords through bulk editing to eliminate Istock CV terms that make no sense outside of Istock such as "young women only" converting this to "young" and "woman" or "women" as appropriate and dropping "only" entirely. These types of edits typically results in me having way more than 50 keywords in an image, so I have to cut down my list to get to 50. I need a counter to tell me how many keywords I have so I can figure out what else needs to be cut. Presently its easier to manage both of these on the FT site, since it gives me immediate feedback if there are too many keywords or the title is too long.
I have a couple thousand files to upload to a number of sites, but I'm not in a position to upload them to many sites all at once, for example different weekly upload limits across the sites. I need to upload the library to some sites and not others, then come back maybe months later and upload to the rest of the sites. Given that I would have to upload and edit the images a second time is a big disincentive to using lightburner. On the other hand if I could store the images with edited metadata for later use, the time saved would be worth quite a bit of money to me.
I think there are going to be lots more istock exclusives in my situation, needing to upload large portfolios to many sites. The timing for some type of subscription might be a whole lot more favorable than it was for iSyndica.
537
« on: January 12, 2011, 00:35 »
I couldn't find the original, infamous "unsustainable" quote just now when I looked for it ... does anyone else have it, or do they remember, was the wording used to justify the changes specifically that "istockphoto" was not sustainable, or did they use an undefined term like "it is not sustainable" which could either mean istockphoto or the parent company?
------------------------- Here is the link and the quote. For what its worth, this particular post in its entirety from Kelly is probably the most damning, offensive, and disingenuous forum post any Istock admin has ever made. This post made clear to me that I had no future as an Istock exclusive. " Since roughly 2005 we've been aware of a basic problem with how our business works. As the company grows, the overall percentage we pay out to contributing artists increases. In the most basic terms that means that iStock becomes less profitable with increased success. As a business model, its simply unsustainable: businesses should get more profitable as they grow. This is a long-term problem that needs to be addressed." and also " According to our projections 76% of Exclusive contributors will either retain their current royalty rate or move up." which might even be true if you count all the base level contributors most of whom have never earned enough to cash out. However if you narrowed that list to gold and diamond contributors, I think it would be more than 76% would drop a level or more. Another that really pissed of a lot of people was the promise to " hopefully start a back-and-forth dialog to help everyone understand exactly whats happening and why" which never happened. It also contains the info from Kelly about how much they pay out a week " we expect to see our total royalty payout increase by more than 30% next year, from $1.7-million per week to well over $2-million per week. Make no mistake, the total amount of money iStock contributors are making is going up." http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=252322
538
« on: January 11, 2011, 21:33 »
Which would make Getty the stupidest corporation in the world, since iStock was their cash cow. It appears that not only has the cash cow been milked dry, but now it is a downer cow on the slaughterhouse floor.
Actually I see this statement a lot and wonder where people get this information from? I always imagined that istock was a pretty small part of their overall revenue (and why it does not get much priority) - I seem to recall this from financial statments a few years ago ... anybody know these days what proportion of getty's revenue IS is responsible for?
-------------------------- Getty is private at the moment, so nobody outside of getty/istock knows that answer. I think Istock is a big and very profitable part of getty. I think I recall Kelly saying a while back that they were paying out something like $1.8 million a week to contributors in royalties with the expectation that they would brake $2 million in the not too distant future. I can't find the link to the article/thread, so my memory is likely off on the numbers but the principal remains the same. So to figure out Istock's gross I'll pick an average percentage that Istock pays out to contributors per sale. I'll guess say 30% (obviously its now far less with today's cuts, but not sure what that will look like going forward) So $1.8/.30 = $6 million for gross sales per week. $6 million x 52 weeks = $312 million a year in gross sales. Royalties are in the neighborhood of $94 million. Royalties aside their other costs low with salaries for say 250 employees, payments to 150 independent contractors for inspections, lots of marketing, lots and lots of bandwidth used, and lots and lots of storage. I can't imagine that Istock is spending $100 million a year on all that other stuff, so Istock is generating maybe $150 to $200 million a year in cash that Getty gets to use. You can alter the basic assumptions significantly and Istock is still throwing off a huge amount of cash every week for getty to use. Now if you drop that average percentage payout from 30% to say 25% percent Istock picks up a whole lot of cash without selling a single additional image.
539
« on: January 11, 2011, 21:01 »
Just had my first $.16 XS download! Where's the Woo Yay thread again? 
540
« on: January 10, 2011, 14:53 »
The content management at iStock has become more and more clubby over the last year. I'm disappointed. I thought the content management team was going to take it in a much more open and community-oriented direction. that was the crux of their messages all year.
------------------------------ I think Istock is becoming/has become a company representing the work of 300 to 500 or contributors, those people it pays 40%, and the 1 20% contributor, and effectively nobody else. Their work appears at the start of pretty much every search and just about everywhere else including as you noted the promotional lightboxes. I never look at the hot shots email, but assume they are there as well. I'm not knocking those people as they are very talented and successful, but most contributors including many with great talent are being or will be left in the dust shortly. I think in 1 to 3 years Istock will be only a name plate with a Vetta look to it, sold at a premium with the rest of the content shifted somewhere else paying a flat 20%
541
« on: January 07, 2011, 17:18 »
credit targets = hampster wheel
542
« on: January 07, 2011, 12:18 »
Today's slow, but Wed & Thu were very nice (for January), especially given how much of the site is busted. They did push some search fixes yesterday, so perhaps that's why sales today are slow
------------------- Maybe they tweaked best match to futher disfavor independents? As a new independent, my sales suck and I would guess are worse then they were this time last year.
543
« on: January 05, 2011, 23:45 »
chia_pet and others,
You're right, this is how things get when a sale or shutdown is in the works, and I also speak from experience. It gets pretty weird, things just sort of go dark and nothing happens. That's because no one can get a decision on anything from the higher-ups. The company is divided into 2 groups - those above a certain level, who know what's happening, and those below that don't - and those groups stop talking to each other. Managers sit in offices with closed doors, workers hang around in small groups and chat.
Employees realize there's no point in thinking about the future until they find out what it's going to be, so they stop doing anything beyond what's necessary to get through the day.
No idea what's really happening at IS but it sort of fits the pattern.
I would agree. It seems as though that is what is happening. But whether it is or isn't, I still can't fathom that they would let things get as bad as they have. Why not just postpone F5 instead of doing it half-a*sed and ruining goodwill with both buyers and contributors. I sure can't figure it out.
-------------------- Been wondering about why not postpone/stop the F5 myself and think one possibility is that bonuses for individual Istock employees might have been tied to say rolling out certain parts of the F5 before the end of 2010. Seems stupid to me that this could be the truth, but I've seen it done elsewhere.
545
« on: December 26, 2010, 21:30 »
Crazy! Seems like if it is a render of a non-specific location it shouldn't be able to use ANY specific locations in the keywords. 
I agree - location keywords are a common problem, both for illustrations and for photos. Just because its a beach doesn't mean its Hawaii.
Its not just a problem at IS though - all the sites have contributors that decide its a good way to rank higher in searches by adding keywords for many popular destinations. The danger is when a buyer uses one mistakenly and gets in trouble for including an image of the Philippines on an advertisement for Hawaii (for example).
In actual (real) photos, iStock says that only the real location can be keyworded, for exactly that reason.
Individual offenders can be wikied, but in the past at least there have been so many that it's worth reporting them for a bulk wiki. In the past, I've suggested e.g. "Caribbean" AND "Mediterranean", (88 have snuck in since the last bulk wiki) but you can substitute just about any similar: Maldives, Seycelles, "Indian Ocean".
256 ATM for Caribbean AND Maldives; 1029 France AND Italy (a few are relevant)
I have also suggested that whenever a bulk wiki is undertaken, note of the offending terms should be circulated to inspectors, but that either hasn't been done or the inspectors are ignoring the notification. (Or, of course, people are sneakily putting the multiple locations in after acceptance, but it's usually obvious when that's been done.)
OMG this so annoys me too. I am a graphic designer for a cruise line and we need images from specific and actual locations. We always have to check the keywords listed and if there is any kind of "multiple location" issue, we just don't download it. The contributor make think this helps their images be seen but it just keeps my company from downloading it (and we buy a lot of travel images). And unless I am in a super hurry I always site for wrong keywords.
--------------------------------------- BK, thanks for taking the time to report the wrong keywords. Were I a buyer, I would be very tempted to send a site mail to those contributors I had passed over because of the "multiple location" issue to let them know they had lost a sale because of how they keyworded. Not suggesting that you do so, but wish it would happen.
546
« on: December 24, 2010, 13:54 »
Just noticed your photos of Chumlee. Were they promo shots for the show, or personal? Just curious.
snip
Hmm...of all the people I photographed you noticed Chumlee!!!
--------------------------
Is he really as perpetually stoned as they make him appear in the show?
547
« on: December 22, 2010, 22:25 »
[quote author=loop link=topic=11547.msg176497#msg176497 date=1293067778]
IS does seem to be able to sustain these blunders though. It is somewhat impressive in a sort of train wreck way.
-------------------------
In the short term I totally agree they will muddle through like they always have. But longer term, I'm not so sure that they can. I think they are busy ripping apart their foundation both with customers and contributors. Its kind of like that game where you have a stack of wooden bricks and you have to keep pulling them out one by one until the whole thing collapses.
[/i]
I don't know what do you mean with "the long term", but I had read comments like yours five and six years ago. By luck, I didn't listen. Now I'm earning at IS 15x what I was earning then. And that is not opinion nor prediction: it's a fact.
[/i] [/quote] ------------------------ I was not making comments like that 5-6 years ago. I'm a long time Istock exclusive in the process of dropping my crown. I could never had imagined I would do so 6 months ago.
548
« on: December 22, 2010, 20:08 »
IS does seem to be able to sustain these blunders though. It is somewhat impressive in a sort of train wreck way.
------------------------- In the short term I totally agree they will muddle through like they always have. But longer term, I'm not so sure that they can. I think they are busy ripping apart their foundation both with customers and contributors. Its kind of like that game where you have a stack of wooden bricks and you have to keep pulling them out one by one until the whole thing collapses.
549
« on: December 20, 2010, 18:49 »
I hope they don't move us to a different URL, that would be even more tragic than all the changes at iStock this since September. That being said, I'm afraid to hear what the big announcement for the vector artists will be.
---------------------------- Editorial vectors? 
550
« on: December 18, 2010, 21:35 »
...
It all fit a pump and dump theory until this search fiasco. This is actually taking away from their 2010 bottom line by hosing potential sales right at the end of the year. Seems counterproductive...announce a Vetta sale and then hose the search mechanism.
It could have been a collision between 2 different pump and dump strategies - (1) cut overhead by reducing or capping money spent on IT - (2) fiddle with software to enhance sales of premium products.
Imagine that a 5 and dime store wants to introduce a new line of expensive, premium products in order to pump up revenues for a quick sale. But they also want to cut expenses so they send their clerk to stock the shelves and put price tags on the goods with a shaky, old chair instead of a ladder. The chair collapses and the shelves come crashing down, right in the holiday season when they were hoping to make most of their money for the year.
Just speculating.
--------------------- Could also be the result of uncoordinated strategies directed at different levels. I think the site redesign was organized within Istock by the people who's job it is to manage the interface, probably a year or more ago. They set the thing in motion and it worked its way (poorly) into implementation. Separately people outside/above Istock management decided they need to increase the Istock/getty bottom line, first with the proposed canister change then the RC change. The pressure to generate more revenue was more urgent (pump and dump perhaps) at the time of the RC change, as they couldn't even wait until the end of the year to jack up the vetta prices. Since the work for the refresh had been under way for a while, most of the costs for the refresh (paying the programmers) was already incurred, there there was no need to stop it. Istock executed its refresh as well as it executes just about anything new and you have the mess you have today.
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