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Messages - Pauws99
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576
« on: March 29, 2019, 08:00 »
I'd love someone to come up with disruptive innovation to drive prices back up.
Ive been reading a lot here and I would like to say that I think there is a way to shake loose the agencies.
The problem has ever been the way of piecing together and maintaining a proper website, the costs and the time. It seems that nobody thinks that this is really feasible, and that joining several websites of this kind at the same hosting place would result into a portal alternative to the agencies.
I followed at a distance the Simbiostock experiment: IMO the basic idea is still appealing, although it think that the way it was technically carried out proved not to be the best.
I'm mainly a web programmer and SEO expert (who loathes the social, sorry :-)) and secondly a photographer. As such I couldnt resist the temptation to build my own virtual shop, and eventually I was surprised myself by how little expensive my effort has been, both in terms of money and of time.
I focused on reducing the cost of the hosting by developing a fully automated OFFLINE procedure (on my computer) to prepare the data before uploading them:
- fully automated .csv files - including the automation of Excel - to populate the product webpages
- ftp to upload the files to be sold and the watermarked images to be displayed
- no manual intervention required
- no extra costs for a special hosting.
Now after a months work my fresh new website is taking off satisfactorily. To get started, rather than my favorite shoots I chose a niche that had already proved quite profitable: illustration scanned from old books (I am an avid collector of antique dusty tomes), refurbished and processed.
My investment? All together $171.00 (hosting included) !
If you like the idea, have a look at: https://vintage-nostalgia.com
Or find more details on the subject in my blog here.
Should you feel tempted too, Ill be happy to give you a hand :-)
How much time have you invested?
577
« on: March 29, 2019, 03:16 »
Kill the new suppliers then  I mean turn away... the new suppliers. Everybody can start blogging about how unsustainable the business is, making 0.25c per month and new contributors will turn to more lucrative options.
Yes basically the only sustainable way of achieving anything is to choke off supply. Either by excluding people from the market which is what happened before microstock opened the doors to "amateurs" or current contributors reducing their submissions. Both basically mean someone loses out for "the greater good" or if you are not in the self defining elite you just lose out. I do hope that many who have been encouraged into the industry by the wildly misleading claims about what they can earn will exit. Though its not happening yet.
578
« on: March 28, 2019, 13:20 »
If this were achievable the contributors to the Agencies of "the good old days" would have stopped 90% of us ever earning a cent from microstock ;-).
579
« on: March 28, 2019, 04:30 »
Prices aren't lowered for no reason. And as we can see here, they haven't even really changed the last 10 years...
That's a great argument against this "race to the bottom" talk.
SS didn't touch it's prices/royalties for how many years? 11? 15?
We can also see that over the years SS have paid about 33% commission. Lots come and go promising more but eventually fail or bring commissions to similar levels. Many hugely underestimate the cost of running a sustainable agency. Marketing is probably the most important and expensive thing. It is not in the agencies interests to reduce prices.
580
« on: March 28, 2019, 03:30 »
Whilst a good idea sadly getting stock contributors to do anything as a collective group is like herding cats 
and you should know ;-). This has come up many times its not going to happen.
581
« on: March 26, 2019, 01:26 »
The reality is that digital photography has made it easier and cheaper to produce images therefore creating massive over supply. In addition the web makes international trading and a fully open market possible. That's how capitalism works. The only way to change that is to overthrow the world order. Sure you could maybe Tax the rich a bit more and break up the larger companies and regulate some of the more questionable investment practices. But it wont change the fundamentals.
582
« on: March 25, 2019, 07:37 »
Not really. 250 pics and 1000+ views. I wonder how many pics you will need to catch a sale? Since you can set the price and they pay 50% (if I'm correct) you can earn a decent amount per sale
Enviado desde mi ALP-L29 mediante Tapatalk
It's about how many pictures, I'm doing this wrong? 50% of nothing is 50% of still nothing.
and 1000 sales for 25c is better than one for $50. Its $$$s in the bank that count not rpd, percentage payout or niceness of the agency.
583
« on: March 25, 2019, 05:45 »
Around 5 clips sell on each agency.
Interesting info. May you say which videos sells well ?
oh come on if you pass him a gun perhaps he can shoot himself in the foot while hes at it
584
« on: March 25, 2019, 01:33 »
love to see and old thread resurrected!
I've got a pic of my feet on the beach, such a cliche, from my early days, it's also one of my oldest images, and the editing is terrible, but it's in the top line at SS and is hands down my best seller. I've reshot the concept, with better editing, and those don't sell at all. I have 2 images, image of sunset over farmland, one has been "properly" edited with multiple exposures to included the properly exposed sky and balanced foreground, the other is one of the set, with the fully blown out sky being all white, that one has sold well and the other "correct" image.... 0 sales. These aren't regular sellers but I often think of how customers don't see the flaws we see. Some technical flaw that would render an image "ugly" to me doesn't even register with customers. Reminds me to lighten up and relax a bit, and makes me want to say the same to editors.
Most Microstock sales are for ephemeral uses and may only be glanced at for a few seconds. Customers are generally not searching for an aesthetic or technical masterpiece but something that will do.
585
« on: March 24, 2019, 14:03 »
BTW it's not all about selling a product.
Indeed just one example. There are a VAST amount of on-line training packages used by companies often with very mundane pictures
586
« on: March 24, 2019, 12:38 »
Alamy, who's only role is to host your image and sell it, enlisted another company to do the sale for them and that earned that mystery company 40% of the sale. For some reason, Alamy thinks they are entitled to an additional 30% of that sale, even though they didn't actually do anything. So you, the creator, copyright owner, the one who did all the work including cataloging and keywording, are left with a lousy 30%.
It would be like if I uploaded some of my friend's pictures for him on my Alamy account, and he got his 40% of each sale, but then I took an additional 30% because, of course, Alamy should be thankful I got them the content, and then we only leave Alamy with 30%. I mean, why wouldn't Alamy would be cool with that? It would only be doing EXACTLY what they are pulling on us.
Alamy have secured a sale from setting up a contract with an agency which is hardly nothing. You could of course go to that agency and place your photos there and sell direct. If you have the time and they accept you.
So Alamy outsources their job to a 3rd party, that's fine. But shouldn't that come 100% out of their end? I don't care what they need to do to make sales anymore than they care what I need to do to create the content. If I were to hire a photographer to shoot for me, a model, rent gear or space, can I split those costs with Alamy? Hell no. But that would be the EXACT same thing to ask of them that they ask of us.
The companies make these crappy choices, and that's bad enough. But the reason we still have to deal with being treated like this is because of all the tireless defenders of these companies and their lying bs. You treat our relationships with the companies like an employee/employer situation and we should all be thankful they even hired us. That is simply not the case. They are agents enlisted to sell our content and make a fair commission for their efforts. We are supposed to be partners, not employees. But instead you guys roll over every time they take more and then you go even further to defend them at every turn. This is why this entire industry is going south, faster now than ever.
We are in an industry where there is massive oversupply. We are not partners we are suppliers. Its economic reality. The concept of "fair" doesn't really come into it. I don't like it but that's the way it is.
587
« on: March 24, 2019, 12:10 »
Also in stock unless the production costs are prohibitively high not much will be in demand and "unique" for long.
588
« on: March 24, 2019, 10:37 »
I always thought that categories are more useful for the search algorithm (similar images) than for buyers.
I could be very wrong though.
That makes sense maybe that helps explain their use
589
« on: March 24, 2019, 09:22 »
Alamy, who's only role is to host your image and sell it, enlisted another company to do the sale for them and that earned that mystery company 40% of the sale. For some reason, Alamy thinks they are entitled to an additional 30% of that sale, even though they didn't actually do anything. So you, the creator, copyright owner, the one who did all the work including cataloging and keywording, are left with a lousy 30%.
It would be like if I uploaded some of my friend's pictures for him on my Alamy account, and he got his 40% of each sale, but then I took an additional 30% because, of course, Alamy should be thankful I got them the content, and then we only leave Alamy with 30%. I mean, why wouldn't Alamy would be cool with that? It would only be doing EXACTLY what they are pulling on us.
Alamy have secured a sale from setting up a contract with an agency which is hardly nothing. You could of course go to that agency and place your photos there and sell direct. If you have the time and they accept you.
590
« on: March 24, 2019, 01:29 »
If the sale is by one of Alamy's partners/agents/pimps they get a generous cut as well.
591
« on: March 23, 2019, 13:32 »
Personally I rather doubt buyers use categories to search by much....but its only my theory. Would be interesting to know from people who do actually buy?
592
« on: March 23, 2019, 04:08 »
i hope they go bankrupt...lot of possibility of sales out there without those bigh sucker company...the problem is that if they go bankrupt imagine 00 millions file and more coming toward ss and fotolia...o better they stay there selling for penny to contributor...the problem is already there lot of exclusive seeing there rperd falling down and thinking to leave their exclusive status.
They wont go bankrupt but they might sellout to someone like Visual China Group... like Corbis did.
iStock has already been sold as part of a deal with Visual China Group. All istock uploads and older files are mirrored to veer and vcg.
Have you got a link for that?
The official word was that "VCG is a trusted business partner for Getty Images in China" meaning to get Getty images into the Chinese market.
Which of course led to low prices, mass copying and even them giving images away for free, though after many complaints that was said to have been stopped.
Whatever, it's not the same as being "sold".
It s kept very quiet, it is not in the news as the corbis sale, but every sign shows that the same has happened.
http://aspp.com/10253-2/ iStock uploads are making it quicker onto Veer than own page. Veer was part of the Corbis sale.
Its a partnership murky and dodgy as it maybe VCG do not own Istock.
593
« on: March 22, 2019, 16:28 »
Envato booted me out as a contributor which meant I had more time to go fishing rather than wasting time uploading to a site that made me next to nothing.
594
« on: March 21, 2019, 17:05 »
20$ for 8 hours in night noth american time. I have a lot of different portrait no boring portrait. I have quality image i sell for 200$ usd per day. I dont think I have poor quality stuff
Maybe he thought that was your monthly income, not overnight
Enviado desde mi ALP-L29 mediante Tapatalk
Well he does have a track record of thinking everyone else has poor quality images and that is why they can't sell...except when it happens to him ;-).
595
« on: March 21, 2019, 10:26 »
I inquired to them in August 2018 about slow sales (well zero sales then) and they gave me this reply:
We're just looking at your profile here and it looks like you're already doing many of the things we recommend - your images are well titled, captioned and tagged, you have a good number of images on your profile and they're well priced.
We're still a young company but we're growing fast and have just expanding our sales team and brought in a Head of Marketing. Ian's role is specifically tasked with growing the number of buyers we have coming to the site and increasing sales for photographers across the board.
We'll continue to try and share the work of as many photographers as we can across all our networks and social media platforms, and we encourage all photographers to do they same across their networks.
We're pushing hard for increased sales in the next quarter, and we're just about to release a couple of exciting new features that we hope will further increase sales. Going well then.....with your one sale from that "hard push".
596
« on: March 21, 2019, 02:51 »
The guy should really get an award for the worst profile/avatar shot ever. He looks like he just got back from a meeting with his parole officer.
He probably was ;-)
597
« on: March 20, 2019, 18:29 »
Getty images is giving you 6 cents for every sale. After knowing this it is simple math to find out how to make $150k/year
To be fair though that isn't actually true.
598
« on: March 20, 2019, 18:23 »
no, I don't think so, for a couple of reasons.
a) There would be spammers spamming the crap out of contributors ('buy viagra!', etc).
b) Those that weren't, mind be asking for custom work/cheaper price (side deal)/etc - so the sites don't want that
c) and kind of along the same lines of b, the sites want the contributors to depend on the sites, not realize they can do things on their own (i.e., custom deals/cheaper prices/etc).
There are ways (although a lot of work) to find contributors if they have their own independent site, but not sure if it is worth the effort for you. Noble that you would want to contact them - but not that easy.
as a caveat though - some do allow 'inter-contributor' contact - providing your are either a contributor (or have purchased from the site) before...
Thanks, I know why really it's just super frustrating. Do you know which sites will let me PM a contributor? I couldn't find a way on AS/FL or SS, am I missing something?
Dreamstime do or at least did as I've had a few messages in the past.
599
« on: March 20, 2019, 06:10 »
Is this kind of usage of our photos allowed by stock agencies?
https://www.amazon.com/Leyiyi-Broadcast-Celebrity-Background-Wallpaper/dp/B07JHY31DD?th=1
It would depend on where they bought the images, but generally yes, it would be a 'item for sale', and would usually need an appropriate extended/enhanced licence.
However, from what I've read here previously, it seems that some of this sort of buyer are on an 'honour' system with some agencies whereby they only have to pay if the product sells.
My interpretation would be until it actually sells only a standard licence would be needed to display on screen etc but once purchased it becomes an actual product and the enhanced is needed.
Which is almost impossible to police, without buying an item yourself.
I suppose Shutterstock could demand records of sales involving their products......whether they do or not who knows? (But I think we could hazard a guess)
600
« on: March 20, 2019, 05:20 »
Is this kind of usage of our photos allowed by stock agencies?
https://www.amazon.com/Leyiyi-Broadcast-Celebrity-Background-Wallpaper/dp/B07JHY31DD?th=1
It would depend on where they bought the images, but generally yes, it would be a 'item for sale', and would usually need an appropriate extended/enhanced licence.
However, from what I've read here previously, it seems that some of this sort of buyer are on an 'honour' system with some agencies whereby they only have to pay if the product sells.
My interpretation would be until it actually sells only a standard licence would be needed to display on screen etc but once purchased it becomes an actual product and the enhanced is needed.
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