I think they shortened the session time. It's stored in the cookie telling them you are logged in. It used to be very long, now it seems to be a few days. It's a security concern. Dreamstime did it too.

The result is you will have to log in more often. The CAPTCHA is a real PITA, but as the spambots getting more and more clever, almost unreadable CAPTCHA's will become standard.

I have a fairly readable captcha on my own site for contact and comment, and regularly, the real estate and medicinal herbs people get through. That was to be expected. Time will come the scripts get better than the human eye to break a captcha. Then we will have to revert to biometric validations to log in everywhere. There will be a great market then for fingerprints instead of email addresses.

Look at the Featurepics forum: a guy got in spamming the forum all over in every thread. It's already 6 days like that. That happens with an unattended site or forum.

I bolded and italicized above: According to what I read, that's what he did do at first. (not linking thumbs) He only changed them once he was outed.

Well there is more joy in heavens for one sinner that repents than for 99 saints that don't need correction.

Yes, it's a referral site, but the images are being used in a negative connotation.

That's a valid point, as I stated first, and more for the model than for a photographer. But who put those images up for stock in the first place? If the model agrees to do weird poses and the photographer uploads it, can they blame a comics page to use/refer them? The lady that lost her teeth on the apple, well, she can imagine her image won't be used on a business site but on a comics page.

Do I think some of them are funny? You bet! Do I think he should be allowed to have the site? You bet. Does that mean I think he should be allowed to use the images on his website FOR FREE just because he is giving a referral? NO!

Again, DT allows this, even with ads (I came across some of those). I don't know about other sites, but I figure the site admin will have read the TOS. You agreed to DT's agreement so you can't reasonably protest against it (I think).

No one should be allowed to decide "bad publicity is better than no publicity" except the copyright holder. Great if the images sell because of the link. They STILL shouldn't be allowed to be used for free without the copyright holder's consent! If you think it's OK, that's your choice. Others may not think it's OK.

If it's a referral (allowed by the sites), your only point will be degrading use. You can always object to it.

Actually the guy is linking the thumbnails to the actual sales page. At least Dreamstime allows that, and you can even put your referral code on it. It's just another (but original) referral site. It would be totally different if he put up the thumbs without links.

The only thing you can argue about is defamation, but as the saying goes: bad publicity is better than no publicity. I have no problem with sarcasm at all, especially since the shooters clearly aimed for that effect in many of the shots. About half of the shots is not really awkward but more weird/unusual.

There is a market for it. I bet the posted shots will have additional sales.

PS - if you keep giving him attention he will rise in the charts and there will come a time you will be begging him to show your awkward shots (with the proper link of course).  

A comp is never meant to be public: it's a mock-up just for the customer's eyes.
If the guy links the thumbs to the originals on the agency site, it can be considered as a promo or referral. In that case, he can't be blamed, imho.

If I am reading your chart correctly, it looks like rate of uploading has a more direct impact on earnings than overall portfolio size does. 

Yes, well, both seem to be important. There are a couple of caveats though. Earnings in general seem to follow portfolio size up till late spring 2008, then hit a ceiling. I saw exactly the same pattern on BigStock. Some people here reported this glass ceiling too, but later.
It makes me suspicious that this is (also?) a side effect of my portfolio composition since in May 2008 I settled down; my travel/nature shoots stopped and I started models. With model concepts there is the problem that (a) you have a lot of competition from much better photographers and (b) your best concepts are copied like hell. I'm also handicapped by the age group and ethnicity of my models, mainly because they are my students and Asian. [My top sales on SS are still niche landmarks (difficult to copy) like "Waterloo battle field" where I dominate the top 20, or "Chinese sweatshop" where I'm alone.]

A second caveat is that the correlation has been done over the full 4 year period. People here reported around end 2009 that new uploads didn't seem to work as good any more on SS like before. You can see that at the end of the graph. But the correlation is of course over the full 4 year period and just one statistic (number) so changes in time are not accounted for. I'm hesitating to do the analysis over the past year since I had steady uploads, and obviously you can't do a proper correlation then, since there will be no variance in one of your datasets. [example: suppose you do a study about success in business and body height: you will have zero correlation if all your subjects are 5ft9]

A note about my method (for Luis): samples (rows) were per month and filled in an Excel spreadsheet. Columns were: earnings (light blue graph) and uploads per month (count # of images over all approved batches that month) (dark purple graph). The port size (light yellow graph) was just a cumulative sum of the uploads.

Conclusion: to have real hard evidence about the "beast feeding" hypothesis you need to have several portfolios (to get rid of the port composition bias) and larger ones. Also, the past is no guarantee for the future since SS can change the algorithm as they like.

Quote from: FD-regular on July 29, 2010, 14:10

What iStock should really do is maintain a release library. Think of all the lost bandwidth when you have to upload the release every time...

so why did you say it? 

Because I do have many shots from the same session. I don't do many sessions and if I have to organize one, I take full advantage. It's not like IS needs a release for every day. I had a shoot last year with people coming in from further away and it took 3 days. It was clearly mentioned in the shoot description, and they accepted it.
It's also eating reviewer's time Doesn't it mean that reviewers have to examine every release over and over again when you upload mixed shoot sessions?

Well it looked a lot like Ktools. It's a nice design by the way, although a bit wide to be a fixed one.

There is something wrong though with the business plan (if you thought about that). A reviewer gets about 10cents (more on top sites) per image. That includes the rejected ones and assuming an AR of 50%, every image online will cost you 20 cents just on reviews. To have a collection of 100K, you'll need to pay 20K$ upfront to reviewers. You can review yourself for a while but you said not to have much time...

The eat-all-you-can subs plan is fine on a site with 10K since there is not much to eat, but diabolic on a site with 100K or more. Heroturko will leech you dry.

Finally, the 1$ price point is too low for a max size. No contributor will want to undercut his current agents. Your only USP is price. With apps like picscout and others in the air (online price comparison with image recognition technology) you can catch some random traffic that hurts us at the main sites.

This is yet another 'Microstock Myth' that keeps being endlessly regurgitated!
It so happens I'm one of the contributors currently beta-testing a new submitter front page on SS. The new page contains statistical data that basically explodes that myth, at least in my case. Since Jan 31 I have increased my portfolio by 10.8%. My earnings from those new images to date are 11.3% of my total earnings since Jan 31 __ essentially my earning have increased almost exactly in proportion to the increase in my portfolio.

Last year I did correlation statistics between downloads and uploads over 3 years. At least for me, the correlation was significant. (the method was based on time series covariances).
About the honeymoon period, your critique might be right since I just got it from hearsay.
I will know more later this year since I stopped doing microstock 7 weeks ago and not motivated to do edits of the last 4 shoots just for cents.
I'll see if the graph goes down...

I feel your pain. I can't say it's been awful there, but my growth there this year has been weak to non existent compared to how much I've added.

When did you sign up there? SS has a honeymoon period for new contributors that expires after a while. Then, it's just marriage.  You'll have to keep feeding the beast regularly after that, or sales might go down by 50%.

I have started uploading some of my microstock images, under a different pseudonym

That won't help. Apps like PicScout do image recognition.

my earnings are still very low but I am having a very good month, a lot better than July...!

Come on Luis. The play isn't over till the Fat Lady sings. The August lady will sing on August 31. 

Sales are so bad right now I simply cannot get motivated to upload anything.  I tried editing some photos yesterday and just gave up in disgust.

+ 1

That should work. Sometimes the different web sites require the individual points numbered as they want the information in a certain order. Like sometimes they want the digital signature at first, sometimes last etc.

Correct. (Thanks!)

Also if you use Google searching for "DMCA template" you should get what you need.

Got it. @Donding: yes of course I will put the links in profile.