Quote from: bravajulia on September 03, 2010, 07:18
Today I have a mail sent by fotolia, 130 of my files was unsold for 24 months, and they suggest to give them for free, locking for five years in they partner sites. In that batch of photos there are many that sell well in other agency, and one was sell yesterday for 360$ in alamy as RF. I agree with a survey warning that images very low seller need some work in keywords, category, etc. But I can't imagine how giving it for free will improve my sales.

Never, ever give 'em free. Remove them. The original agreement was for all images offered in the free section to be offered for a period of 18 months.
That period was extended by FT to 5 years without consultation and without notice. It's corporate kleptocracy at the expense of the little guy. It's unlikely to boost your sales of other images either as free buyers only want stuff for free and your images probably end up in some archive in Timbuktu offered for sale, for money  by some scammer.

Your work is good and is worth paying for.

Quote from: sharpshot on August 31, 2010, 15:14
Having said that, I don't mind this, seems sensible to me and they told us before it happens this time  And did they really listen to requests from contributors?  Makes a nice change if its true.

The mail starts with: "Recently, we've been receiving a lot of requests from contributors to remove underperforming files from their portfolios."

As far as I know, if you wish to remove a file for whatever reason, you just 'delete' it. If an image is 'underperforming', halving the price won't help if it's in position 2,015 in the search..........it may never be seen again. Possibly quite rightly so!

Nothing has really changed then....................except those images delivered to consumers screens now cost (following the same reasoning) one millionth of the price of a subscription sale from a micro stock agency.

Quote from: simsi on August 10, 2010, 13:00
I was asked to photograph metal furniture for a company. I'll meet them later this week to see how much that is.

My question is, how do you photographers price such jobs? By the hour? Maybe it wouldn't be fair because I'd need a little more time, I have never been lighting reflective surfaces like this. What is it that I can ask for, and in which way do you usually charge?

Concerning the lighting I thought of isolating those metal furniture pieces (it's for a catalogue) with white backdrop blown out. The reflection may be handled with large softbox and white cardboard left and right to get some white into the metal maybe. What do you think?

Thanks,
Simone

Depending on many factors, I would investigate the possibility of renting a (local) studio with an egg-shaped cove; the type used for car shots. With spotlights directed at the walls ceiling and floor, reflections/highlights can be controlled perfectly. Not a cheap option though.

Primarily a creator but I do have a client who asks me to select and buy stock images for them but no more than 10/year.

This may change in future as the client now realises he can get stock images (mainly of people) to liven up his brochures at a price that is far lower than commissioning me to do them for him! For the right stuff he is prepared to pay up to €60 per shot but he doesn't have the time or sufficient knowledge of English to go trawling through the mountains of spam files on microstock agencies. For a very small fee, cos he is such a good customer  , we deliver the selected, relevant images and I get to pay for the images in credits getting cash+ in return when I bill him.

Should he need more images in future, I can see the possibility of doing a deal with him. I shoot what he wants for a lowered fee and I get to use the images as stock for myself.

Quote from: sharpshot on August 12, 2010, 09:06

Quote from: lagereek on August 12, 2010, 07:26
Take away all this subscription crap and Micro will yet again have a good time.

No, just make subscriptions the right price and pay a fixed commission.  Lots of buyers prefer subs, taking that away from them would probably be a mistake.

Let's say that I'm an enterprising Chinese/Russian and I have a good knowledge of the advertising industry in my country with tons of contacts (relatively small, local players) who frequently buy stock. I, as enterprising person, offer them stock from my 'personal' and private archive. Then I go to Fotolia, for example, and I take out a 200+ dollar premium subscription which entitles me to download 750 files in one month. If FT has the majority of contributors in subs, then depending on their status (white to sapphire and exclusive/non-exclusive), for $200 or so, I can download between $6K-$36K worth of images at XL size that month. For $50-$100 more, I can nominate the clients as one of three or one of an unlimited number of users. I pay < $0.20 per download and my clients pay me a special discount rate, of say, $8/download for files up to 15Mp. Ca...ching, ca....ching.
If I can think this up and I'm not smart, how many hundreds or thousands are doing this already. I don't even know if it would be illegal to provide such a service once you have a bought a sub with unlimited users. And once you have the download, you could re-sell multiple times without ever getting caught. If you keep everything in your own language (not English) no-one will ever notice except the contributors that sell one XL sub, never to be sold again.

Just sayin' that's all.

Quote from: lisafx on August 06, 2010, 23:40
Those are some funny photos!  I like the commentary at Badstockart.com though.  The comments add a lot

What a hoot, indeed (some comments).

Quote from: eggshell on July 27, 2010, 10:19

Quote
1. By allowing the sales in subscription you will improve the ratio sold/views for each one of your contents. When a subscription customer wants to buy your image and you don't allow the sale in subscription, your content will be marked at 0 sold for 1 view. The ratio sold/view is an important criteria within our search engine. Images that are sold each time they are viewed receive a better visibility in the results page."

Quote
This could also lead to misuse of the system.  To reduce competition and worsen their ratio sold/view i could hire a third world country guy to click on as many images of top contributors a day except mine.

Patrick.

I was wondering about the high number of views ( regularly 25-40 a day , up to 80 ) that I get on my relatively small port ( ~50 images ) . Now that I read this I'm starting to get paranoid

views/sold since a month ago -   875/6    ?!
Do you guys find that normal ?

I also have a small portfolio of ~150 images. I'm lucky if I get 20 views and a download or two in the first month after submission. 20-40 views/day............ I can always dream.

I'll add that none of my images features people. Maybe that's the reason for such low views.

Maybe it's me being mean but I don't think that original negs are worth anything like the price quoted. Yes, they are of historical/photographic interest but you can't put 'em on a wall in a frame and admire the beauty of them like you could a print made from them by the hand of the master.
Any print now made from them is worth what it costs to make the print (IMHO) because hundreds or thousands of prints can now be made from them. Maybe I get the feeling that this is getting all hyped up (just like everything else these days it seems).
The current owner of the negs, submitted them for research 10 years ago. Would have been an awful shame had they turned out not to be by Ansel Adams. Lotta bills to be paid to all those researchers and, of course, some auction house will be rubbing hands gleefully at the prospect of all that commission on their sale.

Desire is the father of thought. Mebbee 

Isn't it only a print made by the artist at approximately the same time as the negative most valuable?

Quote from: OM on July 24, 2010, 23:26

Quote from: dirkr on July 23, 2010, 19:23
Fotolia. They allow you to opt out your exclusive images (and only those) from their subs program.
But I remember reading some comments on the (German) FT forum, that members doing that have experienced dropping sales. Obviously FT takes into account your view/sales ratio for determining search order, so having images not available for subs might impact your position in the search.
As I have no exclusive images with them, I can't give any own experience though.

Correct. I attempted to give up FT subs but lasted 3 weeks. In that short time, I really had the feeling that my sales were dropping and I folded.
On an FT blog there was some info regarding images in subs and how it does affect that image in the search results. Every time an image is viewed in subs, it gathers a point which helps in the search order. Images not in subs get zero points and can quickly become invisible.

I'll quote meself! I found the section on FT blog about subs that I posted a few months ago:

"Visibility
By following the rules above, you will achieve a better visibility. But there are further tips to increase your visibility:

1. By allowing the sales in subscription you will improve the ratio sold/views for each one of your contents. When a subscription customer wants to buy your image and you don't allow the sale in subscription, your content will be marked at 0 sold for 1 view. The ratio sold/view is an important criteria within our search engine. Images that are sold each time they are viewed receive a better visibility in the results page."

http://blog.fotolia.com/uk/guideline/microstocktips.html

Quote from: dirkr on July 23, 2010, 19:23
Fotolia. They allow you to opt out your exclusive images (and only those) from their subs program.
But I remember reading some comments on the (German) FT forum, that members doing that have experienced dropping sales. Obviously FT takes into account your view/sales ratio for determining search order, so having images not available for subs might impact your position in the search.
As I have no exclusive images with them, I can't give any own experience though.

Correct. I attempted to give up FT subs but lasted 3 weeks. In that short time, I really had the feeling that my sales were dropping and I folded.
On an FT blog there was some info regarding images in subs and how it does affect that image in the search results. Every time an image is viewed in subs, it gathers a point which helps in the search order. Images not in subs get zero points and can quickly become invisible.

Almost instantaneous Gmails on sales for me and always has been.

Last week I submitted three images to FT. All were of the same subject 'vintage fire engine', using all the same keywords and all three were accepted. On two images I used 'vintage' as the first word of the title whereas on the third image I titled it 'fire engine, classic vintage'.

Looking at the stats today, each of the 2 images with 'vintage' as first word of the title has been viewed 10 times and the third image zero views. And I thought that the first six or seven keywords were important, not the title. This suggests otherwise. Does anyone know?

Small port, excl. FT so this means nothing..........already more than double last June but majority of sales were made in the first 2 weeks of June and pretty much deceased after that. June looks to be slightly better than May so far but if the last 10 days are anything to go by, July will be rotten.

Quote from: sjlocke on June 01, 2010, 03:54
This could be a reason Yuri's losing money

http://rising.blackstar.com/there-are-no-shortcuts-to-success-in-microstock.html

Thanks. Always wondered why best sellers kept selling.

No problems here either.........number of credits usually goes up even before email notification of the sale reaches my email address.

Quote from: pancaketom on May 23, 2010, 02:58
Fotolia seems to be the master of doing things w/o telling anyone.

--=Tom

Yup! Fortunately, I've never had dealings with their erroneously named "UK Support Group" but from the things I've read from other contributors, I've had to conclude that a. It does not consist of humans and b. It is probably the space detritus of HAL9000 which they exchanged for someone's senile RM archive.

At the time of the "Pay US tax debacle", UK Support issued numerous incorrect pieces of advice to contributors, some of which cost the contributors money and a lot of wasted time. Utterly unprofessional IMO.

Quote from: leaf on May 22, 2010, 23:54
It could also be people who made use of the 'Crank Your Rank' Deal that some members received
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/crank-your-rank/

Or else when Fotolia had their 'Operation Level Ground' where people who have never been involved in Fotolia before could  jump ahead of the ranks and get a 'Free' Emerald rating if they had equivalent sales on another site
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/news-operation-level-ground-attracts-artists-to-fotolia/

Thanks for that information, leaf. Kerioak made a reference to Operation Ground level today but didn't explain what it was. To think I thought that there was still a meritocracy in some sectors of business.

A poster to the FT blog noticed that despite having 'sapphire' status micromonkey only had 24 images in their portfolio.

I took a look at all the 'gold' rankings and above and discovered yet another 3 gold members with either too few images for their status or too few sales of the images they now have to justify 'gold'.

Looks like there have been some large portfolio exits recently. Whether this is also behind some complaints regarding reduced views by some members, it's difficult to say.

Dunno why but I've never had to wait more than a week for payout (except perhaps the first one). Paypal usually sends their mail within 5-7 days of the request to FT.

Quote from: ShadySue on May 16, 2010, 20:07
Yesterday, i was photographing at my local Cattle Show, mainly for practice though I'll probably send some to Alamy, not that last year's batch have done me any good! A few different people (officials) asked if I was shooting for Scottish Farmer magazine. http://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk (I guess it was the 5DMk2!).
A farmer asked me particularly to photograph his cow and calf. In fact, I'd noticed them earlier and had taken several photos. At the end of the Champion of Champions round, he held back for a few seconds (the Grand Parade was about to start so it was literally a few seconds). He asked for my card (lucky I've got an iStock Moo card, though a bit irrelevant) and gave me his email addy.
So I processed the photos and shoved them some on my website http://www.lizworld.com/General/CattleShow.html and emailled him. I assumed he might want to buy a couple of prints, and had no idea of how much to charge. (Photographers go out of business within a year or two round about here, whether they charge a little or a lot - can't get enough people willing to pay anything.)
Turns out he's the bloke who writes the report for the Scottish Farmer, and he's emailled them and suggested they use one of my photos of his cattle. (What's the point of writing the report if you can't feature your own winners?!). He's not sure whether or not they'll use a picture, and I guess if they do, my rubric is "... at your usual rate."

He has also asked about gettting prints, and said specifically that he "didn't want big ones" I fobbed him off for a bit - I haven't a clue how much to charge, especially as I'll be submitting to Alamy. In other circs, I could exchange them for MRs for iStock, but I can't imagine there would be any interest on iStock, and anyway most of the pics have other people in the background, or objects which would need PRs.
I could do inkjet prints (I've got an Epson 1400), but thought I'd use Photobox, which I've used about three years ago. An 8x6 costs 37p there +p&p, so I thought £3 + p&p.
I know all you USian photogs wouldn't get out of your bed for under £100, but this is rural Scotland.
TIA
After I wrote the above, I thought that IF Scottish Farmer use one of my photos and IF the fee is good (which is by no means certain; I haven't located any info about fees on their website yet) I should send him the small prints free for the contact.

If you do 'sell' a photo to Scottish Farmer, I'd be aware of this............they sell their photo's on:

http://thescottishfarmer.newsprints.co.uk/prices/db/0/0

Quote from: Danicek on April 16, 2010, 17:43
One guy here reported exactly this thing. He is exclusive, opted out of subs. I think he saw big drop in files visibility and after a while opted back in. I can't find the thread. My memory tells me it was part of one of the large FT threads (not a separate one about the topic). You may be able to find it.

Might have been me. I opted out of subs for about 2 weeks but chickened out when my sales of PPD also dropped off rapidly......at least that was the impression I got (not a very scientific analysis, I'm afraid). That was February when I stopped subs and went back in again. Feb was OK, March was close to or even BME but April, so far, has been diabolical with almost all sales being subs or premium subs. In contrast to Mat, I don't consider subs as gravy....they're more like cod-liver oil. Maybe good for you but leaves a foul taste in the mouth. FT has no doubt been successful at promoting their subs program considering the number of subs sales I'm getting now but that only goes to show that the business interests of micro-stock sites and contributors are diametrically opposed. The site gets in large volumes of cash quickly which has to be paid out in minimal amounts slowly. The contributor is most interested in selling full price 'L' s , 'XL' s and 'EL's frequently.

Here's a piece from the FT blog on subscriptions and why opting out may be bad for your FT financial health:

"Visibility
By following the rules above, you will achieve a better visibility. But there are further tips to increase your visibility:

1. By allowing the sales in subscription you will improve the ratio sold/views for each one of your contents. When a subscription customer wants to buy your image and you don't allow the sale in subscription, your content will be marked at 0 sold for 1 view. The ratio sold/view is an important criteria within our search engine. Images that are sold each time they are viewed receive a better visibility in the results page."

http://blog.fotolia.com/uk/guideline/microstocktips.html

To be honest, I can't really see FT's interest in 'exclusive' photo's or contributors. Unless the images of an exclusive contributor are of a particularly 'hot' genre or style, FT only has to shell out more of it's share of the profit to the contributor than if they were non-exclusive. If the exclusive images are in subs, the buyer of subs is getting $20-$40 'L' or 'XL' exclusive photo's for peanuts compared to a regular PPD. For a couple of hundred bucks/month, a buyer can download several thousands of bucks worth of photo's. It's no skin off FT's nose if the buyer was never intending to pay the full price anyway.

Quote from: MatHayward on April 09, 2010, 10:41

QuoteThat being said, imagine if Yuri simply said all of his portfolio were going to one site.  How much could he charge?  How much could he demand he get paid?  How did he get to where he is?  The same we are all where we are right now (yep, even YOU).  He just chose to take it to the next level.  I haven't had the courage to do so yet.  Do you?  If you did rise to the challenge don't you think you could single handedly change the industry?  It's still so new and the possibilities are infinite.  Don't settle and accept what's being given.  Kick some ass and make a name for yourself.  There are maybe 3 or 4 photographers in the "Micro" stock industry that have done so to date in my opinion.  I can't help but feel there is more room.  Quit bitching and put your money where your mouth is.

Mat

Not only may all of Yuri's photo's be going to one site (his own), they may also be completely free. A blog is the name of the game with ads providing the revenue.

http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/yuri-admits-his-losing-money-!/100/

http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/yuri-admits-his-losing-money-!/125/

Scroll down for Yuri's posts.

Nothing sells better than free.

Quote from: Elenathewise on March 23, 2010, 18:53

Quote from: ap on March 23, 2010, 18:42
hi elena:

sorry this is happening to you too at ft. great portfolio and track record so i'm sure it's a rogue reviewer on the loose.

but, i'm kind of curious as to what declined message are you getting? is it the ubiquitous "not up to our aesthetic standard" that they give to the rest of us, or is it "your photographic work is excellent, but not needed, blah, blah blah?"

The latest one is "quality". Which is ridiculous. Which is why I started all this:) If they say "we don't need this at this time", well it's their call. But my quality I am pretty sure about.

FT is weird. Their 'quality' rejection means 'we don't think this image will sell'.