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Messages - qwerty
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726
« on: February 01, 2011, 06:21 »
you can use photos of copywrited stuff, you just risk that the owner may challenge the use. Whether they win or not is another question. But there is no doubt that some companies are challenging some uses and other companies are challenging every use they can find.
Agencies are refusing these images not only because they might be used in ways that would infinge on copywrite and trademarks etc but because they don't want to defend any legal cases even if they would win.
Why would the agency take the risk of a law suit over the sale $20 beanie baby photo. Photo Agencies don't make money sending lawyers to courts.
727
« on: January 31, 2011, 05:36 »
You can't seriously blame the photographers for these sites lowering commissions when exclusives are seeing cuts too.
Yes I can. Buyers aren't stupid. They know they can get the same pics at all the sites. They have the luxury of shopping for the lowest prices. That is what they make their buying decision on so the sites must fight to be the cheapest.
Can't speak for every buyer but as a typical Freelance Designer I couldn't care less if I paid $1 or $50. It would probably cost me $50 in time just to look elsewhere - if I find the right image I just buy it regardless of where or how much it cost (within reason). The only factor which would make me think twice is if I required a whole bunch of images - that rarely happens though!
I agree If majority of buyers were price sensitive why would they buy any of Yuri's photos on Istock when you can get them much cheaper elsewhere. he's sold like 1 million downloads. Some customers are but I'd say a lot aren't.
728
« on: January 26, 2011, 06:58 »
Once you deduct all his costs, it's quite possible that his microstock photo business (leaving aside referral income and all the other revenue streams he has worked on) is less profitable than that of a few others at the top of the game.[/quote]
A number of people have speculated this before and I agree. You can see some lower cost productions producing much higher returns on investment.
Yuri model is a highly leveraged one. But while its making a profit it is building up a huge very salable portfolio. The big question what is the lifetime of the images, how quickly will they date ? With 30,000 images you could shut up shop and live quite well, but for how long ?
There's also the option of an outright sale and heading in a different direction.
729
« on: January 26, 2011, 04:02 »
there was a very long thread about this topic a year or so ago, should be lots of relevant info in that.
Try a forum search.
730
« on: January 25, 2011, 18:01 »
How's this one. quote from fotolia forum. Yeah they screwed us over again lets make them the best. what ? I thought there were some ass kissers at Istock but this one takes the cake.
"There are a couple of ways we can treat this, either get fed up and give up and just stop uploading or delete our portfolios which seems a shame after all the work that has gone into them or do totally the opposite.
If we continue to upload, and make those images that we do upload the best we can do then we will make Fotolia somewhere that the buyers/licencees want to come and the more that come and buy, the more of our images will be sold, it is totally up to us, the submitters, we are what makes Fotolia and the better they do, the better we do - when times were good we got rewarded, I trust that if we can put Fotolia at the top of the microstock market we will again get increases but imagine that, as the UK government keeps telling us - "things may get worse before they get better" but they will get better, they always do it just takes time and a lot of effort.
I think I will treat this as a challenge rather than just accept it as a defeat and try and start shooting again so I can replace some of those images that the rest of you are deleting or not uploading "
731
« on: January 22, 2011, 21:27 »
Best of luck with your proposal. But it doesn't work for me. I don't want to have my own website I simply don't have enough time to run one. In a perfect world what I would be looking for is a non-profit agency that provides 50% commission and uses the rest to run the site, make it better, advertise etc. No shareholder to provide an every increasing profit to. The obvious problem is the start up period where there are lots of costs and no income. Microstock IPO ? At the moment I'm supporting stockfresh hoping they can provide us with some fair royalties (until they get successful and cut our commissions) 
732
« on: January 21, 2011, 04:27 »
definitely slow over there for me.
Shutterstock model encourages people to look at the latest uploaded to fill their all they can eat formula.
I'm sure some people just download their daily quota from what they like when browsing with nothing particular in mind.
My photo sales at veer show no relation to the age of the photographs
733
« on: January 20, 2011, 06:52 »
"Competition in the market is increasing, both amongst the photographers in the community, and amongst stock photography agencies. We've been monitoring the situation carefully, and have continued to increase our marketing spend in the number and frequency of ad campaigns. In addition, Fotolia continued its international leadership in new markets, with the opening of the Russian and Chinese web sites. With the increase in sales, the velocity of the rank changes has also accelerated. In order to sustain our continued efforts in marketing, we are making some changes to the royalty structures at the mid and lower tiers next week."
International leadership = we cut commissions for the 2nd time - IS and DT have only done it once
Please undertake your extra marketing out of the +70% you already take.
I encourage everybody to direct customers away from IS and FT to agencies that provide you and the customers a better deal
734
« on: January 20, 2011, 01:33 »
did the credit prices change much ?
If they increase prices I'd prefer increased credits per image as that would increase RC total.
735
« on: January 20, 2011, 01:22 »
I would just resubmit them if they were rejected for logos etc.
If it was rejection for another reason eg noise etc you should either fix them or forget about them and move on.
If you resubmit, they should be the original image, not Photoshopped to remove logos. ie., don't just resubmit the Mini photo without the logo on the front.
Yeah that's what I meant
736
« on: January 19, 2011, 06:16 »
I would just resubmit them if they were rejected for logos etc.
If it was rejection for another reason eg noise etc you should either fix them or forget about them and move on.
737
« on: January 18, 2011, 03:56 »
well there many different possibilities.
Socks isolated on white
socks isolated on black
socks with headphones
socks with goldfish jumping into them
hey I'd better stop letting out all my ideas.
738
« on: January 12, 2011, 05:07 »
Which would make Getty the stupidest corporation in the world, since iStock was their cash cow. It appears that not only has the cash cow been milked dry, but now it is a downer cow on the slaughterhouse floor.
Actually I see this statement a lot and wonder where people get this information from? I always imagined that istock was a pretty small part of their overall revenue (and why it does not get much priority) - I seem to recall this from financial statments a few years ago ... anybody know these days what proportion of getty's revenue IS is responsible for?
--------------------------
Getty is private at the moment, so nobody outside of getty/istock knows that answer. I think Istock is a big and very profitable part of getty. I think I recall Kelly saying a while back that they were paying out something like $1.8 million a week to contributors in royalties with the expectation that they would brake $2 million in the not too distant future. I can't find the link to the article/thread, so my memory is likely off on the numbers but the principal remains the same.
So to figure out Istock's gross I'll pick an average percentage that Istock pays out to contributors per sale. I'll guess say 30% (obviously its now far less with today's cuts, but not sure what that will look like going forward) So $1.8/.30 = $6 million for gross sales per week. $6 million x 52 weeks = $312 million a year in gross sales. Royalties are in the neighborhood of $94 million. Royalties aside their other costs low with salaries for say 250 employees, payments to 150 independent contractors for inspections, lots of marketing, lots and lots of bandwidth used, and lots and lots of storage. I can't imagine that Istock is spending $100 million a year on all that other stuff, so Istock is generating maybe $150 to $200 million a year in cash that Getty gets to use. You can alter the basic assumptions significantly and Istock is still throwing off a huge amount of cash every week for getty to use.
Now if you drop that average percentage payout from 30% to say 25% percent Istock picks up a whole lot of cash without selling a single additional image.
If your numbers are even close to being right $50 million dollar purchase was a good deal.
739
« on: January 12, 2011, 03:51 »
Looks like with the new system I will miss out on 35% level by 155 credits or less than one fraudulent Vetta sale. I have 36,845 credits or 99.581% of what I need to get to the next level. This is outrageous that I will miss out on 16% of sales by .4% or again less than one fraudulent Vetta sale.
I do wish that you had made your level. especially by such a small number. Are these people actually able to do anything right ? Oh well we'll just run another script to correct another f__up. Please direct any customers to agencies that operate smoothly, pay commissions greater than Istock and can consistently keep their shop open. Come to think of it that's every other agency.
740
« on: January 11, 2011, 05:52 »
It would be good to only have to submit at shutterstock
I know I'll get shot down in flames for this but I would want to be able to upload rejected files to bigstock "as they service different customer bases"
741
« on: January 11, 2011, 05:44 »
wasn't the "easy" comments only about reaching the 33c level eg $500.
I agree that it's definitely easier reaching top level at SS compared to Istock.
At Istock for top level you required 1,250,000 credits last year.
If you average 10 credits per download (generous on my figures) and you'd need 125,000 downloads a year to stay at 20%. No that would be hard. I doubt you could do it as an independent without a large team.
742
« on: January 11, 2011, 04:09 »
its been randomly playing up for me today, sometimes doing nothing when I click on buttons.
743
« on: January 10, 2011, 06:33 »
my experience with rejections at stockfresh is reseasonable. Approval rate is about the same as approval rate at Dreamstime. The odd one goes through that others haven't accepted and the odd one is rejected.
744
« on: January 08, 2011, 20:26 »
no point comparing views between portfolios. Some different subjects get more clicks through by people just browsing not really looking to buy. Also some of the agencies count views differently. Some you have to be logged in as a buyer, some other log a view everytime a web crawler indexes for searches etc.
Canstock is slow for sales compared to other agencies.
If you want to measure how good your portfolio is I would compare details on Istock or Dreamstime against your peers where you can get some useful data.
745
« on: January 08, 2011, 20:19 »
no massive change is Dreamstime in the last few months, just keeps ticking along
My earnings 2009 and 2010 were steady compared to increases at Shutterstock and IS.
When did the commission cuts take effect at DT ? probably lines up as the explaination
746
« on: January 08, 2011, 05:16 »
I think the revised targets are to try and minimise the loss of exclusives and to keep a few at the top around the 1.2 - 1.4 million on board. I'm sure they don't give a #### about non-exclusives except the top 3 of them.
With no exclusives no vetta which makes them the most money
747
« on: January 07, 2011, 17:31 »
still dropping to 16%
748
« on: January 07, 2011, 04:55 »
Well done, good to hear some good news for a change
749
« on: January 07, 2011, 04:44 »
I'm very happy with mine, as I've never used a 1d/1ds Mkxx I don't have a problem with the AF system except live view. (I only really use live view when using my macro lens to accurately focus manually)
Improved frame rate would be on my wish list
Any higher pixel count would not really be much of an advantage to me.
750
« on: January 04, 2011, 05:51 »
this is the definition of graft I was thinking of...
"graft 2
n.
1. Unscrupulous use of one's position to derive profit or advantages; extortion.
2. Money or an advantage gained or yielded by unscrupulous means.
tr. & intr.v. grafted, grafting, grafts
To gain by or practice unscrupulous use of one's position."
Sounds like some of the sites lately...
Interesting __ in the UK 'graft' is an informal expression meaning 'to work hard' (other than the surgical & botanical definitions).
I know! still though, dangerous misconceptions between the British/American English language, isnt it? there are plenty more examples.
and Australian/British/Amercan take thong for example which in Australia is a type of footware
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