Hi aeonf,

 There was a time in our countries history that employers were able to pay whatever they liked to their workers and people worked like crazy, from children to over age adults. We changed that with minimum wage, Unions and child labor laws, this helped create and support the middle class. The worker does and should have rights. I do agree 100%, if you don't want to shoot for Istock then don't but as far as being a smart motivating business plan that is another subject.
 When Macro RF came on the scene they started at 20% ( a number literally pulled from the air ) when RM was at 40-50%. How were these companies able to make money by offering their photographers 50%? The did, as a matter of fact Tony Stone made their photographers very rich. To this day there are a few agencies still offering 50% to their photographers and they are still making a profit. I think if you keep your worker bees happy then they produce the best honey and work around the clock to support the hive. My two cents.


Best,
Jonathan

Quote from: lisafx on January 03, 2011, 17:20

Quote from: RacePhoto on January 03, 2011, 17:00

Interesting and nicely consistent. Is that RPI per month? I'm guessing it is. Which would mean that your type of material and the sites you sell on, you get about $1.20 a picture, on average per year? Nice.

I believe he said it was .11 a DAY.  Which is quite outstanding IMO.  That equals out to $40.15 per image per year.  With, say, 5k images, he would be making over 200k annually.  That would probably put him among the very top elites in the country. 

Yeah, I measure monthly RPI and that's around $3.30 RPI per month which has got to be at the high end of the performance scale.

When was it that istock announced the changes? I find the traffic statistic for istockphoto compared to shutterstock of the last 12 month interesting.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/shutterstock.com+istockphoto.com/?metric=uv&months=12

It looks like that starting last June, that there is a movement from istockphoto to shutterstock. Well, maybe it is just a coincidence.

Up 171% from 2009, with 2300 new photos.

Quote from: lisafx on January 02, 2011, 18:08

Quote from: RacePhoto on January 02, 2011, 18:02

Quote from: stockmarketer on January 02, 2011, 08:53

 It's my belief that if your RPI is falling, you're doing something wrong, and no one has been able to convince me otherwise since I have a ton of data that doesn't lie.

I guess you two are different from everyone else here because for three years I've been reading how more photos doesn't mean more money per image and RPI drops. There's no direct relationship 1:1 between number of images and income from those images.

Unless you are saying all the rest of those people aren't telling the truth?

Which is it?

Option #3.  We are all doing something wrong

And my mistake is trying to point out that RPI is a vague nearly useless statistic. I should just STFU and leave it alone. Kind of like pointing out that aliens don't fly light years across space, just so they can find a poor farmer, and tell him the secrets of the universe and how they have come to save mankind. They can defeat science and psysics but can't drop a calling card on the White House lawn or send someone to speak to the UN? LOL

Anyone who watches sports betting or any gambling, knows that some people watch the "trends" for an indication of the future. Trends in football only tell what has happened and 99% of the time don't predict what will happen in the future. Watch a roulette wheel, it comes up 14 times in a row on Red, what are the chances the next time it will be Black or Red. Well, the same as every other spin, because the wheel doesn't know what color came up last, only us humans do!

RPI only measures what has passed, what happened last month or last year, and not only do demands change, but the prices and commissions change and so do the markets. RPI doesn't account for any of that.

Now you know why I feel the way I do about RPI. It's nice to know, it's a way to measure sales and success and see how the hard work is paying off. In a very broad sense, it does show earnings and can project potential for the future, but after one months data, the RPI doesn't change in any significant way or show something interesting?

RPI drops as someone works harder, and it makes the returns look like they are diminishing based on more and more work or effort put in. When in fact, income is going up, while the RPI goes down! I might as well track how my sales are, based on the day of the week the photo was taken. There's bound to be some useless statistic I can come up with, like Sundays are best, but using that information doesn't produce more sales or do anything. It just measures what has already happened. If I shoot more on Sunday, because it's the best day for earnings, then other days will start to improve. Silly as it seems, the best way to improve RPI is delete old non-selling images!

Quote from: aeonf on January 02, 2011, 04:27

No they don't, they do help you decide what to shoot, how much to invest in it (and gear) and make future predictions.
For example I know what I will reach my break-even point, how many photos are needed for that etc' etc'.

So if you have 1000 photos and make $1500 then you can calculate that if you have 2000 photos (based on rpi or rpd or some other fantasy number) you are going to make $3000? (hypothetical numbers for an example)

Then you are amazing, because it seems no one else can calculate that? There's no direct relationship between the number of images and sales, from what I've been reading? In fact I just read where someone has about 200 photos and makes over $300 a month, and another person uploads 1000 photos a year (has 3000 online now across multiple agencies) and makes under $500 a month.

If RPI was anything more than a measure of what has happened, and had anything to do with predicting the future, I'd be all for it. But all that stat does is tell me what has happened. It's like a weather man telling us if rained 15 days last month, which has nothing to do with what will happen tomorrow. Maybe a little, but it's all after the fact. That and the problem that RPI doesn't coincide with the number of images, 1 for 1.

What you pointed out that does make much more sense is What is selling and how many times that image or that type of image has sold. That's important and meaningful. RPI is nearly usless because it doesn't take into consider "What Image Was It".

Quote from: SNP on January 01, 2011, 16:41

listen, the more other contributors take off, the more of the pie there is for the rest of us.

...or not. The constantly declining downloads aren't just because there are too many contributors.

Quote from: aeonf on January 01, 2011, 06:47

... Is december suppost to be a good or bad month because of Xmas / years end ?

Rather depends upon your portfolio and the seasonal image content. Historically for me (but not this year) December is the second best earner (November is best, followed by December or October and then September or March - that has varied).

As I'm an IS exclusive, their idiotic decision to roll out a broken search engine in early December hurt the month's sales. It was marginally up over December 09, but was the 7th best month of 2010, not the 2nd as I'd have expected.

Overall for 2010, income was up 72% and downloads up 6.5%, so it was a good year