Quote from: lisafx on January 07, 2011, 18:43

Are there ANY real winners among the contributors in this situation?  

I guess a handful of newbies who are really good will have shifted up a level or two, but they are the ones who would have made the 40% after a year or two, which in most cases will now be unattainable.

There's one such contributor - very talented, I'll grant you - who is going from 30% to 40% (and was even at the 150K target level).

Quote from: jsnover on January 07, 2011, 12:14

They did push some search fixes yesterday, so perhaps that's why sales today are slow

It's fixed?!
I just did a search, clicked on one of the images, hit the back button, and all the thums were missing except for an apparently random one.
Three F5s made no difference. The Search Results showed as (4), although the real result was 283.
This however isn't consistently replicable, as doing the same again (inputting a search term, clicking on one image, hitting the back button) shows all the thums as it should be.

Search isn't fully fixed, but they did fix a few problems. The one with multiple search terms where one term had only one meaning causing all other terms to have only their default meaning (often giving no results as in horse leg). Another one brought up by a contributor with a rotting bird picture that didn't show (and one where removing illustrations from the results caused the number of search results to increase!).

They have plenty more to to work on though

Today's slow, but Wed & Thu were very nice (for January), especially given how much of the site is busted. They did push some search fixes yesterday, so perhaps that's why sales today are slow

Back when the CV was introduced (in 2006 I think) there was a promise that we'd have bulk editing tools for keyword editing on our images. It's always possible the promised tools for managing E+ files may yet appear, but I'm not anticipating it any time soon. It may also be that results have been mixed for E+ files - and the promised boost in the best match doesn't appear to have occurred either.  I don't know if that means they're reconsidering it, but people expected that sooner too.

Thanks. I think a flat rate for the contributor would be better, I'm sure thats been discussed on here before.

With an international business, the flat rate system allows companies to play games with currency fluctuations (look at the threads about FT's compensation).

I'd prefer a variation of the current system. Bulk credit purchases having a discount seems fine to me, and getting a percentage of the actual price paid for credits seems reasonable (although not entirely fair as IS gets to keep all the money it makes on holding the buyers cash between purchase time and payout to us).

What irks me is that IS offers "I'm sorry" discounts and other promotional discounts and then contributors pay for those too. I think that should come out of their cut as a promotional expense, not be bourne by contributors.

They're largely a historical artifact at this point - a remnant of a community that no longer exists in the same form.

Given that anything prior to the previous year's sales is irrelevant to IS, I'd think they'd do better to assign upload slots (Vetta nominations or any other quota item) on the same basis. Or they could do it by approval percentage.

I believe one of the broken things in search is terms with apostrophes. New Year's Day was broken over the holidays and those with Valentine's Day images were urging it be fixed in the bug thread. My guess is that this bug has busted your search term too.

I thought I'd check out Thinkstock to see if there were any new nasties started by Getty since I last checked in the summer to find the "image packs" - ppd with another name.

They have a 10% off sale for January, a monthly payment plan for an annual subscription and 25% off purchases at Getty Images during your Thinkstock subscription.

As some of the content that isn't at Thinkstock is at Getty - e.g. all the Vetta and Agency from iStock - I assume this discount is trying to entice buyers to subscriptions when they object that there's only a subset of the content available at Thinkstock.

I pulled my Vetta files, so it doesn't affect me personally, but I assume any exclusive who has Vetta/Agency will be paid less on a sale via Getty that's at a 25% discount (i.e. it won't be Getty paying the bill for this promo) - i.e. I assume it's 20% of the actual sales price, not "list".

Seems pretty ballsy to me to pass on the costs of promos for your low end subs site to the contributors at your higher end image site. I'm sure they'll suggest that this is incremental business, not cannibalization, but they also said Thinkstock was a totally different market with different customers and then started selling credits image packs.

I'd agree that you should check with support, but RM - regardless of how or where - is permissible while being an IS exclusive.

The only gray area is taking IS rejects and selling them elsewhere - there's some ambiguous and puzzling clause in the ASA that talks about asking permission for that.

I'm not sure that IS would permit you to link to your personal web site from your IS images or profile page if you sell RM there (you didn't say anything about that, but I can imagine it would be tempting to try and drive traffic there). Support could probably answer that too.

One thing to consider is what 2012 would look like if you take this approach for 2011. Pulling 65% of your portfolio will probably mean that your RC numbers for 2011 will be lower than they were for 2010. That would mean lower royalties for 2012. If that's the case, perhaps just becoming independent would make more sense and you could sell whatever, wherever.

...I would, however, be interested in participating in some kind of organized strike, but it would have to be on a mass scale. If Yuri took the lead on something like this, then contributors would follow and it would force changes in istock, or drive their buyers to other fairer-paying sites. But I think it would have to be Yuri - the importance of his portfolio to the site and his influence on the community can not be underestimated....

And I think IS is well aware of that. Yuri may be the only independent to make the 1.4M RCs required to keep his 20% commission for 2011. My guess is that another posted who speculated that they set this target with him in mind, not wanting him to walk if his royalty were cut, is correct.

I don't see how, given that Yuri isn't in a different position vis-a-vis IS in 2011 from 2010, he'd have any interest in any sort of protest. And I'm sure that is just what IS wanted.

I'm carrying on as normal for now. I expect lots of confusion in January as they try to fix everything they broke and get a working system.

Given the lack of detailed reporting on sales (see my suggestion forum post about fixing that) and big variations in credit prices, it won't be easy to know when they change the rate.

I expect that when they do announce the new RC targets (to meet in 2011 for 2012 royalties)  they'll be higher at the top levels than those for 2011 royalties. That will guide my planning for the future. I'll be most interested to see how this feudal model works out (royalty and peasants), especially if the royalty see more of their premium price sales coming from Getty, not iStock (where they don't earn RCs for next year's targets).

I hadn't seen them, and they are truly gorgeous. I'm so jealous of the opportunity to see the planet from space. If I'm lucky I'll live long enough to see tourism take us up there

Thanks for posting

We already have a thread listing IS's eff-ups - the epic fail title seems more appropriate than iStock Rocks. We also have a couple of threads about what the future may bring for microstock.

I decided to read this to see who could possibly be cheering them on given the current state of things. But you're anonymous, so there's no way to assess whether you're just trying to stir up trouble or want a discussion about something.

Why did you post?