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Messages - Microstock Posts
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676
« on: December 18, 2011, 02:08 »
Yes you can use your email address for anything you like. Trust me, I'm an IT expert 
677
« on: December 18, 2011, 02:01 »
What I meant about finding it curious buyers don't buy directly is that they could just contact us via PM. It's happened to me once. But I think it should have happened more often
It generally wouldn't happen often because it's time consuming and impractical. Buyers purchase credit or sub packages at an agency and then they just search and download. No wasting time negotiating prices, no waiting for responses and images from individuals, no dealing with multiple transactions from several different photographers. They want images immediately with as little communication as possible.
678
« on: December 17, 2011, 14:15 »
If anything we should try and make buyers buy directly from us. Why should we be satisfied with getting 50% instead of 15-20%, if we can get 100%? OK you usually have to give 'em some discount, so let's say we could get 70%. And by doing so directing traffic from the agencies to photographers and that would make us a little bit less expendable and by that cuts wouldn't be something that's happening every year. And what's worse, a lot of contributors seem to just be getting OK with them :s
I also find it weird more buyers don't contact us to buy directly, they'd get a discount, we'd earn more, it's a win-win situation. Especially during recession.
A buyer may buy an image or a few images of yours and then may never buy from you again. They aren't going to spend time contacting contributors individually when they can get everything in one place. The images are already pretty cheap compared to the old days of stock. Yes you could discount even further by selling directly to them, but unless u cover every subject in huge quantities, u won't get sufficient traffic to make a great income selling ur own port on ur own site at microstock prices. Ur own site would be additional income, but u will always be reliant on the agencies for the bulk of ur income.
679
« on: December 17, 2011, 05:36 »
All this talk about SF, I just logged in to have a look and I have a sale, $2.50. I only have 34 images there, I was kind of put off by the low acceptance rate that I was getting. Might send them some more to see if it's still the same.
680
« on: December 16, 2011, 23:08 »
One of the reasons why I went exclusive on Istockphoto more than 3 years ago was I was tired of getting paid peanuts for my image sales. Now I see that Shutterstock may be stealing customers from Istockphoto, and I'm thinking why would this be a good thing?
I'm in the gold level on Istockphoto (probably not after this month) and I make about $0.42 to something like $7.8 an image sale, but more like at least $3.5 a sale on average. Shutterstock only pays like $0.25 to $0.38 a sale. I know that the on-demand images pay more, but I don't know if they are anywhere as popular as the subscription sales. It would take more than 10 times the sales that I have on Istockphoto for Shutterstock to match my exclusive Istockphoto sales, and I doubt even half of that is possible. Is selling full size images for even $0.38 a sale a good thing? I know there are other websites like Dreamstime that pay more (and especially in royalty rates) but for the photography I do, it doesn't look like Dreamstime has anywhere the level of sales volume compared to IS or SS.
I feel that if Shutterstock stays #1 and further weakens other websites like Istockphoto, that would further dilute and cheapen the stock photography market and seriously damage the ability to produce stock photography for microstock as well as hurt many stock photography careers out there. I guess microstock did that to traditional stock, but Istockphoto raised prices slowly but surely, and made it more viable to invest in produce stock photography for microstock. Shutterstock doesn't care with keeping its rock bottom compensation rates.
I would guess that rpd has been gradually increasing on ss over the years, since they keep introducing other methods to purchase images other than sub plans. I ran a poll recently to try and get an idea of sub verses non-sub income and non-sub income is actually pretty high. But with subs it's the sheer volume of downloads which is impressive, no other site that I'm aware of has that volume and it's increasing. For sure many former iStock customers have gone to the other big microstock site that they know, the simplicity of buying at ss is probably appealing especially as it seems that buying at IS is becoming ever more complex.
681
« on: December 16, 2011, 02:43 »
That video has spoof written all over it.
Yeah it's satire. If you do a quick web search though, there seems to be an awful lot of people who believe she is being serious.
682
« on: December 10, 2011, 14:10 »
683
« on: December 07, 2011, 19:43 »
is this the "biggest" topic ever?
- topic started on September 09, 2010, 10:06
- around 1375 posts (0.33/day)
- read 83394 times
The thread will finish once they've all bailed. ETD...
684
« on: December 07, 2011, 19:03 »
Well I use picWorkflow for storing and distributing images, they also have a keywording service which starts from 15c per image (dependent on how many words you want) and a captioning service which is title and description and that's 20c per image. They have an affiliate programme too, so I'm using a referral link in the link above.
685
« on: December 07, 2011, 00:04 »
In comparison, the liberty given to those in the ss forum is good. There is a lot of criticism and negative posts there, no skin off Shutterstock's nose though.
686
« on: December 05, 2011, 15:08 »
Can't really complain, I've just had my BME at 123rf - in fact I've more than doubled my previous BME - yay If that is the case, you must really have a small portfolio on 123RF to get such an increase (statistical artifact). The point has been mentioned in another thread by Rinder. Don't mention portoflio's under 1-2K. I get tantrums reading people on the DT forum yelling BME when they had 50 sales. Only the real big guns here can tell what's happening.
Give the guy a break. 13 days waiting for a review, but he can't really complain cos he's just has a great month. I can't see what is wrong with saying that. The comment wasn't a "sales are growing at 123rf, look at my stats" type of comment. The guy is just being positive, do u remember the days when u were optimistic before microstock brought you down?
687
« on: December 05, 2011, 03:02 »
I have less than 200 images on ss, so you can imagine my Els are pretty infrequent. However, like for many they suddenly started appearing more. I had 3 in August and 1 in early October, which for me is a 'Rush'. None since then though.
688
« on: December 02, 2011, 10:27 »
Because istock is a pay as you go site with high prices, SS is a subscription site with much lower prices. So even with less traffic, istock still makes more money.
SS is not just 'a subscription site' and hasn't been for some time. OD and EL sales have been growing strongly for the last couple of years and now make up nearly 50% of my total earnings at SS.
I checked my own stats after reading this and found that more than one third of my revenue on ss comes from non-subscription downloads. I've put a very simple poll on my blog. Hope u guys can take part. Just how much of a subscription site is Shutterstock?
689
« on: December 01, 2011, 15:42 »
Not sure how to interpret this poll, since I feel Istock has been boning me for over a year now....
Blimey! So that's why they're going down the pan. They've been spending all their time with you.
690
« on: November 30, 2011, 09:20 »
1. Declare that unlike my predecessors, I will be a more honest CEO. 2. Announce that I need to buy a luxury yacht and the latest Mercedes Benz, and therefore present royalties are too high and will have to be lowered in order to sustain my lifestyle. 5% sounds good. 3. Promote Lobo to second in command, for his outstanding service to the company. 
691
« on: November 29, 2011, 06:53 »
Nah, just kidding
.....ok, I admit it, the situation is going beyond ridiculous. I'm curious about the cause tho. Does this go back to when Bruce once mentioned he could not afford to invest the money required to update the site and hence sold out?
Yeah but Getty could afford to and they've had it quite a while.
692
« on: November 29, 2011, 02:32 »
I was once on Dreamstime's top 10 list too.. now who knows where I am. Far down for sure. The DT rank site (http://www.dtrank.com) became password protected and there has never been any contact info on it.
Have you ever done a whois search on who owns that domain? I was surprised 
haha, yeah me too
Some interesting stats there. There are only 2048 photographers with over 1000 images. There are 8821 (45%) Contributors who haven't reached payout. I know that many of the 8821 will probably be newbies with small ports, but many of those would have all but given up but left their images there (which is what a lot of those I refer do). Nice little earner that, for the agencies.
693
« on: November 28, 2011, 13:00 »
Cheers Tom. Have u guys noticed sales dropping at iStock? 
never had big sales on IS but have been increasing actually but this month went back like 1 year ago
You've made me wonder if no one knew what I meant. Nevermind, back to my own world.
694
« on: November 26, 2011, 18:41 »
Cheers Tom. Have u guys noticed sales dropping at iStock?
695
« on: November 26, 2011, 17:15 »
@microstock posts - So what if PD's motivation is financial instead of altruistic in raising their royalty % and treating contributors with respect? Other sites' income depends on it too, you would think, but they still treat us like dog droppings. Credit where credit is due IMO.
Credit goes to all the fantastic photographers and artists who produce such outstanding stuff for microstock and quite frankly agencies should be thanking their lucky stars for having access to such incredible talent, as well as making as much money as they do from it, even the agencies that offer 50%. Very often those who work for and run agencies have little clue about the amount of work that goes into producing images and they should know. Here we are in a situation which is so bad that if an agency increases its commission from 25% to 33%, people think they deserve credit. Believe me they would much rather still be taking 75%, I know that because they tried to already. Credit goes to companies like Canstockphoto, 123rf and others, which maintain giving 50% commission to those who contribute to them despite having ample opportunity to lower them. Microstockers seem to have a yearning to Woo Yay something, Woo Yay these guys, not PD. PD starts off low (I wonder why) and then increases to not as low as before, and know how to smile and charm, is suddenly propelled into some kind of wonderful agency because their bird droppings are smaller than others. They're still sheeting on us nonetheless. It's a step in the right direction, but they're still 17% away from 123rf, who did it the hard way without being greedy. I give them credit for that. If their is any concession by an agency it's usually because they were unable to get away with what they really wanted. This mentality of praising agencies who know how to charm and be polite, but at the same time still want to take a massive chunk of the pie from each and every sale, I can not fathom. I really wish I could one day give PD a lot of credit, but I don't think it's due yet.
696
« on: November 26, 2011, 06:55 »
Editorial images less than a day. Regular images 3 to 7 days usually.
697
« on: November 26, 2011, 05:14 »
You can buy kangaroo at the supermarket.
I've spent in all duration around 14 months in Oz, 5 of the cities and lots in between. A while back though. I tried Kangaroo but I can't remember what it was like, which may mean that I didn't think much of it. I do remember the meat being so cheap there and of good quality. However, I hear that prices aren't so cheap now.
698
« on: November 26, 2011, 01:22 »
I've opted out of ELs;
@jsnover Good move. They've increased the lowest revenue a contributor can receive for an EL from $2 to $2.64. @y'all They increased their commission from 25% to 33%, because they are nice, because they are good people and they listen? Because they didn't want to be constantly vilified as they were, because to compete they wanted all contributors to be on board which they weren't getting, hence they offered a carrot. iStock got too big for their boots and gave up on being polite both in words and actions (to their detriment), PD like all new agencies are extremely polite with their words and responses, their income depends on being like this, but no agency is truly polite unless they recognise that their role is to be an agent for which they receive a cut, an intermediary for work that belongs to others and take a percentage for being that middle-man. 50% is more than enough, anything less is rude and no matter what money you are making and how many polite words you hear, this shouldn't be forgotten.
699
« on: November 25, 2011, 13:30 »
I just did a search by "Date". It appears that only relatively recent stuff have a new watermark, positioned in the top left hand corner. Older photos have a watermark in the centre with the word "Copyright".
700
« on: November 24, 2011, 15:27 »
There's a free online storage site called mostphotos.
Not only mostphotos. And where i store RAW files?
I was kidding. I thought you already had a solution.
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