I can't give you ratios because I don't have records of my portfolio size.

SS started out at 20 cents a download, but for those of us who'd been there from the very early days, in Feburary 2005 we started to get 23 cents a download while newbies got only 20 cents. In November 2005 my first on-demand download showed up - for $5.99. That made my day as my 26 other downloads for $5.98 just got doubled with one sale

At the end of March 2006 everyone got a raise to 25 cents. In July 2006 my first two ELs (then $20 each showed up). Backup CD royalties of 5 cents an image started in May 2006, but never amounted to very much.

From November 2005 (I started at iStock in Sept 2004 and SS Oct 31, 2004) the download totals for IS and SS were closer to comparable - 800 for SS and 600 for IS. IS's money was better - RPD of 35 cents vs. SS's 24 cents leaving IS the monthly total leader. That month total downloads across all sites were 2,300. My portfolio was small then - probably 700 or 800 images at a guess. A lot of those images weren't very good, but given how cheap things were they got downloaded anyway

@XPTO. You know the answer to your question and that they'll probably never say it directly or in public.

They want to minimize their payout to contributors but they're afraid that the most successful contributors will walk if they cut their commissions too much. The tiered payout structure isn't because your images are worth any less than Yuri's or Monkey Business Images' but because they can't afford for them to walk and they feel they can live without you (or me or any of the other smaller contributors).

They - 123rf - are exercising their power (no logic or reason, just because they can as the agency with the storefront) and softening the impact on the contributors who hold more than average leverage of their own. They hope they'll keep us all quiet this way and up their take from the business.

If all this talk about improving sales produces some actual improvement in sales over the next several months, I might decide to stay come Jan 2013. At the moment I see a site that is barely functioning with contributor login (see the other thread about problems loading) and sales bumping along about as they have been - good, but not iStock good where I feel I have to tolerate their greedy ways.

My photos submitted on Tuesday (14th) are all still sitting there waiting. I guess I'm glad they haven't disappeared, but was wondering why things were taking so long

Another point that drives me insane is the fact that they think a sub - no matter what size is only worth 1 royalty credit.   A XXL sub dl should be 5 credits unless they only dl an XS.

Especially considerly 123 is really a subs agency and regular sales are spare.

This scheme is a loser - I might have mentioned that once or twice before - but I don't think it's logical to credit subs differently for different sizes when we get compensated at a flat rate for subs, no matter the size.

And I took a look at my percentage of subs sales of the monthly totals since last June (when I returned to independence) and it was 41% by units (downloads) and 18% by $$, so I would say it's pretty similar to SS in that a lot of the money is coming from non-sub sales

IS on top? Please tell me it's wrong...

Given that Leaf added some higher numbers and that exclusives and independents are not separated, it would make sense that if exclusives are adding their votes, IS will almost always come out on top. Even if Sean doesn't vote

I think exclusives and independents need to have votes tallied separately and the comparison needs to be between the total of independents' earnings and exclusives' iStock earnings. Otherwise it won't tell us anything useful at the top end.

I think of such funny things - when you get the mix right - big shifts in businesses are made. Hello iTunes, buh-bye Tower Records.

The fact that the one-time innovator (iStock) has now stopped innovating - 'cause Getty doesn't want to spend money and is protecting its own turf - is a bit sad. It'd be nice if one of the other micros had started something like Evolve.

So, if SS decided that instead of leaving BigStock to fester - what's the point of BigStock when you have on demand and single licenses at SS? - it was going to make a curated image-exclusive collection on that site? Leave SS as the success it is and do your experimenting with the other site you acquired.

Certainly Evolve's a site to keep our eyes on to see if it gets any traction with buyers.

It says I can vote in March. I've never used the poll before, and it says I have no previous vote so why would I wait?

And if I voted today, assuming I could, am I voting for January 2012? It might be helpful to show what month of sales your vote is applying to.

Seeing more amounts in the list is very helpful - thanks.

They said the royalties are going up, but they didn't say anything about whether or not image pack prices are going up as well.

I can't imagine why they'd do this absent some benefit for themselves, so then I wonder what that benefit is.

They don't care about independents as they've already (theoretically) forced us all into the PP. I say theoretically as I'm still sitting at 25 out of 2500 moved over because it's apparently too hard to move content from one Getty family site to another.

Exclusives currently have an opt out, so possibly they're hoping to entice more exclusive content over there - but it's hard to see how they'd do that with image pack pricing vs. increasing the subscription royalties.

My guess is that they're going to be forcing more content that previously would have gone to IS directly into the PP and they're hoping to forestall the massive howling about that by upping the Image Pack royalties. Image packs are credit bundles under another name and with slightly different rules.

If it isn't any of those, what else could it be. No one could possibly believe they're trying to do something solely to benefit contributors...

2010 was my best year so far. 2011 was better than 2009 and all prior years. You should take into account, however, that my portfolio was smaller in some of those earlier years so you would expect that it made less money just on the basis of number of images sold.

I have given some attention to "new guys" - Stockfresh, PhotoDune, Veer and Pixmac. There's some possibility PhotoDune may end up as a long term middle tier site, but Pixmac seems to be going nowhere (I uploaded a few hundred to see, but haven't seen any indication it'd be worth uploading more); Stockfresh is on life support, Veer has potential, but their reviews are slow and odd, and sales are of the once a week variety, so for the moment I'm not encouraged to upload the rest of my portfolio there.

DepositPhotos seems awful. They sent me e-mail encouraging me to upload and I told them prices were just too low to consider it. Then they sent me a "deal" which (a) wasn't all that great and (b) part of it offered preferential search placement and that seems like a massive loser. Sounds good until you consider that they've offered that to others, and probably will again in the future, in which case the deal will be meaningless. Not to mention how does this help the buyer that they're playing with search (which I know all the agencies do for one reason or another, but doing it to lure contributors just seems to me fundamentally corrupt).

So I don't think things are better than they were, except possibly for the agencies. And they certainly aren't better than they could have been if the deals we all started out with were adhered to.

Okay, just did the math.  Based on 2011 numbers, I am in the 50% category, but the low end.  No chance of getting higher up, but a real chance of slipping down.  Just like Istock, I am hanging on to the rate I have earned, but just barely, and for how long?  

Paulie, I definitely get what you are saying, but do you really think Istock exclusivity offers any better protection?  

I realize I may be perceived as biased (one of the "bitter ex girlfriends" as an exclusive with a tart tongue described us), but entering iStock exclusivity at the moment is career suicide.

Staying exclusive is a different issue, and for a newbie with nothing much to lose, I wouldn't advise exclusivity, but I don't think it matters much one way or the other.

Lisa, I will personally come and tear apart your fence (I hear Florida weather's nice this time of year) if you even give a nanosecond's thought to exclusivity at this point!

I do realize that having any agency become more powerful doesn't help contributors much in the long run if that agency uses the power in an anti-contributor fashion. However, at the moment we have to play the hand we have, not the one we think we should have in a fair and just universe.

It's sort of an aside, but there's some very interesting reading in a boycott of a large and apparently greedy journal publisher, Elsevier, by the academics who volunteer as editors for the journals. See the blog that started it all, a NY Times article about it yesterday and other coverage here and here.

The situations aren't directly comparable, but this does talk about the possibility of opening up new avenues to disseminate journals - especially as almost all the work is done by people other than the journal publishers and distribution in print is no longer as important as it was - more than changing the behavior of the existing publisher. I think my point is that sometimes things can change - just as iStock changed things way back when it started and before it became assimilated into the Borg

Quote from: cobalt on February 14, 2012, 17:32

Quote from: lisafx on February 14, 2012, 14:53

Funny thing, though.  Whenever I read these interviews and see pictures of these guys who are running multi-million/billion dollar microstock companies, I am amazed at how young they are!  Makes me feel like an old lady

You should have seen all the young, good looking, supersmart people at the microstock expo. I felt like a dinosaur between all the young talent.

Funny how those smart people don't actually own the product they hock.

That's what's so smart

I don't have a full year of data to work on (I only returned to 123rf in June 2011) and only part of my portfolio was online for some of that time, blah, blah, blah, but...

I made a spreadsheet out of the monthly earnings information - which, by the way, 123rf MUST make available as a downloadable CSV (if they were being helpful, sales should include the RC numbers as well as downloads) and expect I'd be at level 4, which would give me 45%.

That's if I decide to stay.

I can't tell you how utterly disgusted I am with this move by you, 123rf. There is nothing beyond naked greed at work. What did you do for me this week. And I fully expect you to keep increasing the numbers required and decreasing the payouts - why wouldn't you? Once you've decided it's OK to rip contributors off once, what's to stop you doing it over and over?

You've looked around and seen the crap the other sites are pulling and decided there's no reason for you to be decent to contributors. The "reasons" you list are beyond ridiculous - healthy competition among contributors? This isn't a holiday camp with contests and prizes. The reward is the money we make for our sales, and you've just reduced it for most of us.

So how do you think the site will look with the factory producers - all of whom produce masses of look-alikes - and nothing else? You clearly don't want the lower-volume contributors as you're penalizing them by cutting their royalties.

I'll leave my portfolio alone while I think about what to to - and calm down - but I honestly don't see any point in investing time and effort in your site with terms like these on the horizon.

I'll save my screaming and hollering for later - who knows what might happen between now and 2013? However, the notion that 123rf is to be the latest in a long and ignominious line of agencies upping their take and reducing that of contributors isn't good news.

Forgive me if I'm not all that interested in hearing about 123rf increasing their "long term growth".