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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
7026
« on: September 21, 2010, 22:41 »
Hi Marisa 
7027
« on: September 21, 2010, 22:37 »
I gather an exclusive might average about 7 RC's per sale?
Yep, 6.9 here.
Yeah, but you guys either aren't exclusive (gostwyck) or have a mix of exclusive and nonexclusive sales data (dgilder).
Trust me, as someone who does a lot of sales analyses, it works out differently when you consider only exclusive sales data.
Also, dgilder, a quick look at your portfolio shows a lack of attention to your E+ image management. I know it's moot now, but you might want to consider Googling "optimal product mix". Or maybe go here.
I've been exclusive since August 2008 and when I calculated my numbers for this year (some time last week) it was 8.19 rc / DL and 47.5 cents per RC.
7028
« on: September 21, 2010, 19:31 »
I think the real kicker is that you don't - and can't - know up front what you have to do in any given year to keep your royalty rate for the next year.
In some ways it will depend on what other photographers are doing and could end up with an arms race type of situation. Yuri uploads 5K new images a year, so the next tier of people up their production from 1.5K to 3K per year and so on down the line. But even if your income for this year is fine, you may still lose out on the royalty rate for the following year if enough other people did even better than you (by sheer number of uploads or by hitting enough home runs with their big sellers).
Theoretically, if enough people kept their upload totals low, there wouldn't be a feed the beast situation, but if enough people do, then the rest have to keep up.
I think the hard part is having no fixed targets to hit - they're moving and hidden (during the year) - and not knowing how your competition is doing.
7029
« on: September 21, 2010, 17:54 »
Things have been pretty good - as some others noted, the summer was abnormally good, so there isn't that feel of big upswing from a flat/down patch.
7030
« on: September 20, 2010, 22:19 »
I guess their stellar success in managing the community at a crowdsourcing site they already own led them to expand to another one I don't use Model Mayhem, but if I did, I'd start wearing one of those bike helmets with a rear view mirror to avoid being taken by surprise by the new owner's "improvements"...
7031
« on: September 17, 2010, 20:06 »
I feel bad for the Istock admins. The ones who have been there for many years and have a relationship with contributors. They are not the ones making these (terrible) decisions, and I would be willing to bet most of them are as sick about what's happening as we are.
There are a lot of questions, but I think most of us already know the answers to them.
1) Is there any room for negotiation on the royalty %? No.
2) Is the Agency collection going to have some lousy pictures in it, and are they going to be bumped ahead of good content from legitimately exclusive contributors? Yes.
3) Are Getty collections allowed to enjoy the benefits of exclusivity while being sold all over the internet at other Getty and non-Getty sites? Yes.
4) Do the folks at Getty and their bosses at H&F care what contributors think, or how much they've invested in the success of the company? No.
5) Do H&F care about the long term financial health of Istock or its contributors? No.
How are they supposed to come on and tell us that? As bad as it is for Istock's image to have contributors upset and speculating all over the forums, it would be worse to actually tell us what's really going on. Because what's going on is just plain ugly.
There is no good news to give us and more bad news or empty corporate double talk isn't going to help matters, so better to remain mum.
I'll post here the reply I made to your mirror of this in the IS forums: I think your summary is pretty close to what's going on. In reading it, it gave me a thought about how, if at all, contributors could push back against this looting of an erstwhile very successful business' future. For H&F to sell Getty in 3.5 years (their plan as explained by His Royal Highness Jonathan Klein here), a buyer would have to be confident about the state of the business. The fact that all the content on iStock - except for the Hulton Archive infiltration - is free to walk tomorrow if contributors chose to do that is a very big risk for any prospective buyer. This isn't like the rest of Getty where it's wholly owned or there's some sort of contract between businesses for licensing their collections. The more public is the contributor discontent, I'd think the more prospective buyers might be somewhat nervous about taking on the business. None of this hurts buyers of licenses as they get to purchase what they see on the site. IOW there is some leverage without hurting current sales on which we all depend. I haven't figured out how to go about this spreading of the news (we'd have to be careful in how it was done) but that's where H&F could feel a reciprocal pinch in their wallet pocket...
7032
« on: September 16, 2010, 13:59 »
This started because Sean Locke found that IngramPublishing had an iStock a/c as an exclusive, although no images uploaded to it yet.
That started people looking at what Ingram had and Paul Cowan (independent) mentioned that he had some files that were sold through Ingram and wondered how it would be if those ended up in the high price Agency Collection, supposedly an iStock/Getty "family" exclusive.
I found one of Jaimie Duplass' images (the young girl dressed as an angel that's sold all over) at Ingram, so if iStock isn't careful, it'll end up taking independent content into this supposedly exclusive program - and have the same file twice on its own site at two different prices.
An industrious contributor found the inspectors images (it's more than one) on Ingram. It isn't every Vetta image there though, just some...
What a total Cl*#$%r F(@k!
7033
« on: September 16, 2010, 12:21 »
...Here are some Xmas images to feast your eyes on (look out iStock exclusives, you might be having to compete against this stuff) http://www.fstopimages.com/collections/showcoll.php?id=390
This set - and all the others I glanced at on the site - seem to me to highlight why microstock was able to be successful in the first place. fStop's site has a pile of really run of the mill, unexciting, easy to produce images for $49 to $435. Old, tired-looking, over priced - and those are the good ones (i.e. not the toilet door). I sincerely hope that the risk of massive public ridicule will keep this crap off IS - it belongs on Thinkstock (and I only say that because none of my work is on TS - apologies to those of you contributing there 
7034
« on: September 15, 2010, 23:30 »
This does seem like a sad replay of FT's Infinite collection introduction. I'm sure the thread is still here somewhere with the many examples of truly abysmal images being lampooned here. FT then tried to clean it up a bit, but it was old tired crap and there wasn't much to be done.
This garbage that is now getting accepted by IS doesn't meet copyright standards (logos in many of the images), lighting, composition or just about any metric for the main collection, let alone these stratospheric prices.
They just posted a FAQ saying the same inspection process would be used for the Agency Collection - utter BS. On top of it all, with 103 accepted images (all today) this person/factory is exclusive. Zero downloads, no criteria to meet.
A total disgrace. They need to remove this stuff and go back to the drawing board. It's an embarrassment to the site to have these images on it.
7035
« on: September 15, 2010, 16:25 »
Lisa - I'm not an apologist, I think your approach on this one couldn't be more wrong. Sadly, hate seeing you on this bandwagon. I resent you and others gouging my livelihood. I hope they don't kowtow, it will set another terrible precedent and I'm tired of these protests.
I can't see why any independent would refer a buyer to iStock as soon as these new rates kick in. The only person to blame in this is IS for the cuts, not the independents for acting in their own interests as a result.
7036
« on: September 15, 2010, 09:42 »
If large numbers of high profile independents left IS, and/or large numbers of high profile exclusives (i.e. gold and diamond; big portfolios, big sales) left, Getty would notice and might then try to make changes. Given the losses involved - i.e. I just don't see the other sites picking up the lost business to make contributor income essentially unchanged if that were to happen.
I really dislike my bank, my phone company, cable company, cell phone company, but I continue to do business with them. Why? Because the other choices are also close to equally bad. That's where I find myself with my decision as to what to do with IS.
I completely agree that each time one of the agencies pulls an anti-contributor stunt it just increases the likelihood of one of the others doing the same or worse. Unlike agencies with a large subscription component, stopping uploading at IS is only somewhat effective unless it's for a longer time.
As the business gets bigger it gets harder to apply pressure to bullying agencies without group action. Someone else pointed out (I think in the IS forums) that the SAA had essentially been unable to rein Getty in during their fight over squeezing contributors. It's a hard problem to solve.
Personally, I'm going to wait the rest of the year and see how things pan out. I am about 70 "redeemed credits" shy of 30K, so if I get that to 40K before year end I will get 35% in 2011. My illustrations will drop back to 25% (as I only have a few of those) and it'll be sad to have 40% royalty for a few weeks only to have it get snatched away again.
Depending on how 2011 goes, I can reevaluate at the end (or whenever Getty turns the screws tighter, which might be sooner).
I don't much like myself for doing business with greedy *insult removed*, but enlightened self interest is telling me that's what I think I should do. I really hope that things work out for David. High stakes move on his part.
7037
« on: September 13, 2010, 19:49 »
I give Fotolia credit for understanding the potential in European markets and growing very quickly into a major player because of that.
However, in spite of my loathing for what iStock is currently doing, if anything keeps me as an iStock exclusive it will be Fotolia. They way they behaved during the time I was independent is not something I relish returning to.
7038
« on: September 13, 2010, 11:07 »
Is there EL with subs? 
Absolutely. I've had a few of those. The subs credits can be used for anything, including ELs.
7039
« on: September 11, 2010, 19:51 »
I am not a top contributor, I'm only putting ~$1,800 a month into their pockets after they give me my current slice. What I am is a person who signed back up under their false pretense of locking in a 40% royalty next year (when I should reach diamond). I would have appreciated some kind of contact to discuss this, but never heard a peep.
Likewise, I'm not a top contributor either. I expected to turn diamond later this year - i.e. move to a 40% royalty. That won't be happenining for 2011 though. What they said last December about grandfathering was hollow blather. They should be ashamed, but apparently aren't. I'll probably stick around through the end of the year and then decide. The words about revisiting the rates if their predictions don't pan out are worth as much as last December's promises -i.e. nothing None of this is a surprise given Getty's track record, but it's sad nevertheless.
7040
« on: September 07, 2010, 15:20 »
Totally sucky news - can't see any upside except perhaps for the factories with huge volume.
7041
« on: August 26, 2010, 14:25 »
If you haven't written a cheque in a while, wait until you have kids in school. It's constant!
Very slowly starting to improve - this year there were a couple of payments I could make online. I voted in Alamy's survey for PayPal. They didn't ask, but I wish they'd drop the payout amount from $250 if you use an online service I have $180 sitting there and I don't intend to upload any more, but would like to remove my cash.
7042
« on: August 25, 2010, 23:03 »
sales are excellent since the launch of f5. no complaints there, so if buyers are happy, I'm happy.
I am glad to see somebody getting sales there. I think JoAnn has also said she's doing pretty well. Maybe the sales falloff hasn't been as bad as my stats would indicate, just shuffled around by best match?
You guys are probably right that these lightboxes aren't going to be hugely popular, limited as they are in scope. It's more of a nagging irritant, I guess.
I've been away and am trying to catch up with things. Yes, I had said that things were going well - and still are, especially given that August usually isn't a great month. I'm not in any lightboxes or part of that in-crowd stuff. I have a very small number of Vetta images. I don't do E+ My take on the very selective lightboxes is that it's really about drawing buyer's attention and getting them into the store. The set of images is so small that no matter how lovely they are that's unlikely to be the set of things searched - it's more like the displays in the store window to get you to come in. In that context, I think that smaller sets of images work better than larger ones, and really eye-catching ones better than those more likely to sell in the end. It seems that the bigger issue is for those (exclusive and independent) who have seen sales drop, which I would think is unrelated to the lightboxes. I don't have a clue what's going on there, but I do know (from the best match changes in 2008 prior to best match 2.0 that did horrible things to my sales) that when sales suck you try to figure out what changed.
7043
« on: August 12, 2010, 06:27 »
Adding one data point from an iStock exclusive, sales since F5 went live have been very good - seems more like September than August. I'm not thrilled about the wrinkles that make the site more of a pain for contributors, but as long as the buyers keep buying, I'll live with it.
I haven't been checking search placement of late, so I have no clue if anything has changed with respect to exclusives vs. independents. I haven't seen any odd patterns of sales - a good mix of newer and older files and Tuesday was as if someone had declared XXXL day - for no obvious reason, lots of larger sizes.
Sorry to hear that my experience isn't apparently typical.
7044
« on: August 02, 2010, 17:57 »
You could look at this the opposite way around - when one of those other photographers with a Sistine Chapel photo ends up on the wrong end of a lawsuit, you won't have to worry because your images were not for sale.
You're the one who bears the responsibility for the inappropriate sale of protected content - why do you want to push yourself into trouble just because some other people are already in a legally risky situation?
7045
« on: July 21, 2010, 15:45 »
7046
« on: July 21, 2010, 11:41 »
There's a thread here if you'd like to join in the congratulations. Great job Lisa - couldn't happen to a nicer person
7047
« on: July 14, 2010, 18:44 »
So the guy gets a Euro 160K compensation.
Interesting. Unfortunately they haven't really explained on what grounds it was paid out on. Was it lack of MR or being used as a Turk which seems to be inferred in the article?
This was a deal, according to the article, not a legal win. They wanted to avoid court and figured out what it would cost them to reach a contract deal with the "model". They apparently now have him as their yoghurt's mascot
7048
« on: July 13, 2010, 19:55 »
I'd second the suggestion to use lynda.com. For $25 (for one month) she can review really excellent training videos. I'm using them now for CS5 new features and learning Lightroom using a month I got as an Adobe gift for registering Photoshop CS3!
I like books for some things (Katrin Eisman's masking & compositing book, for example) and books are easier to skim for one quick thing you don't remember, but the videos are really a great way to learn something new.
7049
« on: July 12, 2010, 16:46 »
If anyone wants to know how exclusive sales are going day to day, just read the "race" threads in the off-topic forum. 50% of the posts in those are just whines about lack of sales.
That graph in the "race for gold" thread is pretty sad. I guess the sky is falling after all.
I'm sure that I can't be the only one for whom downloads as well as dollars are growing over 2009. I post that every so often, but it just gets lost in the shuffle - perhaps because I'm a pretty small contributor, perhaps because the current "story" is how downloads are declining.
7050
« on: July 09, 2010, 20:00 »
I thought mine was low-ish at 249, but 85 is really early days!!
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