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Messages - epixx
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776
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:53 »
We've had 9 sales on SnapVillage in the past 3 weeks. All at either the $25 or $50 level.
Ron
http://www.iofoto.com
Ron, Are you in our out of subscriptions?
777
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:52 »
just for fun... who has the image with most views, but no downloads on LO.
I have one (ordinary pic if you ask me!) that has 1761 views, but no downloads. Can anyone beat that?
cheers.
How do I see views for individual images?
778
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:48 »
While I appreciate the fact that StockXpert is actually listening, I'm still not very positive. Any customer going for subscription at StockXpert will either:
- come from another subscription scheme, with no gain or loss for the photographer.
- from buying "full price" microstock at StockXpert and/or other micro-agencies, which means a loss of anything between 0% and 95% per sale for the photographer.
- from buying macro-stock, which is a potential loss for those of us who submit to macro-agencies, and a loss to all, considering the fact that buying "full price" micro or another subscription scheme would be the alternative.
One can always discuss if it really matters at all, since there are other agencies offering subscriptions as well, and most probably, all of them except IS will offer it in the future.
But that's exactly our problem here. Subscriptions are for bulk buyers, and the prices are so low that even a relatively small advertising agency will probably gain from having one. Those of them with any brains at all, are probably already building their own photo databases for future use, utilizing their subscriptions for all they are worth. In the long run, that means less business both for ourselves and for the agencies.
That doesn't mean that sales will stop, but I can't see how it won't affect future business in a negative way.
It's interesting to see how some say "I'm opting in, but I hope it won't be a success". I haven't made a decision for myself yet, but: if it's not a success, it doesn't matter if I'm in or out, since there's not much money involved anyway. If it is a success, and my "full price" sales go down, I lose money, and should opt out. I can't see were I gain from this.
As I said at the top here: "I appreciate the fact that StockXpert is actually listening". But, that listening doesn't pay my rent, nor does it pay for my food or my cameras. Money pays, and $2.50 pays for more food than $0.30.
779
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:13 »
Haven't had a sale yet, but I'm building my portfolio there now. I don't think we can expect anything great from them until they're past beta and start proper marketing.
My standard price is $10 and no subscription. Particularly good or unique images, I increase the price to $25. Those "13 a dozen" shots are prized at $5 with subscription. I also consider uploading photos I have at macro agencies and set the price at $50.
780
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:08 »
I just read the above description of the technological status at IS. For those of you who don't care to read the rather lengthy story, I've compressed the most essential information into a more manageable size. The essence of the contents should be the same though: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum." I think that about says it 
781
« on: October 11, 2007, 20:02 »
Do we can say the same for 123RF, because I just started there to check if there was some money to make there? At this time it's seem to be the no man's land...
123rf is another story. Much more professional (a part of Inmagine), better (but not great) sales, and .036 for subscription sales.
782
« on: October 11, 2007, 12:48 »
I had a look at my statistics there. Looks like a great ski-slope, starting in March. Unfortunately, that's not my purpose with my presence there 
783
« on: October 11, 2007, 12:16 »
Im giving LO one more month.
I have to agree. They seem to have some of the best images available on the web, their web-site looks good and works very well, and still, they are not able sell. Very surprising. In this case, it's not even worth waiting for a payout. I'll probably get mine in ten years or so 
784
« on: October 11, 2007, 08:19 »
That depends on what camera you have. Tilt/shift lenses are very useful for photographing architecture, but unfortunately, only Canon has wide-angle tilt/shift lenses these days. The 24mm is very useful, particularly on full frame, but not cheap.
For Nikon, you can find the 28mm AIS used, but on the DX format, that gives the FOV of a 42mm, which is not that useful. In addition, Nikon has a 85mm tilt/shift macro. Not so useful for architecture, but very sharp, and it makes manipulations of the focal plane possible. Food photography is one area where this lens shines.
785
« on: October 11, 2007, 08:14 »
It's also a question of payback. At StockXpert, the images regularly generate $2.50 with normal sales. At Crestock, this is much more problematic: high quality requirements, but only $0.25 per sale most of the time
786
« on: October 10, 2007, 19:41 »
Congrats to Freeze and his penguins! 
Regards,
Adelaide
PS: As far as I can see, images in SV are fixed price, they don't offer resizing, is it so? And we get only 30%, right?
It's only 30%, but you can price your images yourself, up to $50. They do seem to offer different sizes, but the price doesn't change with the size. Strange. I'm currently uploading there, and pricing my images individually at $5, 10 and 25. I also like that I can opt in and out of the subscription scheme for each individual photo. I may even upload some photos that are currently at macro-agencies, but at $50, just to see how it goes.
787
« on: October 10, 2007, 19:23 »
Will the opt in/out be available on a per image basis, like at Slaptown, or will I have to make the decision for the complete portfolio?
The per image solution makes sense to me, since it would make it possible to opt out for "unique" images, while "paper clip isolated on white" could be available for subscribers.
I'm still on the fence with regards to this. At DT, it works quite well, since there are lots of full price downloads, and rather few subscriptions. But should it end up like Crestock, I'm out. Low volume, and almost exclusively subscription. This is my worry with StockXpert as well. The volume there is relatively low, and with the majority of that volume is changed to subscription, it's not worth it.
From a customer's point of view, it's very simple: if his downloads at StockXpert approaches the price of a subscription, it obviously pays to subscribe. Very profitable for the customer, but probably not for the photographer, unless the customer increases the volume dramatically. I don't really see that happening.
788
« on: October 10, 2007, 11:24 »
Congrats! I'm not surprised, and the infamous judge is right on target for once: your airplane images are "rock solid".
789
« on: October 09, 2007, 23:20 »
Another 30c added to my piggy-bank. It's not my best day at LO, far from it. There have even been days with sales of more than a dollar. With this latest sale though, LO is even comparable to IS, bringing the accumulated sales since February up to just 15% under my sales at IS. It must be said though, that in the case of IS, that was the sales for today only. Oh well... tomorrow is another day...
790
« on: October 09, 2007, 16:05 »
The gods must be reading this forum. While we are discussing this, I'm having my best day ever at IS, and way over anything I've had since April. Weird
791
« on: October 09, 2007, 10:33 »
For me, the effect was that I had no upload slots for a week.
That's not how that worked. The effect was that it parceled out upload slots by the day, instead of by the week. So, if your limit was 15, you could upload two each day, instead of 15 at a time. Inconvenient, but that was over with in a week, and it certainly wasn't the cause of the large queue.
That was not how it worked in reality because: - The uploads I had just before the weekend were deducted from the first days - It required people to stay home every day to upload, since the quota from one day wasn't transferred to the next. But this isn't really anything new. I lose around half of my upload slots because I travel a lot. Why the quotas can't be on a monthly basis is beyond me, but things are what they are, and I've chosen to live with that.
792
« on: October 09, 2007, 07:08 »
That really didn't have anything to do with the queue. Most exclusives reported uploading their normal amount that weekend. Only a couple said they had a few extras. The queue was more affected by the decision to have a ton of admins/inspectors at the France meetup for several days. Plus the site outages.
Here's the official explanation from IS: "Here's what happened. Last weekend, we raised the limits to effectively allow unlimited uploads. Y'all took advantage of this and uploaded a whole bunch of files. When the free-for-all was over, we lowered the limits to normal levels. Unfortunately, with the lower limits, and the fact that we normally count the number of uploads over the past 7 days (168 hours actually), many of you are now over your limit. As a temporary measure, so you can start uploading again, I've change the system so that it only counts uploads in the past 24 hours against your limit (the limits have been reduced by 1/7 as a result). Next week, when the unlimited upload days are history, we will bring back the "x uploads per 168" period limits." For me, the effect was that I had no upload slots for a week.
793
« on: October 09, 2007, 02:00 »
I agree that exclusives should have priority, and as long as it doesn't create problems for the rest, good for them. But when exclusives had unlimited uploads a whole weekend not so long ago, with the result that they had to halt uploads for everybody, before reducing it to the crawl we are seeing now, they really shot themselves in the foot. And mind you, this happened only days after they had increased the limits for non-exclusives to fairly acceptable levels.
Incidents like that makes me place a big question mark over the abilities of the current management. That kind of stunt can work well in a small organisation, but when you have tens of thousands of suppliers and customers spread all over the globe, it's not a good idea.
Most people prefer predictability and stability in any business relationship, and a business relationship is basically what IS is offering their suppliers as well as customers. A couple of "Yay" or "Hallelujah" in the forums don't change that fact.
794
« on: October 08, 2007, 20:23 »
I just registered as well.
795
« on: October 08, 2007, 19:02 »
Just did a search for the classic "business" only 6 out of the first 10 were exclusive (didn't look past that). My guess is that exclusives just upload more than non-exclusives.
My images didn't jump up in the search when I went exclusive. The biggest factor in the search right now is dl/month. If exclusive plays a role it doesn't appear to be a big one.
I did 5 different searches (sailboat, London, man telephone, tomato meal, pencil) and on average, of the 24 first images (the first page), 70% were from exclusives. This is understandable, since photos from exclusives don't exist elsewhere, and are supposed to give IS a competitive edge. I would have been surprised if it looked much differently. Obviously, with higher upload limits, exclusives have the possibility to upload more. If they really do so is another question. The exclusive vs non-exclusive debate isn't really that interesting. It's the way IS has chosen to go, and we can accept it or leave. Much more interesting is how much market share they are losing, and to whom. It would also be interesting to know why they have the technical problems that they have, and why they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot with activities that could easily have been avoided (unlimited upload for exclusives a few weekends ago springs to my mind). Things like that annoy me because I think their basic concept is great. In spite of meager paybacks, and in spite of horrible routines for almost everything, I have chosen to invest a lot of work uploading photos to IS. When my sales at the same time go down instead of up, not for a month or two, but for almost six consecutive months, I have to start wondering where they are going. We will probably never know. Nobody keep their cards as close to the body as the guys at IS, which again is understandable, but it also makes me feel that the community thing and "human touch" is more a gimmick developed by some marketing guru than anything else. "What's good for Getty is good for the world". These things were most probably very different in the past, but IS today isn't less of a commercial enterprise than Coca-Cola.
796
« on: October 08, 2007, 11:03 »
I ran into the same problem last year that epixx is running into. I went through this period from March to September where after making best month for like a year straight, I ran into a brick wall. Then a year ago, things picked up through May of this year. A lot can be attributed to the seasonality of the stock business. The one thing I've found is that IS changes it the search engine algorithm many times. One image I had went to flames in a couple of months and about a year ago something changed and I've had like two downloads in a month. That took a huge bite out of my monthly downloads.
The one thing I find with IS is that it takes a while for images to start getting downloads vs. SS or DT...
While I agree with you on many points, there are two elements that are radically different from previous years: - IS favors exclusives much stronger than before. - The competition from other agencies is much fiercer. There are more micro-agencies around, and the big ones are doing a much better job selling their images than before. In a few months, SnapperTown (that is the name, isn't it  ) will be up and running full steam, and we can be quite sure that they will use all the resources they have to gain a significant market share.
797
« on: October 08, 2007, 10:49 »
I think we can agree that the views on the IS forums are very divided. People either love them or hate them. I've always found them to be weird. The helpfulness is there, by all means, but only until there's a hint of criticism. The contrast to this forum is almost beyond description. Even if some of the agencies are criticized heavily here, we are still able to have a constructive dialog with their admins.
But this is really OT, since the thread is about the sinking sales at IS. While staying away from the IS forums doesn't cost me a dime, sinking sales do. As I see it, there are two possible reasons for that: either IS is losing market shares, or the number of photos online increases fast than what the market is willing to absorb. A combination is also possible, that the number of agencies with large portfolios is growing too fast for IS to keep up with.
Since IS is obviously protecting the exclusives (from what I see, 80-90% of the first page of most searches are from exclusives), being a non-exclusive at IS becomes less attractive. It's also impossible for photographers to read from their own sales where this is going, since exclusives and non-exclusives develop differently.
It's a pity, since IS used to be a great place for everyone to sell photos. Now, the non-exclusives seem to be ignored mostly. Add to that the lowest pay in the business, and the conclusion for many may soon be that it's simply no fun anymore.
798
« on: October 08, 2007, 10:06 »
When I started, March 2006, the limit per day was around the current weekly level. Correct me if I'm wrong. The weekly limits were introduced shortly after. I don't know the exact history, but from what I've been able to gather, the current levels are much lower than they were two or more years ago.
But I don't really worry that much anymore. If the current sales development continues, IS is a bit down on my priority list anyway.
799
« on: October 08, 2007, 08:42 »
Here's an interesting curve, the Alexa statistics for IS. I picked it from the forum over there. There's actually a discussion going on about the falling sales. It's been going on since 3 October without being locked. That must be a new iStock record or something   Seems to follow my sales-trend pretty well.
800
« on: October 08, 2007, 08:20 »
Well as you can see from below things have been on a downward trend since March, with SS knocking IS of top spot as my best performing Agency.
Ha ha, for a moment, I thought you had copied my stats. They show an almost identical trend  I have to add, that I've almost doubled my portfolio at IS since April. That makes it even worse, doesn't it?
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