Microstock is still a developing industry and in my view should be fully explored before committing to exclusivity with one site or another. DT are an important agency and without uploading to them you will be losing a significant proportion of income as well as the experience of the agency itself.

I contributed to DT and BigStock almost the whole time I was independent. I don't disagree that the experience of each agency helps to understand what's going on.

Change is about the only constant I've seen in the last 5 years and while I've had various long(ish) term plans through that time, I had to keep adjusting them to adapt to the realities of what was out there. I fully explored with Albumo, emboldened by seeing a number of other well known microstock names that had already signed up. Turned out that didn't work out so well (although I did get paid). I explored Gimmestock for a little while as well, but it became apparent they were going nowhere. My point? I don't have a problem your idea of exploring. I've generally suggested that people should be independent to start for most of the reasons you stated (the big one being financial).

However, given the poster's interest in exclusivity and DT's unfortunate 6 month hold, I think he could view his choice differently -just giving him more options. While DT is an interesting agency, it never broke out of the 3rd place slot (and slipped down quite badly towards the end of my independent period). I don't see it as a must-have for independents.

Quote from: cthoman on December 14, 2009, 14:40

I'm still not convinced, but it could be the structure of my portfolio. I don't really have any super popular files in my portfolio just a bunch of solid sellers. So, I may be more immune to wild swings in changes to search rankings. Usually when I see someone complaining about the best match, they are complaining about their best seller getting buried in the search.

I thought the same until it happened to me

Everybody does!

When their sales are good it's the deserved reward for their clearly superior images.

I saw a few images tank in the 2006 best match shift (several hot images just stopped selling cold turkey) and the fall of 2008 was truly awful. The fact that this coincided with me going exclusive might have made it slightly less awful, but I had a dreadful time until bm2.0 came out. Things have been great since then.

I don't have one or two best sellers and then the rest, so I'm not dependent on the fortunes of one or two images. I like to think that good results in BM2.0 are the result of good keywording on my part which is finally having an effect on search placement. But that could be another delusion - an attempt to rationalize something I can't see the logic behind.

My take on the price increases is that they aren't going to be good for exclusives - that the success of Vetta has made them think they can up the price on run-of-the-mill content too. I do know that overall download numbers have gone down as prices have gone up and I think that's even accounting for the increased number of contributors sharing the pie (lots and lots of contributors join; only a few really build a substantial portfolio and stick with it).

One thing seems very simple. They wanted to reduce the commission from 30 cents to 25 and this is how they're going to do it.

Quote from: jsnover on December 12, 2009, 19:23

@Lisa, you've been on and off that fence so many times now there's probably a big dent in it

she's not that heavy!  judging from her photo, she's positively svelte.

That's why it's only a dent....I crushed my fence after the first few attempts to sit on it a while

Quote from: alias on December 12, 2009, 14:33

In the past Getty was criticized for paying very low royalties. The amounts paid to IS diamonds are huge by comparison. But clever tuning of the best match and prices etc would allow them to seem to continue to pay a higher percentage. In theory. It's a model now which can be carefully tuned. It might be better to not be a diamond down the road. You might be looking at a greater percentage of less volume.

Yikes!  I can't believe this scenario never occurred to me, but it does make sense. 

If Getty really wants to maximize profits, they can push the bronze and silver content to the front since their margins are so much better on those images.

But how much of a drop in exposure will top exclusives tolerate?  I am guessing not much.  Wouldn't they bolt and start uploading their lucrative portfolios to the competition?

My head is starting to hurt from looking at all the possible outcomes here...

Making a wild assumption that the game plan is already laid out, I would assume that, like a predator targeting the weak, young or sick, you first squeeze the lower level exclusives.

You don't do much to target independents (because they have choices) but you do take the price drop (XL sizes and up) out of their hide so you can say to buyers that you've dropped some prices without making your upset exclusives shoulder that burden.

Once you've pushed that phase of the plan through you target squeezing the diamond exclusives 'cause that's who you're paying the most money to. Your success in the first part of the plan makes it easier to pull off - they won't like it but only some will become independent.

Fotolia'd perhaps still have that level playing field program so they could become emeralds or rubies or whatever there. SS probably wouldn't offer any incentives but with the easy FTP uploads and large bumps for new content I'll bet it wouldn't take long for a former exclusive diamond to get the higher SS commission levels.

If you lose too many diamond exclusives perhaps you ease the upload restrictions on diamond independents a bit 'cause there are lots of images that never make it to iStock that are perfectly saleable. As long as you have some exclusive content you hope to have the marketing edge. And Vetta's the lure to many - open only to exclusives - which should keep a new thread of exclusive content coming in.

I think in the long run they'll try to push all the royalties down toward 20% if they can. May take several steps to get there.

When I was explaining the gossip about Mayonnaise HQ packaging Getty up for sale so they could get their money out to my husband, his comment (regarding my angst over not turning diamond at 25K downloads next year) was "You're screwed".

Whoever suggested that Corbis buy iStock should bite their tongue. I can't imagine anything worse - I don't think Corbis gets microstock and having another owner that doesn't get it sounds painful.

Now what I'd like to know is how long they remain deactivated? I've read that they will automatically be deleted after 4 months, but I've had 4 files deactivated in my account for much, much longer than that. Anyone have a definitive word about that?

All my DT files are still there, deactivated, from August 2008. I have no idea if the enable button would work if I were to push it, but that's a very, very, dangerous button for anyone who is thinking of leaving DT

Someone stopped uploading but started disabling files a bit too soon. Upon realizing he was stuck for a few more weeks, he enabled a few of his best sellers to make some money while he was waiting.

Re-enabling a disabled file starts the 6 month clock all over again! Even if the file had been on the site for years prior to being disabled. He was royally ticked, but support said that those were the rules and he had to live with them...

You can read what I'd posted about this a while back. AFAIK nothing has changed since:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/going-exclusive-before-and-after/

Kelly Thompson is promising significant dollar increases to exclusives under the new deal.

Quote

There is one thing I want our exclusives to take away from this. We are confident that with the new Exclusive prices, you'll have the chance to see some significant increases in your payouts � more than enough to counterbalance any delay in your next 5% canister increase.

How many independents might now consider going exclusive on istock?

Given the upending of long standing terms of the exclusivity deal with virtually no notice, you'd have to be really happy with high risk to go for exclusivity right now.

Quote from: sharpshot on December 08, 2009, 18:56

I think one day istock might let non-exclusives contribute to an exclusive images collection.  A lot of us would find it almost impossible to go exclusive now and lots of the people that are already with the traditional agencies can't go RF exclusive with istock.  This is millions of images that are on their rivals sites, they could cut the competition and increase their profits by allowing us to upload images exclusively.  As their current owners are renowned for buying and selling companies for a profit, they are likely to look at every way possible to make more money.  As Getty already have exclusive images and not exclusive contributors, I don't see why istock wont do the same one day.

I am beginning to wonder if Getty's goal is to divide Istock exclusives, not only by exclusivity status, but also by talent and/or sales potential. With the higher canister people encouraged to submit to Getty, low quality images siphoned off to Photos.com, and now multiple levels of "exclusive content", it appears a definite hierarchy is emerging within the ranks of Istock exclusives.   Separating the wheat (Vetta, Getty) from the chafe (Photos.com & low end Istock collection).

I suspect that Getty's goals are quite simple - they want to pay less in commissions.

Back in the summer they sent Pump Audio artists a letter saying that their 50% commission would now be 35%. For those who had enough sales, they offered them a deal to keep the 50% commission if they became exclusive.

The partner program was about trying to get content for Photos.com+/JIU unlimited at the lowest possible commission (cutting the 30cents to 25 cents for StockXpert contributors who now would have to go via iStock).

They want the benefits of an exclusive collection as a marketing weapon but don't want to pay for it.

Sucks.

Big time.

To answer the next question that I sense looming out there, the point of the cannister change for independents is that you get a slightly higher upload allowance.

There may also be some additional buyer confidence in buying from someone who's sold a lot. Hard to quantify or demonstrate though.

I don't understand what the numbers mean - I'm sorry if I'm being dense.

xx/yy  for both uploads and downloads. 31/442 is what mine says for uploads. I don't recognize either of those numbers

What's the difference between the pocketwizard and the Cactus Wireless Flash Trigger Set V4? They work fine for me on Canon cam/580 and Sigma strobes and Linkstar softboxes, for a fraction of the price.

I tried those first and then switched to the new Pocket Wizards (Flex TT5). I did that because the Cactus stuff was so hit and miss. Sometimes it worked fine; other times it didn't. I got fed up farting around trying to get lights to work vs staging and shooting what I wanted (and I don't work with non-family models; heaven knows how fed up people would be if they were hanging around).

The pocket wizards aren't cheap, but they work - reliably. I haven't yet tried the high speed sync via ETT-L but plan to.

I opted out of this partner program and intend to stay that way unless something changes materially.

One thing that would make me think differently is if they allowed different standards for content for the partner site - not to put too fine a point on it, my chessier raster illustrations and composites that used to sell very nicely thank you on SS when I was an independent. IS won't accept those (and that's fine) but that sort of  "cheap and cheerful" stuff works well for the all-you-can-eat (as long as it's not more than 25 a day) subs deals.

If they'd then fix the dollar bin so it was two prices 1 credit for Large and below, 2 credits for XL up for the main collection content that hasn't sold, I think they'd have a reasonable spread of prices.

The problem is that they want the good stuff (main collection) for too low a commission (worse for indepdents, but it was still pretty icky for exclusives even after the improvements).

I think the best course is to hold off letting them have the content cheap (i.e stay opted out). There is perhaps a slim chance that they'll get desperate and remove the opt out, but they'd have to be really desperate as there'd be peasants with large pitchforks if they did (IMO).

The weak spot is long time exclusives who have bought the total crock that this will be incremental revenue and can't wait to opt in lots of stuff. Not sure what to do about that though as just about everything got said in those massive threads that appeared back when this whole nasty business started.