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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
5301
« on: July 13, 2012, 16:44 »
Just to clarify, Dreamstime still pays 'part' of the referral costs. The referral costs are subtracted from the transaction value before our royalties are calculated, so the costs are shared.
I think the real issue with all these sorts of "sharing" is which costs are included in calculating the amount to be shared. I wouldn't mind if I could deduct the amortized cost of my camera, lighting, etc. from the total the buyer pays and then "share" the remainder with DT. They might not like that deal any more than I like the ones that take a bunch of promotional expenses - which I think are entirely theirs - and deduct those from the gross before "sharing" with me. In the movie business, the whole scheme for big stars getting a percentage of the gross (versus the profits) came about because the studios always managed to keep the books so that there was no profit. The agencies are increasingly following the same path and trying to effectively continue to cut contributor shares while assisting their own bottom line.
5302
« on: July 13, 2012, 00:11 »
Very nicely done.
In addition to the stats for the last 7 days, if you click on an image you'll see its total sales ($ and downloads) as well as the keywords info. Very compact and easy to work with. Not sure if it's the same folks who did the lovely iPad app, but SS is two for two in their offerings for mobile devices, IMO
5303
« on: July 12, 2012, 09:09 »
Anyone that has dropped the crown in the last couple of months wont likely have much to report. It takes time to build a presence. You dont drop today and show a huge increase in money tomorrow. jsnover should be able to give a report, I think its been at least a few months since she dropped.
If you're not prepared to give it at least a year to get established everywhere (and in particular to get your earnings up at SS which requires you get beyond the basic levels), then perhaps hang out some more with IS. I became independent again June 2011, but I had been independent from fall 2004 to August 2008, so I had a very clear idea of what I was returning to - I was gold at IS when I became exclusive. One of the things you lose once you make a shift - in either direction - is what the alternative would have been. I see lots of doom and gloom reports for IS exclusives in the monthly sales threads (with a few exceptions, typically for those with lots of E+ files). After a few months of independence I was down in earnings, but then so were a lot of IS exclusives. Was I worse or better off? A few months ago I had a month that beat my prior year IS earnings for the first time. What I am really after is establishing a solid platform for earning money from my photos - where I don't see a freefall in earnings because one site has changed best match, lost customers, raised prices, etc. I think H&F and Getty have been very bad for IS and don't bode well for its future, but IS is still either my #1 or #2 each month, so I want it to keep going until someone else can knock it off that perch. And yes, if you can't get accepted at SS then financially you might as well not bother
5304
« on: July 11, 2012, 19:20 »
...I would like to insist on one point, though, which is that I actually do know how to spell "algorithm" [face palm].
I thought that perhaps "algoritums" was a term of art for algorithms so bad/complex/opaque that you lived on a diet of Tums when working on them  There's certainly no shortage of dreadful software around, and bottom line is that it almost doesn't matter why things aren't working - we can't do squat to change it regardless of the inside story. And I wouldn't argue for one minute that complex, shifting requirements that the software team doesn't fully understand is one sure fire way to a bad end result
5305
« on: July 11, 2012, 16:49 »
It's been a week or so, rather than the last couple of days, but sales volume is down and there are many more older files in the mix. As an example, of my last 20 sales, 13 of them are images uploaded prior to 2010 with 4 of those from 2005!
Some of the slowdown is the 4th July holiday and aftermath, but I think all these old files selling says there's been some sort of best match shift (again).
5306
« on: July 11, 2012, 12:41 »
...But I sure wouldn't want to be an IT guy at this company, with a pricing and commission structure, and search algoritums, that are already far too complicated for my puny human brain, and are only likely to become more so. I have to wonder how many of the technical people within IS actually understand it all?
Computers are good at dealing with lots of details and massive computations - humans don't have to be able to replicate it, just to understand the algorithm and have enough discipline in their software process to do decent QA. And you also don't have to have any one person understand everything - that's part of the deal with large software systems. I think many of their choices and pricing schemes are a bad idea, but not because it's complex to manage from the IT end. And the reason you wouldn't want to be an IT guy with iStock is they give off every sign of having a massive pile of dreadful code that's been band-aided to the point that the only real solution is toss it and start over (which isn't cheap or easy given the circumstances). I doubt that H&F - or a new private equity owner - is going to want to spend money to put any of this right, however. So as contributors, we're stuck with watching them closely to try and catch their worst eff-ups and pester them until we get some amount that's close to what we're owed.
5307
« on: July 11, 2012, 09:08 »
...
come on fellas, stop nitpicking.
It's not news that iStock's accounting is flawed - and I think it's incompetence and terrible IT, not intentional - but with accounts being off, there's no such thing as nitpicking. The money's right or it's not. If it's not, it's typically not as straightforward as you'd think to know if it's off by a lot or a little. Given that they frequently don't appear to know - or at least can't make payments or back payments correctly - we can't rely on it being just a little. I don't think there's anything specific we can do until/unless we get some solid data to work with. But I don't think it's a nitpick.
5308
« on: July 10, 2012, 12:49 »
5309
« on: July 09, 2012, 14:32 »
I left out the "no" in "no automatic win" - I've edited to fix my goof.
I think it's simple to make things fair for contributors and have the agency make a profit - all of the current micros used to come pretty close before they started cutting percentages for contributors, jacking up prices for buyers, etc. Both sides can be profitable and offer buyers a fair deal. We can't generate enough cash to (a) support "dividends" for the vulture capital firms (H&F and I assume KKR will do the same to Fotolia) or (b) prop up other parts of a business that aren't making as much money.
I don't think you have to be a niche or even have unique images to succeed. Good choice, fair prices, great search engine, working site with little/no downtime and simple, straightforward purchase systems.
5310
« on: July 09, 2012, 08:59 »
The downside of the fixed payout system is that when the site is collecting income in other currencies, they are sometimes making out like bandits by paying you the fixed amount.
I think the percentage model works as long as marketing expenses - promotional and "I'm sorry" discounts are paid for by the site and as long as there's no games being played. In IS's case, one of the games I suspect happened was that they gave out huge discounts to large angry customers who weren't happy about Vetta/Agency/E+ price hikes. The problem was those cheapo credits then got spent on regular files as well.
There's no automatic "win" for contributors with either system - an ethical, honest and fair agency is the only way we win.
5311
« on: July 07, 2012, 20:11 »
All that will encourage them to do is drop the royalties paid to independents at Thinkstock, so I'm not sure that rule is "sustainable" Yesterday I had an XXXL for $7.28 (also P+) which balances out the 10 cent XS sales and is the reason the monthly tallies at IS stay reasonable
5312
« on: July 07, 2012, 17:03 »
come on guys! DT is fine 
Not in my book. They have more rules - many of which are illogical and arbitrary, and not consistently enforced - than just about any other site. If these rules made for a wonderful buyer experience or better returns for contributors, I might feel better about it, but none of these rules have elevated them from the bottom of the pile in the top tier sites.
5313
« on: July 07, 2012, 12:02 »
E+ and Vetta prices have increased a lot over the last couple of years - as well as the basic exclusive prices. Offsetting the drops in downloads with sales at those higher prices is fine at the beginning, but truly isn't sustainable over time - without more price increases, how are you going to grow in the future? Tripling your portfolio each year?
5314
« on: July 03, 2012, 22:52 »
I find the deeply depressing part of this is the buyers are more private equity firms. So - assuming they somehow get someone to buy them out at close to the high asking price - we are faced with more belt tightening and squeezing suppliers (i.e. us) as the second round of vultures want to collect their "dividends" on this deal.
While the business is in the hands of those who want to drain profits from it versus invest in improving it over the long haul, I can't see how it can be a good thing for anyone but the financial firms advising on the deals and those receiving the "dividends".
5315
« on: July 03, 2012, 13:18 »
I wonder why they always quote the lowest amount we ever get. They never seem to mention the average $5 (at SS) OD download, or the $16.80 other downloads or the ELs. Last month I made about $.70 per download. With a stagnant port and no effort. Think what I could do if I really tried.
Same reason everyone at IS makes $.19 a download 
No no - you got it all wrong!! I've had 11 cents and I know others have had 9 cents. 19 cents is what we're all dreaming of
5316
« on: July 02, 2012, 13:25 »
I'm not sure how imminent and serious a threat this proposal is - sometimes governments talk a lot, and commission blue ribbon panels to debate for years, write reports and do nothing. There are a couple of other blog posts about this issue that I read after reading your link - see here and here. But if I understand this proposal correctly, it seems that I might have virtually all rights to decide where, to whom, for what price and under what licensing terms my copyrighted work is sold taken away - unless I know enough to opt out, in another country, under whatever laws that country cares to pass? And if they do license my works for a pittance, I'm to know who to contact to collect my share of that pittance? Any requirement for a user of copyrighted material to do a diligent search for me, the rights holder is removed and this extended collective licensing (ECL) takes its place? This is just mind boggling. Poor publisher/Google/other buyer who has to do work to find out who owns the thing they want to use. Boo hoo - let them get off their lazy backsides and find out who to pay for what they use. Am I missing something here, or is this very bad news for producers of copyrighted works?
5317
« on: July 02, 2012, 09:07 »
It's great that the removal end is working speedily - thanks for reporting back
5318
« on: July 01, 2012, 17:19 »
Theoretically, with a bit of a lag, the answer is yes, removing from iStock will remove from Thinkstock.
In practice, things have been so broken with the connector between the sites, it's anyone's guess as to when this will happen. In the last couple of weeks there has been some renewed activity moving files from IS to the partner sites - I had been stuck at about 1K images for many weeks (out of 2.5K at IS) and now my total is just over 1.5K. Interestingly although most are coming in oldest first as before, there was a handful (but not all) of some recent May/June 2012 uploads in the mix.
You can open a support ticket with IS if the image doesn't get deleted, just for form's sake, but that's not likely to do much unless you can make enough of a stink to get them to do something manually (perhaps because you have some contractual obligations that require the image's removal, or something similar)
5319
« on: June 29, 2012, 10:24 »
Woo hoo! Congrats
5320
« on: June 27, 2012, 20:19 »
I was a Lightroom holdout for a long time but have been using LR 3 (so far haven't seen anything compelling in LR4 and want them to fix some more bugs before I bite the bullet and make the transition) for a year or two now.
It's not either/or with Photoshop. For almost any serious editing you still need Photoshop, but LR gives you a pretty decent management tool for keeping track of all your images, doing RAW conversion (that was what got me to bite the bullet finally) and some simple editing - especially handy if you have to quickly produce a bunch of JPEGs from your RAW and the files don't need much in the way of cleanup.
After I copy RAW files to my system, the worfklow is to import them into LR, sort through and see what's worth working on, use the develop module to do the basic RAW conversion and then hand off to Photoshop for editing.
I don't want to deal with subscriptions with Adobe - I can't imagine they're going to improve on their past sad record with bug fixes (new version, they break a bunch of stuff, declare half the breakage a new feature, fix one or two of the rest and then demand you pay to upgrade to a new version). If they eliminate the option to buy the software I guess I'll have to give in, but I think their value for money proposition has been going down and down and it's only because there is no other decent option that I keep paying them.l
5321
« on: June 27, 2012, 17:39 »
I am not as optimistic as Freedom about iStock's future, but I think if you're interested in the money you make from stock you absolutely should contribute to iStock.
There are a few exceptions - some of the folks doing very successful raster illustrations have a hard time getting them accepted at IS as they have some rather odd rules in that area. You don't need to do only "natural" images - take a look at my portfolio for examples of pretty highly processed images that passed at IS. For your application, probably best to stick to basics - well exposed, good color, even lighting and sharp while not sharpened.
Their upload process on the web site is a wreck, but DeepMeta (which is done by a contributor but supported by IS) makes most of that go away. And even with IS's crappy royalty rates for independents, last month they beat SS's monthly total for me (it varies; sometimes it's SS).
5322
« on: June 27, 2012, 16:00 »
"The world's index of licensable content"!! Why not the galaxy if we're going for big sounding empty promises? Taking 20% for doing almost nothing seems closer to one of those e-mail scams that a realistic business proposition If I were going to pay for hosting and a storefront, I'd prefer to do it on a monthly fee basis versus handing over 20% of what I earned. Take a look at their idea of "quick" fulfillment - you upload the content within 3 days if the buyer makes a purchase. That suggests they're trying to avoid fees for hosting original data. But in this day of instant downloads almost everywhere, who's going to make a purchase and wait? And for those travel folks who are out of touch for various times, they just miss out on the sale? You'll see they pay 30 days in arrears if you have at least $10. They suggest you watermark your content - meaning I guess that they don't. I did a few searches and in addition to a rather sad current library, when I looked at a photo it didn't give the resolution or file format I'd be buying for $12. All seems like a poorly thought through non-starter. And no clue as to the company or person behind it. Perhaps it's Albumo come back from the grave
5323
« on: June 27, 2012, 11:31 »
Given the relatively low volume of subscriptions at DT the main appeal of them is that it helps boost images to higher levels for credit sales. I'd rather DT were credits only, but as long as they have a low-volume of subs sales where one sub sale counts in the system to move images up a level, I can live with it.
The concern would be that the change in the subs plan increases the volume of subs sales at the expense of credit sales - i.e. no overall increase in business, just a shift to cheaper methods of buying. I don't care about a higher RPD if the site is losing volume and my monthly earnings drop - conversely, as the SS model shows, you can bring home the bacon to contributors with lower RPDs.
I guess it's good that DT is trying to fix things if they aren't working well, but they just seem to be endlessly tinkering with different ways to be at the bottom of the top tier heap.
5324
« on: June 26, 2012, 11:38 »
I haven't heard anyone complain about earnings/best match in a while. Looks like everyone is doing great . It's so nice to see some positivity around here for a change (lack of negativity is telling a story)
I think you're reading way too much into silence. Having had a few really good weeks on iStock, they appear just about dead this week. But it's June and this time of year is typically a bit quieter - I'm sure they'll decided to "improve" search right around the fall busy season and you'll see plenty of complaints surface then
5325
« on: June 25, 2012, 09:53 »
I don't subscribe to notifications for threads, but I have always had e-mail notifications for PMs enabled.
Over the weekend I just happened to notice that I had a new PM (from Friday) and had not received notification. I replied and apologized for the delay. I didn't get a notification for the follow up PM either.
I haven't changed my e-mail address - and I checked that my preferences still say "Always" for notification of PMs. There's nothing in my spam filters. As noted above, I am getting the newsletter e-mail
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