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Messages - BaldricksTrousers
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651
« on: May 24, 2015, 15:13 »
Surely there must come an equilibrium point when returns reach the lowest level able to keep a useful number of producers producing.
That's what I always expected and I assumed it would happen while there were still decent sales of new stuff - but it seems now that there is no particular minimum that cuts off the flow of images. Does anybody know how iStock's library growth has been affected by the almost total collapse in sales of new material? I've a feeling they are still getting masses of uploads - and let's remember that their heyday (from the contributor's view) was when they had only 200,000 images and maybe 5,000 uploads a month. That amount of growth kept punters happy.
652
« on: May 24, 2015, 12:37 »
But who ever said you were not allowed to play with the big boys? Also there were many sites that were not the big boys and the pricing was still in the $30-75$ range as were the royalties as previously mentioned, and somewhat easy to get accepted, you just needed more than 3 photos to get accepted, more like 50 -100 photos. They were all highly profitable and the designers were paying the pricing.
Well, I don't know about minor sites - were there really that many in 2004? - but I did read the terms and conditions for some big ones and it was clear that I couldn't qualify, you had to be an established professional to have a chance.
653
« on: May 24, 2015, 12:32 »
But we always knew it was going to happen, didn't we? It was the logic of the whole thing. We were worrying about it 10 years ago when the ball had just started rolling.
I must have had my rose-colored glasses on. I underestimated the depth of the greed of the big companies. I thought that as quality of images went up, and prices to buyers increased, that the amount paid to contributors would increase as well. I never thought that microstock shooters would ever make what trad stock togs made, but i did think that our royalties would move up, not down. I thought that it would even out to a midstock model, where buyers could still afford images, agencies could still make a buck, and contributors would make more than a dollar per image. Boy, was i way off base. 
I think we were talking about the constant dilution of sales through the influx of more and more images 10 years ago, rather than the price level. You could always go to Alamy to get the higher prices - just without the sales. The microstock thing was huge sales at tiny prices makes everybody happy, I don't recall many people arguing for a move into "midstock" pricing, and the "Istockpro" midstock offering that was meant to open that market never managed to take off.
654
« on: May 24, 2015, 11:55 »
That is my point! Before microstock came along (and this really had nothing to do with Getty as they did not purchase Istock till much later) basic web usage images were being sold for $30 - $75 depending on your source and royalties being roughly 30%-40%. Microstock brought that down to it's knees for $1 - 5$ per image and starting at 20% based on the canister system, if memory serves correct. If that is not being a pioneer in the race to the bottom I really don't know what is.
Yeah ... but folk like me weren't allowed to play with the big boys, that's what created microstock. It turned out that, despite not being able to meet "professional standards" required by the agencies we could still provide what a lot of designers needed - and broaden the market. The total that is being spent on images now is much higher than it was when the prices were higher.
655
« on: May 24, 2015, 11:51 »
But we always knew it was going to happen, didn't we? It was the logic of the whole thing. We were worrying about it 10 years ago when the ball had just started rolling.
Recently I have produced hardly anything for any sites - I'm a bit preoccupied with personal changes right now but even without that I doubt if I would find the enthusiasm to produce. One of the great things about stock for me was that rather than creating pictures to sit on a hard drive and do nothing, however pretty they were, I was able to produce something that was of actual use to people - and get some cash at the same time. It gave validity to taking pictures, then it provided a modest living. Now, however, the lack of sales for most new stuff (only SS is still delivering decent figures) leaves me feeling I'm just wasting time and maybe I should let this drift away, merely collecting whatever cash is still to come while I find something else to do.
I never did high production cost stuff, anyway, but now even meals-ready-to-eat seem scarcely worth the effort of shooting and uploading when I could be reading a book instead.
657
« on: May 23, 2015, 01:38 »
Payment received today instead of March 25. One month late!
The payment for April has just come through - have you got combined March+April, just the March or just the April payments? I'd check if I were you.
658
« on: May 17, 2015, 05:07 »
It's simple, really. They will want you to sign up in the currency for which they pay the lowest commission.
659
« on: May 14, 2015, 10:48 »
It's back again - but this is playing havoc with the earnings.
Yeah the new rate is 14 cents for a frakking image I see
Some mistake, surely? My rate doesn't seem to have changed.
660
« on: May 12, 2015, 07:44 »
It's back again - but this is playing havoc with the earnings.
661
« on: May 09, 2015, 00:19 »
Paulie, you forgot to factor in the time spent in uploading those photos, which for some sites (especially iStock) is considerable. Say it takes seven minutes per image, that adds another 10 hours or so onto the production time. If the process ended when the image was processed it would be significantly easier than it is.
662
« on: May 05, 2015, 02:27 »
Lobo's censorship and Kelvinjay's censorship and snooping into our accounts make me sick.
Snooping into our accounts. What do you mean ?
He's probably referring to this sort of snarky post that appeared from Kelvinjay on iS five minutes ago, indicating that moderators can (and do) access account details: Posted By XXXXXX:
Am I missing something? Shouldn't payment be done at 25 of april? I still didn't get mine!?
Hi,
Yes, what you seem to be missing is that your balance wasn't over $100 on the last day of March, therefore you didn't get paid in April. We have a thread here explaining everything, please take a look.
663
« on: May 01, 2015, 15:06 »
... I haven't uploaded anything there for several months. Also, you have to remember that the upload process for istock is incredibly tedious and time-consuming...
Maybe you have forgotten or don't know yet the DeepMeta Free software for uploading to iStock.
I've been using DeepMeta, it helps a bit but not much. You still have to spend minutes per file going into the keywords and category systems, prioritising different words, deleting stuff that the CV creates duplicates from and trying to find the right terms in the CV. Which effectively means keywording everything twice - once for the metadata and then again in DeepMeta.
664
« on: May 01, 2015, 05:24 »
With sales of recent images through the floor at iStock I doubt if that one is worth the effort, either. I haven't uploaded anything there for several months.
Also, you have to remember that the upload process for istock is incredibly tedious and time-consuming, whereas FTP to the likes of Dreamstime and 123 is easy (I'm set up to FTP to SS and half-a-dozen other sites at one click of the button) and the subsequent site-based processing is also very quick and easy.
665
« on: April 30, 2015, 05:47 »
Someone just bought a "Doha city skyline" picture from me. It was taken in 2004, before 40 or 50 skyscrapers sprang up and shows a rather sparse horizon. I hope they weren't looking for the current skyline because the absence of the caption removes the information about the picture's date - the sort of information that Getty apparently doesn't care about.
666
« on: April 29, 2015, 06:53 »
I see that only two of my last 20 sales were of files shot after the end of 2009. Extraordinary, really.
,,,, and 9 of the 20 were shot in 2004 or 2005, even more extraordinary.
667
« on: April 28, 2015, 13:58 »
Deleting your portfolio because uploading it was a waste of time seems like a self-fulfilling whinge to me.
668
« on: April 28, 2015, 11:09 »
The lens resolution vs sensor resolution issue is a bit complicated and it seems nowhere near true that in all circumstances the cameras are outresolving the lenses. Here's something from the Canon Rumours site three years ago:
"The highest resolution Canon sensor on the market today, their 18mp APS-C sensors, resolve 116 lp/mm (see quote above for reference and details about how this number is derived.) If we assume a perfect lens, at f/2.8 and 50% contrast, you can resolve about 247 lp/mm, which is slightly more than twice what Canon's highest resolution sensors are capable of resolving (for reference, you would need a 210mp FF or 81mp APS-C sensor to resolve that much detail.) Given that real-world lenses are aberration-limited at wide apertures like f/2.8, lets take a more realistic aperture. The Canon 7D 18mp APS-C sensor is diffraction-limited at f/6.9, so if we assume an f/7.1 aperture, we can resolve roughly around 95-100lp/mm. The sensor is now outresolving the lens at this aperture, and all apertures smaller than f/7.1. At f/8 the lens can only resolve 86 lp/mm, f/11 it drops down to 63 lp/mm, and at f/22 it is at a mediocre 30 lp/mm!! The same lens at f/6.3 would probably resolve just about 118 lp/mm, just ever so slightly better than what the sensor is capable of resolving itself."
So I wouldn't worry too much about that - but it's worth being aware that high f numbers (f/8 upwards) can automatically degrade your images. The diffraction limit varies from camera to camera, Cambridge in Colour website has a calculator that can tell you where your camera is. I regularly get images accepted on SS that are past the diffraction limit (they're more likely to reject for a shot with a shallow DoF than one that is diffraction limited).
669
« on: April 28, 2015, 06:53 »
Yes My regular photo sales are the highest ever this month and my video is at least decent. March was a train wreck so it just goes to show we all have our highs and lows no matter what agency you sell on.
Unfortunately, my trend on iStock has been consistently down for many years, I'm not expecting ever to see a "high" there that compares with 2008 or 2009 (or whenever my maximum was). It's a long way down from $30 or $40 a day to $1.5 a day or less.
670
« on: April 28, 2015, 05:26 »
My numbers are strong for April in photo and video 
What? jjneff is having a good month and someone gives him a minus . . . . that, at least, makes me laugh.
by the way, I'm having a good month also.
I just gave you that minus, to keep you in good company 
671
« on: April 28, 2015, 05:24 »
My sales had already become weak and erratic averaging two or three a day but since the 15th they've fallen off a cliff and I'm now not even averaging one a day from 5,000 files - and they want us to keep uploading? And I'm a "diamond"-level contributor within a whisker of 57,000 sales (and more than 250,000 across eight or nine sites).
May I ask if this (your) slump is specific to IS? Reason I'm asking is because my April is terrible on all sites, even SS is struggling for me...
As a "slump", I would say yes, it is just IS (and it remains to be seen whether the PP is affected) - but several other sites are a bit weak, too, compared with recent months. The main one - SS - is steady, though still 20 or 30% down on its glory days, DT is weak, 123 is below the last few months and the others aren't particularly significant. Alamy is holding up well, with seven sales this month, and I got a huge sale on FAA but one sale in a month is not something that can be regarded as anything more than a pleasant surprise.
672
« on: April 28, 2015, 04:02 »
My sales had already become weak and erratic averaging two or three a day but since the 15th they've fallen off a cliff and I'm now not even averaging one a day from 5,000 files - and they want us to keep uploading? And I'm a "diamond"-level contributor within a whisker of 57,000 sales (and more than 250,000 across eight or nine sites).
673
« on: April 24, 2015, 01:59 »
If they become profitable again, the Contributors also earn, and everyone is happy and blessed.
Sadly, it doesn't always work like that. They can always give you a pay cut if they feel things are going too well for you. Remember the time things were getting better and better for everyone, so they proclaimed that it was unsustainable for them to pay more and more just because they were doing well so they gave us a pay cut? And things just got worse from then on.
674
« on: April 23, 2015, 08:15 »
In an industry where our competitors continue to push quantity over quality
Are they still accepting absolutely everything that is uploaded to them as long as it passes the copyright/model release check?
This is the kind of claim they make to investors, even though it's not true. Where it is true is in exclusive content but they stretch that truth to broad brush their entire collection, which includes a porous filter to accept anything. And point two is that exclusive content is really also represented very well by cheap seat content (non-exclusive) and as exclusives keep bailing that fabricated truth erodes further. [/quote] And, presumably, the imported Getty dross is still hanging around in the exclusive section where it pollutes the search.
675
« on: April 23, 2015, 08:01 »
In an industry where our competitors continue to push quantity over quality [/quote] Are they still accepting absolutely everything that is uploaded to them as long as it passes the copyright/model release check?
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