Quote from: soundworks on December 22, 2012, 03:32

I usually do not comment much on forums but.. you people are crazy. Have you any idea how much quality content there's is on iStock? If those exclusives decide to transfer their portfolio to SS your earnings will suffer. Big time. It's just that the content on iStock is of higher quality as a whole.

quality is realative everyone has a different opinion here. But stock isn't about quality it's about buyers need. I don't care if exclusive stay exclusive, but to be dependant on one agency isn't very smart regardless how big the short benefits might be.

So, you can read the future and know that even though at time istock had 70% of the market share of micro stock market and paid up to double to exclusives that it was stupid to go exclusive.

Sorry you are really bad at math to call exclusives stupid back then.  If there is no exclusive at IS it's not only a flood of images everywhere else, there is no floor under pricing and all agencies will sell on price

  Hey you indies look better now but for the five years you left  a lot of money on the table.  We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars for black diamond indies.  You did not make it up on sub sites.   As evidenced by Jon's $400000000. 

And any money in the future is up for grabs as in your indie position over the last five years does not put in front of the line.

And you thought getty was a thief.   Is 20% better than 0%.   Can't image the downward pressure on pricing in microstock this would create.  Not to mention the loss of sales.  They could sell photos for a dollar and make out like a private equity firm.

Quote from: click_click on November 22, 2012, 12:39

I've seen posts here on the forums where some contributors apparently have the gift of seeing the future and outlined that this race to the bottom will supposedly go down to paying us %1 

Two years of falling income despite fairly steady uploading has shown me that I am unlikely to maintain my current income levels.  However I do agree that, barring any unforeseen disasters, the decline will be gradual.   

My plans, if that is the case, are to get my daughter through her last two years of college and out supporting herself, and then I won't need to make nearly as much.  I can semi retire and go back to shooting what I like when I feel like it, and doing stock on a much more PT basis. 

I'll probably leave the primary wage earning to my hubby, who loves his teaching gig and is planning to do it up to age 65 or 70.

OTOH, if the world economy recovers, we may see a big boost in sales.  And there is always a chance the sites will begin to feel the effects of the demotivation their royalty cuts have caused and decide to begin raising rates again.  If the money improves again, I can see myself getting motivated to plan, finance, and execute more shoots again.

Not so sure about the gradual decline thing.   I might even call it a disaster.   Did you notice the top selling Xmas exclusive went from selling 60,000 images in one xmas a few years back to less than 1000 this xmas.  At least judging by her new stuff flopping.   But don't feel too bad she probably made $1.5 million give or take 500k since 2006 so exclusitivity was a no brainer. 
 
It appears some popular xmas themes went from selling more than a 1000 dls in a season to less than 20 this year.   Ouch!  If istock can't sell xmas, which they said last 4 months were almost half of their sales, then they are toast.  The exodus will be swift and the price wars will be brutal. 

Quote from: Yuri_Arcurs on November 20, 2012, 04:11

16% is pretty bad. I think I will start to upload only Low res from now on. For 38 cents per download - that's the price of a a low res

The "16%" you are quoting is what iSTOCK are paying Luis, not Shutterstock. SS are paying him over 27%.

First, this is where stats get used to make an dishonest claim.  Percentages vs selling price.  Are you saying the selling price for images are the same at SS and IS. 

Second, You assume that SS can raise prices and commissions while selling a product that is not exclusive.  They don't sell anything that can't be bought on other sites.  This keeps prices low.. see walmart.
 
Third, A lot of independents did not go with IS because they did not want to give power to one company. But instead this has let the competition lower the value of work and now in the gutter it lays.

The most ominous thing I have read in this thread is not that sales are so dismal.  It's that the forums are being left to run amok unsupervised. 

Add that to the many serious site problems and lack of interest in repairing them, the disinterest in customer and contributor relations, etc. and it paints a pretty complete picture. 

This is exactly what is described by many employees in the corporate world when the company is folding.  I don't imagine Getty is folding, but Istock seems to be on life support.  Somebody's going to pull the plug.

If anyone asks contributors to build a thirty foot stage, we know its all over

Since Istock is on life support are your sales at SS double what they were 3 months ago.  It appears to me that stock photo sales are tanking.  If not istock sales would be pushed to the other sites and your year over year would not be down or even.  Your sales would be growing because Jon at SS said stock photo demand is exploading.  Exploding demand equals exploding sales and not a drop in sales year over year.  Are your sales exploding?

Great month on IS... North of $10 per download all last week

Hi folks, just sharing the things after going to complete the 5th month... By the way, I'd like to hear also from other member that have left the exclusivity too how are the things doing on their side.


Regarding the iStock earnings, in sum it dropped 80% of my income by leaving the exclusivity (+ iStock sales drop), and the other agencies income didn't get close to this dropped value. So, for example if I used to make/earn 1k a month at iStock, it dropped to $200/month, and the others, no one get close to 50% of it yet and summing them all, doesn't reach what I was making as exclusive. 

Well, it was a decision for not leaving all eggs in the same basket and as they cut our exclusivity earnings from 40% to 35% with the RC

If you take the your $$$$ % drop after leaving istock, and apply it to your commission rate you went from 35% to 7% commission on istock sales.  I believe some of this due to falling sales but If you apply a 17% commission rate to non-exclusive files being cheaper (63% of a regular exclusive file) you are at 10.7% without factoring in loss of vetta or agency $$$.   That means the other combined non-istock agencies have to own 75% market share for you to make up the difference. 

Quote from: jsnover on October 23, 2012, 19:15

One of my many musings about what on earth Getty/Carlyle are up to is that they're trying to drive traffic to Getty and Thinkstock.

Yes, what on earth indeed? One wild thought I've had is that perhaps a Thinkstock subscription is worth more to Getty than we think. Perhaps the average TS subscriber spends as much per year as the average buyer of iStock credits does, while the cost of payouts to suppliers is very much smaller, especially considering that most subscriptions must be far from fully utilised.

Another musing of mine is that perhaps it's just retrograde old-school thinking at Getty. Getty managers must have loathed iStock for the six years it was the upstart eating away at their high-value sales. So now, rather than rejoice at having bought the top brand in stock imagery, they prefer to use iStock's traffic as a means of driving sales back to Getty (sigh of relief) and also down to a bargain-basement subscription site that their MBAs have somehow convinced themselves is the future of microstock.

I can imagine some suit standing up in front of a whiteboard to explain that the Getty group needed to achieve more clear-cut market segmentation, what with Getty RF being all muddied together with iStockphoto.

Alternatively, and just as (im)plausibly, the long-term plan is to merge Getty RF and iStockphoto under the Getty brand. So we will see more Getty images moving to iStock and iStock images moving to Getty (technology failures aside). Getty RF then becomes the midstock marketplace while Getty RM continues at the top end and Thinkstock mops up the cheap-n-cheerful market.

In fact, the price convergence between Getty RF (falling) and iStockphoto's upper tiers (rising) could well have been designed to facilitate just such a repositioning.

Yes it sounds like getty is force feeding customers and contributors gettys secret sauce.  It reminds me what anheuser busch did when they bought rolling rock brewery.  They shut down the brewery with special glass stills and moved to production to a janky budwiser plant not even located in the same sate.  Yet they still sell the same branded product. 


 

Quote from: jsnover on October 18, 2012, 19:26

And as far as that snide remark about people who weren't maintaining sales, the only way for an indie to keep a 20% royalty rate was to have over a million RCs. I think only Yuri got to keep 20%. So yes, they cut indie royalties for everyone but Yuri.

Yep.  My sales maintained very well that first year of the royalty credit fiasco, and I still got stuck at 19%.  Of course now that sales have plummeted across the board for pretty much everyone on IS, a lot of us are going to go down a level or more. 

It's unreasonable to blame a failure to "maintain sales" on contributors when the site has been barely functional for months.

Look, all you independents did was get getty 2.4 billion and then h&f 4.4 billion.  Do you really think it was a good long term (more than 2 years) strategy to heavily promote ( mainly yuri and monkey) on istock best match from 2008 - 2011.  Why would a company allow prominent shelf space to a non-exclusive files that are available at 10 cents on the dollar a click away.  You got played by men who pumped and dumped istock.   Why do you think the strategy of promoting independents suddenly stopped.  It was bleeding off customers.  Sure the price hikes sped up the migration but the short term balance sheet got two groups of owners 4  billion.  Now they have a problem.  They built up the competition beyond a controlling interest and now the value of their brand is going the wrong way.   How will the new group sell for 7 billion in three years at this rate??   Anyone with half a brain new that promoting non exclusives while raising prices was incongruent.  But it worked like a 4 billion dollar charm. 

       

Quote from: pro@stockphotos on October 16, 2012, 09:50

Makes no sense why independents like this guy.  He figured out a way to make 400 million dollars while giving contributors the lowest possible amount of money for each sale.  As if micro wasn't paying too little already.    If getty is evil what is this guy.   I would be embarrassed by getting so much from giving out so little while bragging about this type of subscription business model.    You should at least be mad you didn't think of it first.  After all giving away others people work can't be that hard.

As an ex-exclusive from iStock who is having decreasing monthly income from my portfolio there and an increasing income from my (smaller) portfolio at SS, not to mention my 9 cent sale this morning for an XS on iStock, I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.

And I don't like Jon - I don't know him, but I do respect people who start businesses that make it - but I echo other people's comments that he's largely been a straight shooter in his dealings with contributors. Other agencies don't have that track record of solid earnings and forthright dealings with their suppliers, unfortunately.

Yes, He did outsmart contributors.  He made $400 for diluting the value of their photos with a subscription model.  While you were bouncing between exclusive vs indy trying to get a fair deal.    Watch his video on here.  It's was his big ideal..  Okay you want to sell my work for low, low, low, prices.... sign me up!!!  I am impressed he followed through with this idea because I am sure anyone else who thought of this said to themselves ... nah they wouldn't fall for this. 

Then he praised for not lowering commissions from these incredibly low commissions.  Then fan boys on here are giddy over a form letter.   You can't make it up.  Look at his expression on the video.   He looks like the cat who ate the canary when he talks about the subscription idea.  SS was supposed to save us from getty.  Now they are beholden to maximizing shareholders profits.  How will this be done?

He says in the video that demand is exploding for images.  Have you seen this???  Everyone either reporting fewer sales or fewer dollars.  No Growth as far as I see listed anywhere in the stats are being reported.  If yuri is down, everyone is down.  I guess the CEO of SS did not read Yuri's post stating his sales are down for the first time ever.

Quote from: Ploink on October 11, 2012, 12:50

...saying: Thank you!

He goes on to say that they will "continue to work at making Shutterstock a rewarding experience for contributors..." - considering how other places are treating their photographers lately (or not so lately), I hope he keeps his word 

"Thanks for making me a couple hundred million dollars.  I'm going to take five minutes and write an email that my computer will send to all of you, with no further effort on my part."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/shutterstock-surges-after-ipo-priced-above-range-at-17.html?cmpid=yhoo

Makes no sense why independents like this guy.  He figured out a way to make 400 million dollars while giving contributors the lowest possible amount of money for each sale.  As if micro wasn't paying too little already.    If getty is evil what is this guy.   I would be embarrassed by getting so much from giving out so little while bragging about this type of subscription business model.    You should at least be mad you didn't think of it first.  After all giving away others people work can't be that hard. 

Looking at sales for independents, I don't see this as a great time for anyone to dump IS exclusivity. 

Sue, as Istock exclusive, is reporting $ down 5% from August and down 26% from last Sept. 

As an independent, I am down 8% from August and 35% from last year. 

Others from both camps are reporting similar.  Why would anyone make a drastic change to or away from exclusivity in such a volatile situation?

Yes you are right on here!  It does not seem that exclusives or independents are pulling away from the argument of which is better.  It seems bad on both sides.  The 5 years of exclusivity advantage may be closing but those dollars lost over that time can't be recovered by independents.  If you are down year over year as an independent then sales on the competing site aren't making up for the loss on istock.   The mismanagement of istock seems to be hurting the whole microstock industry.  Selling your images for next to nothing doesn't seem to be the answer to me either.   Istock is saying that Sept. wasn't that bad!!!   What!!!!!  If they lose exclusives what would they have left.  The fattest rats are always last to jump off a sinking ship.   

Do yourself a favour!  forget the whole project!  look how bad the 4 major sites are going and then ask yourself:  what chance have I got?

Yah!  I agree with this comment.  Why not  beat facebook instead of all these stock sites.  It would be just as easy to take on fakebook as getty.  It should be a breeze with the software set up for you and all.  Piece of cake!

Next week I am replacing the airplane with something better!