I don't know how many exclusives complete the poll - I've never completed it. First because I was exclusive and I didn't see any point. Afterwards because the income brackets are not very useful - your number one and two agencies can be hundreds of dollars a month apart and still appear in the same bracket as if they were equal.

And for an exclusive with a decent portfolio and earnings, they're just going to click on 10 ($1,000) each month and it won't tell you anything about whether iStock is up or down anyway.

I like the idea of a poll, but as is, there's more of a bias towards the low end ($50 a month or less) and honestly if a site is under $50 a month, which a lot of the low earners are, what difference does it make whether it's $5 or $10 - it's all flavors of virtually zero?

congrats, jsnover! hope you see a lot of sales from it.

Thanks all. I wouldn't say it's been a big sales boost, but I think as PhotoDune is still in beta the regular trickle is fine for now. I won't know if opting out of the ELs makes a difference - i.e. how many sales I might lose out on - but I find the EL prices so unreasonable that I don't really care about walking away from business at those prices.

There's a forum thread on this - lots of us are having this problem, but no fix yet.

I love the idea that the music was what he'd been thinking of and the other guy doing it was ripping him off

I'm very late in catching up with this thread, but just had a read  - and checked out that wretched site official PSDs that's mentioned in many of the Graphic River items as where people can go to get photos to use after they purchase the template. They're no better than the many sites that offer stolen images from the stock agencies.

I think it's heartening that so many of the links in this thread are now to content that's been pulled - that's a start.

However, I think Envato needs to be much, much stricter on what it permits in the wording of template descriptions, as well as in the use of preview images that haven't been properly licensed. In particular, it should not permit any reference to shady sites that offer stolen content - like Official PSDs.  MSG has a feature that automatically replaces obscenities in posts - perhaps Envato can do something similar with references to file sharing sites.

As long as the image isn't included in the template, Graphic River sellers could license a small image from PhotoDune - the prices are dirt cheap - no need to include unlicensed/improperly licensed content.

Thanks to Microbius for bringing this up

I can't speak for the OP but I was talking about sales patterns at the site - things like a typical level of sales on a weekday, weekends and holidays are quieter, and so on. Sometimes there are site outages that disrupt the patterns; in the past (not at 123rf) there were chunks of 0 sale weekdays for people with a long history of solid sales and it turned out there were technical problems where sales weren't getting recorded (this was Jupiter sales not getting to StockXpert periodically for those of you who remember).

I don't know how long you've been with the micros (can't be 20 years as they haven't been around that long!)  but the near real time feedback from most of the sites is very different from monthly and quarterly accounting at the macro agencies. Sometimes that can be a distraction, but sometimes we can use that information usefully. Comparing notes to see what's individual and what's being experienced more broadly is another of the useful features MSG provides.

I completely agree that people should behave responsibly but I would not support the notion that anonymity should no longer be allowed.

If you don't like people's posts, use the ignore feature. If someone is way out of line, ask leaf to step in (which he generally does without being asked).

And as far as " No one should work for a business that punishes their contributors for free speech.", that's pretty easy for someone who doesn't earn a lot from that agency to say, but a pretty unreasonable condition to set for forum participation here, IMO. Some IS exclusives are anonymous because they feel they can speak more freely that way. The dials let you see if someone is an active participant in IS or DT - make it easy to see who has skin in the game and who's just trolling.

I realized this morning what the "We highly value exclusive artists and their content ..." reminded me of: �Your call is very important to us . . .�

Quote from: gostwyck on January 24, 2012, 04:55

Press release from Getty on The Wall Street Journal's 'MarketWatch' site;

What I find interesting about this PR is where they've chosen to release it __ to the financial world rather than to the image buying world. Is their real objective to advertise 'Getty the business' itself? Could this be the start of a series of good news stories as H&F attempt to offload Getty during 2012?

How many years have you been predicting this sale coming any day now?

...
Come on Gostwyck after five years or more of you saying, they are going to turn over IS soon...

H&F acquired Getty in July 2008 (announced Feb 2008) - so they haven't even owned them for five years yet. Many articles suggested a 3-5 year time frame, typical for private equity to hold the company. The late-2010 dividend recapitalization ($500 million to H&F) was a little cash to soften the blow that they couldn't sell Getty yet. I don't know who would buy Getty from H&F, but I'm sure they want to keep the image of the company nicely polished in case someone comes along who's interested.

I don't see how the Spotify model can work for images that need to be incorporated into something in another piece of software - Photoshop, InDesign, some HTML somewhere, etc.

All the streaming music services use some sort of DRM and  although I'm sure people do try to get around that, you can't just save an MP3 file when listening to Spotify. And with paid services (Spotify or Rhapsody) you need to connect to the service at least once a month for the mobile saved files to continue to play (and those play only in their app, not any music player of your choice).

If you just looked at pictures, it might be analagous, but as that's not what people do when they license stock images, a whole lot of additional software would be needed - and adoption of that DRM software by the majority of image editing, page layout and web design software - before you could even think about using this approach.

And then there's the issue of how you sell enough ads to make money with the free version (versus paid) of the service...

Given this rather odd PR pat on the back for themselves, I find it amusing that I still have a grand total of 18 images out of over 2,500 of my port on TS/photos.com. Having pissed off indies (those of us not voluntarily in the PP anyway, and possibly those who were in at the prospect of a reduced share of the take in the future) by forcing us into the PP they then can't get the content migrated.

Perhaps they'll have that 10 million total when Logos go live, PNG support is added and ....

As long as we're speculating, how's this: Commissions are lowered to 20% while at the same time making iStock an exclusive-only agency. This would reduce the iStock catalogue to ~1.5M images, which is more than robust enough to succeed, while at the same time reducing competition for sales by about a factor of 6. If the typical contributor experienced a (conservatively-estimated) four-fold increase in DLs, this would mean his/her income would at least double. iStock can control contributor income by limiting the number of contributors, allowing new members to join only if they have a proven sales record and can create files that the catalogue needs. 20% commission and closed-door/invitation-only membership: pretty much right along Getty policy lines.

The implications of this to independent contributors are pretty big: Indie income will drop by perhaps 20% (which seems to be a good number for an iStock average), and there'll now only be a 'Big3'.

I don't think this is all that likely, but if Getty did go this route, I don't think it'd play out the way you think. And I would guess this would improve things for indies rather than hurt them (beyond the first couple of months of transition). If Getty went this route sales would drop significantly a soon as buyers used up existing credit bundles. All those buyers who can no longer do one stop shopping at iStock are going to migrate some portion (and the risk for iStock is that they migrate all) of their business elsewhere. It'll push any buyers sitting on the fence about whether they will stick with iStock off the fence - and most will do more shopping elsewhere for all the content iStock no longer has.

Given the drop in sales and the drop in contributors, the trick will be whether the remaining exclusives will see much of a boost. Whatever doesn't stay with iStock will move to the other agencies (and there'll be no indie content on TS any more so it won't migrate there) which may more than make up for the ever-declining indie income from iStock.

I also would think that exclusives would be required to participate in the partner program - otherwise there's virtually no volume of new content to support TS subscriptions.

But iStock in this incarnation wouldn't really be exclusive the way that word used to be used  - Agency content on iStock, edstock, Hulton Archive, etdstock2 on iStock and all the iStock content on the Getty sites. Why would anyone shop at iStock any more - a TS subscription which gives you 10% off Getty Images content (how you get the Vetta/Agency stuff) would be a better way to get everything you need cheaper.

With apologies to the bard:

To jump, or not to jump: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the bank balance to suffer
The ebb and flow of outrageous RCs,
Or to take action against a sea of troubles,
And by diversifying end them?