I think the final straw for me has been the big increase in rejections with Shutterstock.  They are rejecting things that I know would make money.

I have some interesting data on that as I've been uploading to Shutterstock a lot in the last few weeks. Most of the files are ones on which I have sales data already (from the last year or two). SS has rejected several of my best selling images on iStock as having limited commercial value. ex-Vetta images rejected as having poor lighting, images with shallow DOF as improper focus, etc.

They've accepted a ton of things too, but I half thought of challenging the LCV rejections on the basis of the proven sales value of those files. I decided it just isn't worth the time to do as each site will just do it's own thing and my sanity lies in just accepting their foibles if I'm to sell there.

The previous royalty system was idiotic and indeed unsustainable!
It will never return. (And that's a good thing!)
If the targets and percentages are reasonably set (what is "reasonable" is, is open for debate) it is a perfect system.
The only flaw I see in it is that different media types have different targets instead of only one.

The old system was completely sustainable. iStock had a guarantee that it would get no less than 60% of the gross. In reality, given what a small portion of the large pool of contributors ever really get serious about building a saleable portfolio, their take wouldn't ever get that low.

The new system is clearly much more profitable for them - a grading on a curve scheme where they can guarantee no more than a certain number of people get each percentage. The assumption was that they want the overall payout to be 20% to contributors and 80% to them.

What you should be alert to is that (a) any system they put in place today they can change completely tomorrow and (b) the clear indication of intent to minimize payouts to contributors wherever possible makes for a challenging business relationship. Look at what they've just done to Getty contributors, forcing their content onto Thinkstock whether they like it or not (they can drop selling via Getty if they don't like it).

If you find more and more of the sales of your content uploaded at iStock is sold through other outlets that don't give you RCs to maintain your royalty percentage, how fair will you feel that is? without opting out of Vetta/Agency completely, you can't control where they sell your Vetta/Agency content which is increasingly going to be a major avenue for iStock contributors to keep their earnings up in an era of decreasing downloads.

Look at Sean Locke's last two monthly reports. Downloads down about 20% over the prior year in spite of an increase of about 2K images in his portfolio. You can dismiss the rest of us as lazy idiots if you wish, but Sean is the model microstocker.

It's easy to be very optimistic when you're benefitting from the current system, but for heavens' sake, keep your eyes and ears open.

I think there's a 50/50 chance they'll actually announce this year's RC targets on Friday (per Joyze's promise 3 weeks ago on May 13th).

I think there's a good chance they'll be the same as last year because even though sales have nosedived for some people, they'll hope they can pocket some extra cash without too much fuss from the contributors they care about.

Argument will be that  they could have raised the targets but were being nice guys and kept them the same.

I think a general unease about how things are going, even among those who are currently doing OK, is part of it. Another is that it was a bit unfocused in presenting its point of view - not really anything you could rally around clearly given the mixed themes.

I also think the lock-happy mood of late discourages a vigorous back and forth about anything (something you might have seen on such a post a few years back). If I have something concrete to post about, I will, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be much point.

Obviously I don't feel like I was one of the lucky ones (although I'm not a sole-income-istocker), and any of those who did feel they were in the lucky group were perhaps sensitive enough to the general mood not to point themselves out by responding. Didn't want to appear "let them eat cake", so to speak.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't sold a single XL or above all weekend and only a couple on Friday.  I don't see this "sale" having any positive affect on my downloads. 

I've sold 3 XL and above over the weekend. Earlier last week things were pretty good (considering how crappy they've been overall in the last month or so), but only a few XL and up - not much more than I'd have expected without a sale. Friday fell off a cliff and the weekend's been very quiet. It is a holiday weekend in both the UK and US, so I think later on in the week might be a better measure.

The e-mail about the sale said it was from May 23 to June 6. But they didn't start it until the afternoon (MST) on May 24th - I got the mail on Tuesday PM too. I dont know if that means they'll extend the sale to June 7th to make it two weeks?

Quote from: jsnover on May 26, 2011, 16:12

Both of those examples were brought up in the forums when the agency content first started showing up. Along with the toilet door and some of the other stuff that supposedly went through the inspection process the rest of us do.

Has the toilet door reappeared? They pulled that off the site back at the beginning.

I probably should have been clearer in my wording - the threads that talked about all the "mistakes" showing up in the agency collection when it was new mentioned these two DK maps. AFAIK the toilet door has gone for good so whoever needed that would have to go to Getty Images for it.

Both of those examples were brought up in the forums when the agency content first started showing up. Along with the toilet door and some of the other stuff that supposedly went through the inspection process the rest of us do.

The fact that no one has done anything about it in over 6 months is pathetic. I think it's like finding out of date food in a grocery store or ripped clothes or missing buttons in a clothing store - it just looks as if the people running the place don't care enough to mind the store.

I guess too many people are assigned to other mission critical tasks like adding Facebook/Twitter buttons or marking sale prices (and there's still nothing about the sale on the home page or photo landing page, but that's another rant).

... Unfortunately, buyers still want everything for a buck.

That's not what the problem is here - there may be some who don't like microstock prices having risen at all, but the current complaining is about the inability to avoid the 55 credits ($50-75 or so) for a small image.

If the expensive collections could be elminiated from searches when buyers wished to, I think 99.9% of the price complaints would go away.

The buyer probably didn't want to hear my words either, that prices are up everywhere.  They just want a way to complain a bit and aren't really looking for suggestions.  "Sorry, good luck" is probably an ok way to leave the vent where it is and move on.

Respectfully disagree.

I saw that yesterday and thought it was very rude.

Getting snarky with contributors is one thing. Being short with people who spend money in your store, even if they're ranting, is just utterly crappy customer service. I don't care how fed up he/they are with hearing that buyers don't want to have to wade through Agency/Vetta if they're looking for less expensive content, they can't "talk" to customers that way.

And leaving these locked threads around for everyone to read is like leaving heads on a pike outside medieval cities - you're warning others off by showing how you deal with dissenters.

As someone funnier than me said a few months back about delivering good customer support "I could tell everyone to eff off and still be doing better than iStock".

I don't think these will fly - sorry.

The skateboarding image has focus on the knees & jeans instead of the eyes - lighting's not ideal either.

Lighting on the girl drinking is a problem - you needed a reflector for fill

The frog isolation is terrible - all sorts of edges are eaten away because you didn't do your selection carefully.

The first two are great subjects - i.e. try to do those again; the frog's not a good idea as it'd be a copyright problem and if you can't isolate objects well, don't include an isolation in your set

I'm guessing you have England in your list of keywords already - the way that dialog works is it excludes from the sub-terms of something any keywords already found in your list.

If you don't have England in a list you see this:

Looks like the DLs are really being transferred from gold+, to silver- exclusives (especially bronzes). Of course I'm not saying overall sales aren't sinking, according to the number of ppl complaining and various site rankings (Alexa and such). If us silver- non-exclusives would be included as well, I wouldn't mind. Diamonds have earned more than enough, time for you to take the path of dinosaurs and let us have so much fun you had from 03 up until 2011 .

It's all about the appeal and usefulness to buyers of images - not some social engineering notions of who is owed some time selling their images. Clearly search position matters, but there is a relationship between image quality/usefulness and sales. The reason most of the golds/diamonds are that is because they've sold a lot of useful images, not just hung around since 2003 eating bon bons. And if you look at some of the complaining diamonds, among them are some of the superstars who've reached that rank in just the last 2-3 years.

You're really barking up the wrong tree.

This rings some vague bells from a long time ago. I think the deal was that FT arranged with a print on demand place to be able to buy a license for an image only when they actually get an order - versus paying for an extended license up front to be able to do print on demand.

There was quite a bit of back and forth over whether it was OK to be able to do print on demand without an extended license, but perhaps someone who recalls the details can add to this.