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Messages - PaulieWalnuts

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651
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Sales
« on: January 03, 2015, 12:29 »
This new price structure they launched in September is a total disaster for me.

November and December sales were 50% compared to average monthly sales earlier this year. And sales weren't all that great earlier this year.

Sub sales and downloads are increasing every month while regular sales and downloads are decreasing. Oh so sub buyers are different than regular buyers? My a$$. Actually they are different. Sub buyers used to be regular buyers that paid more money.

I used to regularly get $30+ E+ earnings. Now everything is under $12.

So now buyers that used to pay $100 for an image pay 1/4 or 1/3 of that. Brilliant. And small image buyers seem to have left.

I stopped submitting new content over a year ago. I'm now starting to remove my higher value images and will move them to macro. I'll leave my generic stuff there for now.

It was good while it lasted.


652
This is Confusing?

License:

CC BY Attribution

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

I won't allow anything creative commons, even if it means I won't get the so called free promotion or "maximum dissemination and use". No thanks.

Share alike also allows commercial use.

Why would I give away my work and allow other to use it commercially?
Pete, this is a question I often ponder over. I know there are people who contribute to Getty, via the Flickr deal, who allow images that weren't selected to the Getty collection to be used in the Creative Commons license. It's absurd. I can, if I hit my head against a wall enough times, understand how an amateur may enjoy seeing their images used in a commercial fashion. But why someone would give away thousands of uses when they are trying to also make a living at selling images goes beyond the understandable.

I'd agree with both points.

CC is pretty clear to me. Not confusing legal language or anything.

I see plenty of news websites using free images with photographer credit at least some of which is probably CC. These days if a news website does a "Top 25" article a lot of it will have free images, a handful of micro images, a maybe one or two macro images. And the only reason they used any stock is because they had to because they couldn't find a suitable free image. So any commercial photographer who's giving work away is hurting themselves and the industry as a whole.

653
General Stock Discussion / Re: Your hopes for 2015
« on: December 23, 2014, 23:00 »
1. I hope enough contributors stop contributing to stock as a whole so that demand outweighs supply and prices start going back up.

2. I hope the average royalty stock websites pay contributors goes up past 50%.

#2 wont happen unless #1 happens. I believe #1 is already happening but has a long way to go before the supply stagnates enough. 

654
Flickr has no reliable identity or payment data in most cases.

this fiasco clearly shows their management is totally clueless and completely downplayed all the legal requirements needed to sell photos online, IP infringement, copyright, licencing, and all.

from a company worth billions you would expect much more and instead they're acting like a fly by night operation trying to make money out of piracy and dodgy deals just like youtube and so many others in the so called user-generated-content (UGC) industry.

Clueless or arrogant?

I think the attitude of a lot of companies these days is it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

They just do what they want. If it goes well, great. If it doesn't go well they turn on the PR machine, do some damage control, everybody eventually forgives and forgets, and life goes on.

655
Overall the stock world will become even more diverse and more confusing, which again will discourage the amateur shooter,because it will be very difficult to predict not just what to shoot but which marketplace is best to sell it through.

i don't think newbies are attracted by stock, they just step into stock while searching for a way, any way, to monetize their hobby.

but ... once their first batch of images is rejected or it's getting no sales and no activity whatsoever apart for 0.5$ downloads here and there in most of the cases they will quickly give up and never look back.

the irony is that the actual abysmal fees they're paying on micro agencies are the best way to keep amateurs out of the market unless they enter with a medium sized portfolio or are lucky enough to find a good niche.

moral of the story, only a small part of photography can be ever monetized as stock and most of it belongs to the low-sellers category so i can't see why stock could ever look like a get-rich-quick scheme for newbies.

modern stock is all about quantity and big portfolios and workflow, the average newbie has no chance to win at this game.

So if most newbies quit, and it seems like a lot of current contributors are moving on to other stuff, is it the handful of image factories that are causing the massive annual increases in sites' library size?

656
Has anyone sold anything on Crated?

I haven't sold anything either and I have a few hundred of my best sellers there. But I also jacked up my prices because by default they have them set to compete with the cheap places like Art.com and Getty's Photos.com. There they sell large canvas for $200. Selling directly I can't even buy a high quality canvas from a print lab for that low of a price. And I'm not interested in making $10 or $20 on $200 low sales volume prints.

So they're just competing on low price. And from what I've found decreasing my print prices as a whole has no positive affect on sales volume.

So not sure what the deal is with Crated. Maybe no buyers. Or their buyers aren't looking for my type of work.

657
iStockPhoto.com / Re: November PP sales are being processed now
« on: December 20, 2014, 09:25 »
Disappointing but not surprising.

And here's some something interesting for all you fans of subs, partner deals, and other creative programs.

My February was a decent month for earnings. October was bad with almost half the earnings of February. Guess what. The number of regular downloads were nearly identical. Total downloads in October after including subs, PP, etc? Double.

So let me repeat that. After the new subs program was introduced my total downloads doubled and my earnings dropped almost in half.

658
But - does the iStock Exclusive contract actually say anything about "similars" ? It certainly never used to. I haven't combed through it lately.
AFAICS, it doesn't actually forbid similars.

Well maybe it changed. And GI/IS definition of similars isn't well defined. But I can't imagine it being okay to sell a jumping goldfish on IS as RF and a jumping betafish on Alamy as RM.

I'll need to dig it up.

659
Have your Plan B ready folks.

i don't think they need to cut costs at all in Fotolia as for starters it will be a lot cheaper to be run and owned by Adobe, just think about lower taxation and lower costs to run the IT and cloud infrastructure, not to mention that Adobe could easily recoup the 800 million dollars on the stock exchange.

yes. they could layoff some FT guys but just because they don't fit in the Adobe corporate culture and of course they will redesign FT to fit into Adobe's masterplan.

as i said before Adobe has never been known as a cheap charlie company, they're not Microsoft or Walmart.
their products are great and always been, they've a proven track record about this since the 80s, they're selling top-notch applications for a very fair price actually.

On top of the $800M they just assumed all ongoing operating costs including office leases, labor, technology, and so on. It will be cheaper for them eventually after they make changes like your example of running the IT and Cloud Infrastructure. Today, it isn't cheaper. Like I said earlier, after they figure out what what they bought then they can decide what to do with it. Even that will cost them a ton and take a long time. They will need to do a technology assessment and figure out what to do with FT IT. They will then probably need to take on a massive project of moving FT IT into Adobe's environment.

From what I remember FT started off as a garage project and the code and technology has probably been piecemealed and band-aided into a mess over the years. Adobe's development approach and code is probably pristine and they will need to do a lot of cleanup.

Now that I think about I'm wondering if they really just paid $800M for the images and sales assets because Adobe could probably code a better system from scratch for less cost and in less time than to try and clean up FT code.

They're a business. Any smart business will immediately be looking at optimizing finances. They may not do anything about it for a while but they already did plenty of analysis before the acquisition. Now they can look under the hood and see how far off their analysis was.

660
I think a lot of us, me included, get stuck in the micro mindset that images aren't worth much. I've spent the past couple years brushing up my SEO skills and optimizing my images and am getting contacted directly regularly by companies who want to license my work.
Because of my exclusive IS agreement I've had to send them to Getty/IS. These companies were willing to pay thousands. They were amazed with IS low pricing. So this was a customer I developed and got a small percentage of peanuts instead of 100% of thousands of dollars. And this was with the old IS pricing.
Why couldn't you have drawn up RM licences for these companies?
RM terms can be very wide.

Later thought: I suppose that should technically be for images you don't actually have on IS/Getty.

Those are images already at IS/Getty. Their exclusive contract says you cannot license or even give away images you have with them. So whenever somebody contacts me about images I have with IS/Getty I end up sending those people IS/Getty links where they can buy them.

The IS/Getty exclusive contract also allows you to sell non-similar RM images elsewhere. For new images I create I'm making them non-similar, selling as RM through my site, and not submitting them to IS/Getty. So in the future if a company contacts me I can work with them and work out whatever pricing I want.

I don't like burning bridges so if I decide to drop exclusivity or leave IS/Getty I'd like to play by the rules and keep that door open.

661
Interesting they'd rather refund the sales than share the proceeds with the authors.
yahoo is really going down the drain at an impressive speed.

these execs are paid a sh-itload of money to come up with monetizing ideas and all they're doing is scre-wing their own user base, losing face, losing reputation, time, and money.

Well, I'm only one person but for me Flickr seems dead. A couple years ago I deleted my images there. A few months ago I decided to try it again because the "new" Flickr. I uploaded some of my better work. Got a couple comments and then tumbleweeds. Uploaded the same stuff on 500px and got a ton of activity. It seems like the same old Flickr model with a facelift. No longer relevant and the entire company seems out of touch. 

662
I will find more non-stock methods of monetizing my images. A couple years ago when I could see where things were going with stock I started experimenting with non-stock sales. This month my non-stock sales revenue is currently on track to be 3X my stock revenue. I'm glad I made changes back then.

are you talking about print on demand or other things like selling in a market or a local shop?

cheers and thanks for sharing your strategy!

At the moment I'm talking about prints in general and also direct licensing. I may at some point do commission portraits but I'm more interested in recurring revenue and not dealing with people.

I think a lot of us, me included, get stuck in the micro mindset that images aren't worth much. I've spent the past couple years brushing up my SEO skills and optimizing my images and am getting contacted directly regularly by companies who want to license my work.

Because of my exclusive IS agreement I've had to send them to Getty/IS. These companies were willing to pay thousands. They were amazed with IS low pricing. So this was a customer I developed and got a small percentage of peanuts instead of 100% of thousands of dollars. And this was with the old IS pricing.

I recently was contacted by another company who wanted to use several images on their products. This one was prepared to pay a license fee and also pay me per product sale royalty. And so I'm supposed to send them to IS where with the new pricing they can get an image for $30 and I get $10? No way. Not anymore. I told the guy I'm interested but we'd need to wait a while to do anything.

I've also been contacted by an event rep who suggested a booth with prints at their show. Huge show with a lot of sales potential. I may consider doing this. I've done plenty of tradeshows for my day job and the right ones can pay off big.

The bottom line is there are plenty of buyers willing to pay a premium for the right images and there are plenty of sales channel opportunities beyond stock. Experiment outside of stock and see what works.

ETA: Just wanted to add. I appreciate the opportunity I've had with the agencies. But they continue to make changes that for each of us there's a point where it just no longer makes financial sense to continue doing business with them.

663
Based on the thread from last year I predict this forum will disappear.  A lot of people have left here since then haven't they.

Yeah after looking at it there are a few greyed out people and a lot of other people that don't seem to be active

664
Predictions >

Mobile stock will grow exponentially. Many new sites will open. Existing sites will make mobile more of a priority. The ones that have their act together will aggressively build their worldwide network of smartphone users who meet the current trend of authentic and timely photos. Sites will start to put in more controls to weed out unsellable images and promote salable mages. Because Joe/Jane-smartphone contributor has never made a penny with their photos they will be glad to accept peanuts, or even nothing but exposure, that the vultures offer them. Overall stock prices will be pushed down and the majority of non-specialty contributors will earn less. The good news about this is the general public will now become more aware of piracy and fair compensation which if it picks up enough steam may end up pushing prices back up a few years down the road when enough Joe/Jane-smartphone contributors realize they're being taken advantage of.

Competition will heat up. Getty and Shutterstock will wait to see what Adobe does and then will need to react by making changes in order to compete. I don't see rainbows, unicorns or a money tree from this. Contributor royalty models will turn into vague shell games. Additional competition will come from at least one more big player/company entering stock. This will either come from acquisition or from an existing established image company like Instragram, Flickr, or Google introducing stock licensing to monetize their massive image database. This may or may not be good for contributors but I would predict sometime during 2015 at least one company will attempt to monetize images without compensating their owners.

A new licensing method will be introduced. Companies will move away from pay-once models like RF. No more perpetual licenses. There aren't enough buyers or sales to sustain perpetual licensing anymore. The new model will essentially be a hybrid of subscription and Rights Managed. I think the first one will be Getty will monetizing embeds. They're currently evaluating the free embed model to gather data and figure out how to monetize it. If they come up with a user-friendly pay and license model this may catch on. Embed would allow Getty to track usage. It would also allow them to have a new usage-based rights managed license. A buyer could license an image for a month, year, and so on. The buyer would get better pricing but would also need to renew which would generate the recurring revenue. If the buyer doesn't renew the image gets turned off and there's no more indefinite usage. If the image is only available through Embed this may lessen piracy.

Personal >

I will transition out of micro. I may leave my generic something-isolated stuff in micro but I'm not producing that kind of work anymore anyway. I'm now producing higher value work and will move existing work to macro and see how the return is. If it's bad I will drop agencies. All new work I will sell directly through my website with a simplified hybrid RM license.

I will find more non-stock methods of monetizing my images. A couple years ago when I could see where things were going with stock I started experimenting with non-stock sales. This month my non-stock sales revenue is currently on track to be 3X my stock revenue. I'm glad I made changes back then.

I will make changes so I can pursue infringements. It's disgusting. A quick Google Image search turns up hundreds of suspect uses and some obvious theft. But by using RF licenses through micro agencies I have no solid evidence and little control. Since my new work will be sold directly using RM I will be able to tell who are customers and who are thieves. I will then look to start using the legal system and my copyright registered images to take advantage of the $120K per violation fees.

On a side note, I wish there was a better platform for selling direct. Nothing is getting better for contributors. They only way we have control is by selling direct. We need a buyer friendly method of pooling contributor images together into a virtual stock agency. I can't see a co-op working. Symbiostock had great potential but no strategy or commitment. Photoshelter Agency is nice but I don't have much confidence in their leadership. I think Photodeck has the capabilities but I don't know if they would pursue something like this. Somebody needs to.

665
Surely the treatment of contributors will change? Fotolia will get someone from Adobe to overlook things? I dont think Adobe wants to deal with a backlash of contributors. Only evil company's dont care about bad word of mouth, question is, is Adobe an evil company?

If Oleg and the original crew are still going to run the FT show you can rest assured his first order of business (before he receives his big check) is to inform Adobe of all the ways that they can screw contributors. After all he is the king of that business model. So, my biggest worry for all of you (I am not with FT no moe) is how Oleg participates in the management of this. I suspect he will be on a retainer for a year or so during the transition and ultimately will phase out to go to Cuba to buy some more cigars. For whatever it's worth I hope something good comes out of this for you folks and does not end up another nail in the coffin of MS.
I doubt they will keep Oleg more than a year or even a few months.  When sales are made the buyer always makes promises and brings the essential team onboard, keep the suppliers and buyers calm, soak as much knowledge out of them as possible then replace them with someone internal at a more reasonable salary.  Of course the non-competes were signed upon the sale.  We won't hear from Oleg again until the non-compete expires, in 2-5 years.  I won't be running to sign up to his new agency though.

They will have to keep some of the FT people on in order to figure out what they just bought and how it works. "Knowledge Transfer".

Like Mantis said they will then look for the FT team to help them identify options to do some screwing. "Optimize Financials". This will include looking at cutting costs such as who at FT should be let go, how they can consolidate FT hardware into Adobe systems, how they can increase profits by paying out less to contributors, and on and on. 

I don't think the paying out less part will be obvious. They won't just cut commissions. They will probably come up with some non-transparent shell game changes to the royalty model where contributors will have no visibility into the formulas and no idea how it affects them. Adobe has a big legal department and has been writing expertly crafted license agreements since before most FT employees were born. And they will probably use the Adobe household name to dangle carrots out to try and get a flood of new contributors to balance out the small percentage of ones they'll lose from the "financial optimization".

And they're a public company. The FT deal was big enough to make their stock bounce. They will be under pressure from investors to make this $800M investment work and not turn into another stock failure. I would love to think this is going to be a positive move for contributors. But I just keep thinking about 2009 iStock where they did stuff like making vague adjustments to royalties and telling everyone it shouldn't affect contributor earnings because of the increased sales volume.

Have your Plan B ready folks.

666
Yes, newbies are always asking why their sunsets haven't sold but lately there are a lot of people complaining bitterly about the search.  The first time you actually try some searches and study the results, it's a shock to realize you're never even going to be seen, even if you have a perfect keyword match.  Its really frustrating to see images at the top of the search that don't even have those keywords.   

The admins have been getting increasingly rude in dismissing those complaints and shutting down negative threads.     

Like some of you, my sales have been declining.

I don't think it's much different than stock. If you shoot stuff where the search shows 1,000,000 results you probably won't be seen. Neither would I. If you have subjects where the search shows 100 results then you have a better chance of getting some sales and boosting yourself. More and more with any of these stock or art sites it's critical to have a strategy than just spray and pray.

If their search is wacky it's their game. The only thing you can do is figure out how to make the wackiness work for you.

667
I dont understand that reasoning. In my first 6 months I sold nothing, then my sales started to pick up, and I was dong well at 300 USD/month, until end of last year my sales started to decline. According to the theory, I should have gone up in the search because I was selling, yet I got less and less sales.

Same thing for me. I submitted 10 of my better images to try it out. First several months no sales. Then I got one sale. And another one a couple months later. It paid for itself so I upgraded and got the $30 account. I submitted a few hundred images and also changed my stock to be more artsy. It took a while but things slowly picked up and I now have ab out 1,300 images with good regular sales. I did notice that when I stop submitting regularly sales seem to slip after a month or two. So maybe that's what happened in your situation (?).

Like any other agency type of business, they're not perfect and have their quirks. But they seem to have potential.

668
Someone posted on the FAA forum today, asking about the 'collections' and why there was no way to submit photos for consideration, etc.  An admin came in and issued this proclamation:  "The site's owner is aware of the various suggestions about the collections. He will implement any changes he deems good for his business".  Then he closed the thread.

Wow.

Yeah, in the past few weeks I've been checking out their forum I've noticed the FAA admins can be a bit abrupt. But I've also noticed they seem to be addressing the same topics over and over again from a lot of the same people. The people who don't sell anything are always looking for advice and a magic bullet but don't want to hear they're doing something wrong. They have an art degree, win ribbons at fairs, and have been an artist for a long time so they know they're not the problem. But they don't sell anything online. Or maybe they sell .50 cent refrigerator magnets at Zazzle and that means they should be able to sell $500 canvas wraps at FAA. "If I just got some work in the collections that would fix the problem". Maybe. Probably not.

FAA's magic formula is pretty simple and it's not much different from stock. Sell stuff, get benefits. That's it. Produce sellable work with good technical quality and good content. Work that sells gets a boost in the search and gets included in other stuff like collections, Amazon, etc. And artists who consistently sell probably get an overall boost in benefits. Stuff that doesn't sell gets pushed down in search. Artists who take blurry, noisy, pictures of telephone poles that have SEO titles like Wowzer#6 and no keywords will probably never sell anything but will think FAA is the problem and create posts like "What am I doing wrong"?

So they're not overly diplomatic but I'm not sure I can blame them.

669
And that was my point. Prices will not be going back up.

not for RF but the demand for niche RM has no reason to stop suddenly and since the price is linked to supply vs demand i don't think the RM prices are going to drop to micro levels ever.

RM won't stop. But what will happen is common images will get moved out of macro into subscription micro because buyers will no longer pay $500 or even $50 for an image. And contributors will no longer be able to justify spending big dollars on macro shoots because it won't be profitable. Like I said, what will be left are micro subscriptions, commissioned shoots, and the odd specialty agency.

What? RM prices arent going to drop to micro levels? Well, RM contributor royalties are dropping. Getty is increasingly paying micro royalties on macro priced images and is now giving embed images away. Alamy has been heading toward micro for a while. Corbis has never been profitable. Stocksy sells macro-ish images for $10-$50. 500px doesn't seem to be catching fire. Is Veer still breathing?  Macro priced agencies are either moving to micro prices or are dying while micro subscription sites like Shutterstock are Wall Street darlings.

670
Off Topic / Re: Looking for Print Supplier Recommendation
« on: December 14, 2014, 12:04 »
WHCC does have a minimum order amount but it's very reasonable.  Their quality is excellent and they're usually very fast.

I think its $15-20. The problem for me is that excludes anything under 16x24 and probably half of my print sales are 8x12 to 12x18.

I totally understand the minimum. I'm not sure how Bay can print, package and ship 4x6's for 50 cents and make a profit. But they offer it and if a customer wants it I don't need to worry about minimum orders. I'm sure it's a loss leader and they make up the small stuff on bigger sales.

671
Macro will be dead in a few years. 

why it should die if the RF industry is going cheaper and cheaper ?

it would be logical that hard to find and/or expensive shoots move to RM while anything else moves to RF and RF editorial in my opinion.

there's still demand for RM, of course it's not big but as long as it's there RM is here to stay and always will because no matter the price it's still a lot more convenient than hiring somebody on assignment.

RM is perfectly suited for unconventional editorial needs and so called "obscure subjects", you'll never find that stuff sold as RF because it just doesn't sell there.

Macro will be dead for mainstream contributors. Maybe there will be a specialty military or medical agency here and there but that's it.

The hard-to-find/expensive move has been happening for a while. Unfortunately a lot of these hard to find images are being included in wacky partner and subscription deals. A contributor drops $10,000 on a shoot and they look at their RM statement and are seeing $.25 and $1 sales. Who in their right mind is going to keep dropping big money on some obscure shoot to get $1? Or even $100? They wont. I'm not. How could anyone possibly turn a profit on high cost, low volume, low price deals. I looked at Gettys needs list yesterday and there isn't one thing I'd bother with. These macro agencies are requesting stuff like "need released group of people on cruise ship playing shuffleboard". Once contributors stop doing expensive custom shoots for $1 clients will need to go back to contracting a photographer to do a shoot. Macro is over unless prices go back up.

And that was my point. Prices will not be going back up. With Adobe jumping in the subscription game this will further validate in the minds of buyers that images have little worth and should always be part of a low cost all you can eat buffet. Adobe will make huge money. What about contributors?

672
So I wonder if this is going to turn into an App or if Fotolia is going to become the backend for a new version of Behance. Either way, Adobe's subscriptions are all pretty straightforward. $X per month for Lightroom. $X for Photoshop. And it will probably be $X per month for stock photos. I can't imagine Adobe going with all kinds of confusing options of subscription, pay-per-download, tiered pricing. Flat monthly fee subscription added as part of their cloud offering.

Unfortunately with a behemoth like Adobe backing the stock subscription model this will probably be a big nail in the coffin for higher priced RF and RM. If they would have bought Getty I would have had some hope of a macro RF/RM revival and prices going up. Macro will be dead in a few years. 

Every time something major happens I say it's gonna get interesting. Not this time. Nothing in this industry seems to be improving for contributors. I can't see anything good for contributors coming out of Getty, Adobe, and Shutterstock battling for supremacy. 


673
Off Topic / Re: Looking for Print Supplier Recommendation
« on: December 13, 2014, 20:35 »
I've been using Bay Photo for a couple years and they've have been excellent.

Prices I'd say are pretty competitive for the quality. They may not be the absolute cheapest but they're the cheapest I've found for pro quality. Print quality is great. Packaging is excellent. They process quickly, usually a day or two. No minimum orders. They also do higher end stuff like exhibition, cotton rag, Fuji Pearl and a ton of other products. They can drop ship with blank packaging and no invoice. Shipper even damaged a package and Bay shipped another print no questions asked. Highly recommend them.

I've also tried a few others that do high quality work but have some quirks. WHCC has minimum orders policy. Adoramapix is closed for a lot of holidays. Mpix is pricey from what I remember.

Hope that helps.

674
Adobe Stock / Re: Adobe shakes things up
« on: December 11, 2014, 20:01 »
"Adobe plans to integrate Fotolia with Creative Cloud, and offer its services to the Creative Cloud base"

Getting directly in front of millions of Photoshop users is interesting. What the users will pay and what contributors will get is a concern. Will Adobe take an approach to attract contributors or start squeezing contributors for every last drop of profit?

675
Why? He has managed to brand himself so that buyers have a high perceived value of him and his work.

I'd love to be my own brand where I could command that kind of money.

I also think it's a good example that images still have plenty of value to the right buyers and not every photo should be free or $1.

Maybe Peter looks at people like us and thinks "I can't quite imagine how he manages to get people to pay so little for his images"


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