I don't buy this notion that contributors and company are both to blame for erosion of community cohesion and spirit.

Lots of people - like me - have just bailed from 95% of any iStock discussions and I don't see the great bounce back you'd have expected from dumping the nay-sayers and locking threads every time some poor buyer dared to complain.

The woo yay crowd has an open platform, but things are awfully quiet anyway.

Here's an update on the chart I've been keeping of various search terms and what is "regular" - i.e. not Vetta/Agency - in the first 200 photos searched by best match.

Sales today have been like a weekend...

I'm now wondering why my teenage son has signed up for this forum as Meadus to call me a crap spouting idiot? Internet is full of very strange things...

Huge change - take a look at the searches I've been keeping tabs on (using Sean's greasemonkey script to sort a page of 200 results). I think the issue will be how long they leave it this way - I'm assuming there will be screams of complaints from Vetta/Agency heavies. It will take a while for buyers to realize that they now have a more reasonable mix of results. And of course turning collections on and off would still be better than any mix.

As a quick example of how a reflector (very similar to the one you just bought) changes a shot, here's an example of something I did a while back for IS's critique forum (click for a larger size:



You can make a huge difference with just a reflector. Also, with putting something in the shade and then using a fill flash - see this example of a shot with and without fill flash.

If you need a second reflector, a piece of white foam board works very well.

On a seperate but connected issue, do you folks think https://www.lynda.com/ is worth while for training?

In general, yes. Lots of great tools to build skills in Photoshop and Illustrator. I'm not sure that right now that'd be the best use of your time though. They don't do general photography courses (there are a few special subject items they've added).  For a while Adobe was giving away a month of lynda.com as a registration thank-you, so I had a good way to get up to speed with new features.

I think you should work on improving your photography skills first and then delve more into post-production skills.

I'm all breathless just reading this and  thinking of all the possibilities.

I guess it's an IQ test - if you send this person any money, you've failed.

The tone - gliding over half truths smoothly and quickly, promising the earth if you just buy this book of tips, no skill or experience required - is pure snake oil sales.

I really don't mean to sound dense here, but these kind of things are not spelled out (at least not that I can find).

BTW thanks to all of you for helping, I'm really getting tired of the rejection (and yes, getting a little discouraged)  That's why I'm hear to try to avoid it this time around.

They are spelled out - in the photographer training manual. See this section.

...
However, at least one admin thinks (or thought, in the recent past) that England and the UK are "synonymous".
He'll be first to the wall if Alex Salmond gets his way.

Well it wouldn't be the first casualty of confusion over who rules what in the British Isles

Quote from: bunhill on May 24, 2011, 16:08

Also note that many people seem to have reported gradually increasing PP sales which likely means that some of the traffic has gone to other parts of the empire with different but probably related business models.

I think you'll find that most of the traffic is finding its way to Shutterstock rather than the PP. The growth of Shutterstock almost exactly mirrors the decline of Istock over the last 18 months or so on my data. The fact that Getty had to increase commissions for the PP to bribe folk into opting-in tells me that it hasn't been particularly successful.

Don't forget that Getty house contributors were given a take-it-or-leave-it new contract, part of which included the option for Getty to put the content onto Thinkstock & other subscription programs. No opt out for that offered to the Getty contributors (because they were fairly sure everyone would opt out).

Also, the last two 'lypses, Tokyo and London, included terms that required content from the lypse go into the Partner program even for those who were opted out for their portfolio in general.

The happy noises I hear from the PP monthly sales report seem to come from iStockers who never participated in a real subscription site (by that I mean iStock's subscriptions aren't really subscriptions the way SS et al. are) - they are bowled over by the high volume of downloads compared to what they're used to at iStock.

@FreeTransform - I did notice the vector in the e-mail about the sale and chuckled a bit. At software companies there's a notion of eating your own dog food (you have to use the software you build) - seems iStock could promote photos with photos and vectors with vectors, no?

As someone pointed out in the thread, if business were good, they wouldn't be having a sale.

As long as it's brief and this doesn't become a way of life (training buyers to shop only during sales if you have them many times during the year), it's possible it might generate more volume. I do sell a fair number of XL and up sales and I'm not thrilled about them being reduced in price (and the RCs reduced) unless overall volume goes up.

I think there are many other ways of offering sales that do get you more volume (where you have to buy more than one item to get a sale price, or you get a better deal the more you buy).

Here's a thread on 2008 sales (consensus seems to be it didn't do much) This was the promo for that sale.

I did a bit of searching, and I don't think we had another spring sale. There was last winter's Vetta sale (which was perhaps trying to roll back the huge price increase while helping some meet their RC targets by giving them double (I think)). There's been the dollar bin and subscriptions as ways of spending less, but not a sale per se.

There have been a few deals in the past where credit bundles were discounted and that's great if you think people won't mind buying new bundles. Having the credits be reduced affects contributors now in a way it didn't back in 2008 - we get fewer RCs as well as a reduced royalty. I wonder if all future sales will be of this type?

There are sales other than subs at partner sites - Thinkstock and photos.com sell image packs (credits except for the name). Go look at those sites to see their pricing options. I assume you had an image pack sale, although the reporting is so limited I'm not sure what you can find out about specifics.

Does Shutterstock just have it out for iS contributors. or what? I know I'm not a great photographer, but these are all selling well at iS.

The issue you're bumping into is the difference between the sort of thing SS wants to sell vs. iStock's preferences. I'm slowly feeling my way back into a SS groove with small-ish batches so I can see what they will and won't take.

Think of all the frustrated folks you've encountered in the past at IS saying that the items IS rejects are selling well elsewhere and IS says, in effect "we don't care about sales elsewhere" - same thing with SS just with different files

I took a look at your photos on IS sorted by download and I can guess why SS isn't happy. For them, some of the subtle, muted colors and useful, but visually a bit dull images (I'm thinking the big stacks of newspapers) have a hard time, especially for an application. Your earth-egg, for example, is much more up their street.

I know you can't upload raster versions of illustrations you have at iStock, but you might see how you fare with other raster illustrations - and perhaps upload your next batch of ten candidates here, or in the SS forums for other people's opinions. Have a browse through the popular images at SS to get an idea of what they're looking for.