Where I most agree with Sean, and this is something which photographers have a hard time grasping, is that the effort one spends educating your competition would be much better spent educating your potential customers.  Not that I have any problem with teaching others to better themselves.  But if you aren't putting far more effort into helping your customers, you are lacking business sense and cheating yourself.

I used not to agree with Sean, but I'm now pretty close to agreeing (a waffle worth of John Kerry).

The way I used to see it, having iStock be a center for drawing in new talent, nurtured by those who'd been around a bit, was something that over time kept building the site as a vibrant, innovative source of great images. That worked fine, IMO, until IS starting trying to grab more of the take, at which point there's not much left but every contributor for him or herself. There are some echoes of the community spirit that was, but, sad as I am, I can't see why I'd spend any time helping others beat me to a higher royalty rate. With the grading on a curve scheme they now operate, there's no longer a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation.

I suspect that for many of us, we don't really know where or how to connect with our customers. Very few show up here or in the IS forums. So that may be one of the reasons for focusing on other contributors.

Perhaps it's a silly question, but why not just sell through Alamy directly? Although you have one more agency to upload to, you then get to keep all the royalty Alamy pays (60% is what I get - I think that's standard).

Once or twice I've had a rejection for a newly uploaded image being too similar to others in the series, but never a deactivation of old images for that reason. Perhaps they're doing some cleanup of older files that don't meet new criteria and you're just on the leading edge?

Of course it could be some weird bug that caused it - perhaps a support ticket to ask for clarification might make sense.

...Non profit comes across as a negative connotation now in days in the US.

I'd take a slightly different tack - I don't disagree entirely, but I'd say it this way. There's a lawn treatment service that promotes how it's in harmony with nature and doesn't use any chemical pesticides. There are also the traditional services that advertise how great your lawn will look.

As a consumer, if the first thing you tell me isn't how well you do your job, or how great my xxx will look after you do your thing, I'm not as interested in your company. I may very well pick a company in the end that uses organic materials, but if you don't promise me good results and only tell me yarns about how you do what you do, the message I take away is that you're asking me to compromise - Accept this less nice looking lawn 'cause you'll feel good about how you didn't trash the planet.

Back to the coop or non-profit. Tell me your great tasting coffee is fair trade and I'm all ears. Drone on with a lecture about the hardships and politics of the coffee trade and I'll wander off to get some coffee to swallow my aspirin with. You have to focus on the buyer first and the fact that they're being fair to artists second. I don't think co-ops or non-profits have a negative connotation, but being nagged or given a political message when you wanted to do some business does.

It's apparently been offline since Jan 29th after a brief period working before that - see here for more.

What boggles my mind is that people are thanking iStock for an 8 cent raise. Is my memory faulty, or didn't they recently CUT PP royalties? And now they are giving it back and people are woo-yaying? Classic iStockholm Syndrome. 

I don't think they changed PP royalties recently. There was the huge fuss when it was first announced and they changed the percentage system to the flat rate, but after that, I think it has stayed the same.

If I were independent and opted in already I'd be happy to take the extra few cents, although I'd be more concerned to have the portal to get new content to the site actually working. If I were one of the exclusives who chose to opt in earlier, the extra money would be a plus, but not a big one. They didn't touch the 20% on "image pack" sales, I notice.

With subscription sites the big thing is volume - SS has it and almost everywhere else doesn't. I watch the monthly threads where those in the PP report earnings, and it still seems pretty low numbers to me.

I was amazed to see something approaching a direct statement - that they want more content in the partner program than they currently have and a tacit admission that their lowball payout scheme has cost them that content.

The pathetic offer of a small amount of additional cash changes nothing. Admitting that that they're willing to change things in contributors' favor should only encourage people to hold out for something decent.

In spite of the fact that they're mandating 'lypse content (Japan and the April in London one) goes to the partner program, they haven't got to the flow of good new images they need to keep buyers happy. The risk would be that at some point they'd drop the opt out (like they did for Vetta/Agency on Getty).

I'm fairly certain JJRD believes what he's saying, but even sincere nice people can be very wrong sometimes. They can believe that what they're being told by their management is true and pass it on. The fact remains that what's in Getty's best short term interests may not be in IS contributors' long term interests. H&F is a Carl Icahn-like entity that will happily cripple a business if they can get the cash they want in the process - they're not in it for the long haul.

I urge anyone who is thinking about their stock portfolio's long term success to leave the partner program alone. That little bit of extra cash now is destructive to your ability to earn the same or higher royalty rate next year (no RCs for PP sales) and for independents is chipping away at the leader in microstock subs - SS. SS pays better (and lets you earn higher payouts the more you earn, something the PP does not) and while it may have skipped raises, hasn't shafted its contributors the way other sites have done.

Starving the partner program sites of good content is the only way to get any changes in the terms offered.

An expression from a while back in the tech field was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". What they meant was that when you went with the company perceived as the leader, even if things didn't work out, people wouldn't blame you for choosing them - you had picked the perceived number one.

Those perceptions do change over time, but I think that sometimes the Getty connection helps from a buyer point of view. Getty Images is a well known name and if you're looking for images on a budget, Getty's microstock site might well seem like a safe bet.

I've said repeatedly that I see the IS PP as a way Getty is trying to drive all commissions lower (once I'd have said down to 20%, but now it's down to 15% and I don't expect they'd raise 15% to 20% once they've done away with the parts of IS that cost them more than 20%).  All that talk of different markets was transparent rubbish (clearly rammed home when they started marketing TS subscriptions on IS and marketing Image Packs (i.e. credits) on the TS main page to those who didn't want to commit to a subscription package.

I don't see any reason to help Getty any more than I can avoid in their march to lower my royalty rate. If I were independent again and the terms at TS made sense, I'd happily participate - it's just another site at that point. If I thought TS was damaging SS (at the moment I don't see any reason to think TS has taken off - why would there be all those discounts offered if that were the case?) and my SS royalties were better, I think I'd consider dropping TS.

When StockXpert content first went to photos.com (when Jupiter was independent and had bought StockXpert), it was because photos.com subscribers were ticked off that they didn't have enough new content. Subscription buyers won't put up (for long) with the same old pile of content. If enough of the bigger portfolios stay away from the sites that don't pay contributors enough, buyers will push for changes. Sites don't give a toss about contributors (any more - their collections are large and there are too many of us) but they will care if buyers aren't happy and aren't renewing their subscriptions.

It's a shame that they've buried the featured photographer in the new design, but big congrats to Christian (and to his lovely wife who models so beautifully in their idyllic settings). I hope buyers see the photo landing page more than contributors do

Did you have any of the long delayed subscription downloads? They finally managed to get a script to run last night that added our past due balances. See the help forum thread for details.

It's not yet clear if this fixes the problem or just makes payments to date.

As far as EL's Sean's Greasemonkey scripts really help, but otherwise you can check your financials tab on the user_view.php page (should be sortable by date but I don't think they fixed that yet).

Quote from: jsnover on February 11, 2011, 16:08

As long as they don't send any developers and skip a 'lypse website, it should have no impact on their ongoing work to fix the broken web site.

I'd like the staff to wear T-shirts saying "Trip expenses paid for with cash transfer from iStock contributors"

It was that sort of talk that got me accused of trolling then Banned! 

I stick to MSG when I let my dry humour out of its cage

Like I always say, if I've got designer tastes on an M&S budget, it won't do me any good whining to the designer shop!
Maybe the Dollar Bin should be a bit more 'visible'.

As long as Vetta, Agency, E+ and dollar bin can be separately searchable if desired, I think that the dollar bin might be a great way to handle the budget conscious buyer. Problems with it at the moment are many - no new content, prices are too high (I think there need to be a max of 3 price bands rather than the sizes matching the rest of the collections; given their programming challenges, they can keep all the same sizes, but XS & S are 1, M & L are 2, XL and up are 3 credits).

If things that hadn't sold at all in 2 years  (or even 3 years if 2 years is too short - things that stop selling, not just things that never sold) were moved to the dollar bin automatically and regularly, I think it'd be more interesting to buyers. Right now it's a forgotten place for the most part.

I know there'd be a huge uproar from IS exclusives, but I think a sort order by price would be something buyers would value. I'd rather keep the buyers and take the risk that I might lose a sale or two by giving them the choice of an independent image over mine if they were really cash strapped for a particular project. I think that driving buyers away is a riskier move than letting them order searches the way they want.