|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - disorderly
Pages: 1 ... 34 35 36 37 38 [39] 40 41 42 43 44 ... 58
951
« on: December 19, 2010, 21:38 »
Odd. As usual, I requested payment the evening of the 30th my time (December 1st theirs), and I had the money on the 3rd. They've been consistently prompt with me, averaging around a week to pay off.
952
« on: December 19, 2010, 16:12 »
Well, the other part has had two weeks to to post and clarify, all msites owners read here?
If you know all the msite owners well enough to know that they read here. Your Acceptance Ratio must be fantastic.
And two sentences connected with a comma? Are they both questions? Is either one?
Since both your first and second clauses read as statements rather than questions, it was easy to miss the punctuation or at least its intent. Which I did, and I suspect others did as well. So your intent was unclear and subject to misinterpretation.
It seems you weren't able to see the question mark.
More likely he had difficulty parsing your fractured English. I know I did.
A question mark is a question mark, here and in Sebastopol.
(And sorry if I speak a somewhat broken english... but I speak other five languages as well (being english my worst). So, let's go on with the discussion with the language of your election... I'm sure it won't be difficult to you.
953
« on: December 19, 2010, 15:43 »
Well, the other part has had two weeks to to post and clarify, all msites owners read here?
If you know all the msite owners well enough to know that they read here. Your Acceptance Ratio must be fantastic.
It seems you weren't able to see the question mark.
More likely he had difficulty parsing your fractured English. I know I did.
954
« on: December 17, 2010, 07:25 »
They haven't changed all that much. They reject most of my submissions, which is an improvement over the old regime. And they still don't bring in much in the way of sales, coming in at #11 for the last year at just .7% of my earnings. If I hadn't been bored, I'd have stopped uploading there.
955
« on: December 16, 2010, 19:54 »
edit: The Peter Principle
Contrast with the Dilbert Principle, in which the truly incompetent are promoted into management, since that's where they can do the least damage. I've experienced examples of both.
956
« on: December 14, 2010, 15:14 »
Mine are tracking at 35.6%; barely more than the percentage of the year. But of course it'll be less, as sales dry up starting before Christmas and don't pick up again until January.
957
« on: December 14, 2010, 13:49 »
I finally got an email in response to the bug report I sent. They're talking end of the month for reporting November's sales. They might beat that, but I won't be surprised if they don't. In any event, I'm assuming that my numbers will match one iteration of the repeated sales I saw before the shutdown. Not nearly enough for a payout, so it doesn't much matter when they get it working.
958
« on: December 14, 2010, 09:57 »
They're doing okay, not great but just okay for me. Down 17% from 2009 to 2010, which isn't as bad as Dreamstime at -26%. BigStock is 4.9% of my total for the year, which puts them in 7th behind SS, iS, Ftl, 123, Veer (thanks to the D4) & DT.
959
« on: December 13, 2010, 17:44 »
I'm guessing they're going to test their sales processing script really carefully. And once they're confident it's right, they'll report last month's sales. Better to get the site back online without November sales than keep it down for days more, or so I suspect they convinced themselves.
960
« on: December 13, 2010, 11:22 »
I'll agree with the majority. To succeed, your images have to be seen. That means getting to the front or at least high up in a site's image search. How is that going to happen for images that can't be described at all well? If a site allowed clients to search by color scheme or pattern type (stripes vs. plaid or spirals or something), then maybe abstract backgrounds could do well, assuming clients have interest in such things. But they (the sites) don't, and they (the clients) probably don't, so you won't.
I have a few fractals in my portfolio on a few sites. Sold a few copies, but not enough to make me want to make more.
961
« on: December 10, 2010, 19:44 »
Incredible, still no thread on the IS forum...unless there has been and it's been squashed like a bug so as not to ruin the big, exciting F5 news!
There are two, but not much activity in either - here and here.
And not a wooyay in sight.
No wonder I didn't see them...one in the Help section and one in the Off-Topic section.  You're right, not much going on.
962
« on: December 10, 2010, 14:21 »
Another thought. Maybe these are all legit downloads and not duplicates.
More evidence that denial is more than a river in Egypt. Going through today's reported sales, I find 7 images with 26 reported sales, 61 with 27 reported sales, 3 with 28 sales, 1 with 52 (2 x 26) and 1 with 54 (2 x 27). Feels like some tweaking or correcting between runs, but still way too consistent to be real sales activity.
963
« on: December 10, 2010, 13:57 »
It might just speed up the inevitable if one of you with the repeating sales reports it to IS support. Incompetent though their IT is, they'll figure it out eventually. Done. We'll see how quickly they respond. I find mistakes with earnings to be really, really worrying though. We've had the EL problems, subscription sales that were delayed more than 1 day, the rounding error in subscription sales for certain royalty levels and now this. It's bad enough they can't lay out a web page straight, but the money has to be right.
Is this the first time the error's been in our favor? That's how we can tell it's a real bug; features always favor the house. 
964
« on: December 10, 2010, 13:40 »
Is this real? are they clearing the books, or is it just a pipe dream?
Pipe dream. If you look closely, you'll see that it's the exact same bunch of images being reported again and again. My first batch of 75 starts at 4:14am and finishes at 4:25am. Then that same bunch of 75 repeats from 4:27am to 4:37am. And again and again, a total of 27 times so far.
965
« on: December 10, 2010, 11:26 »
OTOH, the fun and community aspects of the site are pretty much dead. So going forward I will have to regard it as just another site. No more or less important than the others. I will continue to make money there until/unless I don't.
Lisa, I sympathize with your situation. iStock makes me only a couple of hundred dollars a month, so I can walk away without feeling any particular pain. And yet I'm taking my time about it, deleting just a few non-performers a day. Partly it's the money they still make, and partly it's the hope that a new owner will undo the disastrous policies of the current regime. Okay, it's mostly the money. I doubt anything will change for the better. Lucky for me I have a day job again and can go back to treating this as a hobby.
966
« on: December 10, 2010, 11:16 »
Wishful thinking....could they be clearing their books of sales not reported throughout the year by some error. My sales were so poor since they took over and I would have expected more. Again, just wishfully thinking
Take your total and divide by 13 and that will most likely be what your correct sales total will be.
We passed 13 a while ago. I'm on repetition #18 of my 75 sales.
967
« on: December 10, 2010, 08:40 »
I should have known it was a fsckup. I can see 14 repetitions of the sales pattern so far, and they're still coming.
968
« on: December 09, 2010, 10:34 »
Paula,
123RF has become more aggressive about demanding property releases. They recently required releases for shots of mine in a hotel room that used a desk and chair, something no other site has demanded. I just delete the images and figure it's their loss.
As for your ID, I believe that's required only for payment. It'll hold up your first payment but not your first sales. Depending on how your images do, you likely have a few months to get your ID accepted.
Best,
Hank
969
« on: December 08, 2010, 14:31 »
Another example for The Innovator's Dilemma. They just have to be good enough for Point&Shoots to fall out of favor. And of course that ignores the benefits of smartphone cameras for sharing and annotation and editing.
970
« on: December 08, 2010, 14:27 »
As a guess, maybe because the violation was seen as willful and intentional. I've had a few images disabled on Shutterstock due to a violation, and that's all that happened: a note explaining why they were removing the image (in one case, five images) and telling me not to reupload them (which I wouldn't have done anyway). They were right, I hadn't known, and I removed those same images from other sites.
I'd like to know what the claimed violation was, although I suspect we'll never be told. Maybe I'm just too trusting, but I don't believe SS would take action without solid evidence. That doesn't mean they're right, but they must have believed they are before acting so decisively.
971
« on: December 08, 2010, 11:13 »
DT and FT were tracking at the same level for me until early this year, when DT began to decline and FT began a slow climb. So far this month DT is running at half of FT. I suspect it's because of DT's policy regarding similars. Multiple poses of the same model do okay for me on other sites, and might do at DT if they didn't reject them out of hand.
972
« on: December 07, 2010, 14:59 »
From rogermexico "What we said was that we would re-examine the targets and soften them if it looks like more people than we anticipated are going to miss them, and this is still the case."
More evidence that this new scheme is a classic zero sum game. It's all based on quotas: this percentage gets the best royalty percentage, this next percentage gets less, the next group gets even less and so on. If too many people do too well, we'll adjust the quotas up to bring it back in line. And if they do too badly, we may have to adjust them down. It's pure combat: for every person who does well, someone else must do badly. To quote War Games, "The only way to win is not to play."
973
« on: December 04, 2010, 13:34 »
Is it possible they received a DMCA takedown notice for some of your images? From what I've read of YouTube's response to such notices, I suspect that would require immediate action of the "shoot first, ask questions later" kind. Still, I'd expect more detail on the specific accusations rather than a blanket "you've been a bad boy" letter.
974
« on: November 30, 2010, 12:21 »
snip
I can't help feeling that some of us overestimated the cohesion of that community. iStock's always struck me as cultish. I only was active in the Shutterstock forums, but haven't been more than an occasional visitor for ages. Still, most people in microstock act in a supportive fashion to their competitors. Those that don't, well, liberal use of the Ignore button helps.
Yes, istock turned cultish but it wasn't that way to begin with, when I started with microstock. Or maybe it was and I have been deluding myself all along .
It's a fair question. Back in 2006 when I got semiserious about this stuff, I spent a lot of time in the Shutterstock forums. I spent a lot less time at iStock. It felt more cultish (where never is heard a discouraging word) and more insular, and of course there was that feeling even from the beginning that the company was taking too large a share. So I can't help wondering how much has really changed vs. how much we changed our perception.
975
« on: November 30, 2010, 10:54 »
More isolated on white shots? No these are a win-win for both the contributors and the companies. Also must say the way Veer went about it was much better then istock.
Thomas, since you don't contribute to Veer, being exclusive to Istock, you may not realize that the wait to get any images approved there has stretched into months. This is unprecedented in microstock. It's not unreasonable for contributors waiting months to get images reviewed (many of them extremely saleable lifestyle, not just objects isolated on white) to wonder if their priorities are a bit out of whack.
I'm with you, Lisa. On the one hand, the PhotoOps benefit only a tiny fraction of Veer's content providers. On the other, we have images waiting six weeks for review and upload quotas so low that we'll never get our existing portfolios online. Only iStock has lower quotas. I guess I just need to accept that the whole "community" spirit has disappeared from microstock and corporate think and greed has taken over. Those who can afford to play the game, win. The rest of the folks just trying to make a buck are S-O-L. I'm really not surprised, istock pretty much has prepared us for all of this.
I am in the same boat as you Cathy. The community aspect of microstock was one of the positive trade-offs for taking such low commissions. Now the community has eroded but the commissions haven't risen to keep pace. It's taking me some time to adjust to the new reality.
I can't help feeling that some of us overestimated the cohesion of that community. iStock's always struck me as cultish. I only was active in the Shutterstock forums, but haven't been more than an occasional visitor for ages. Still, most people in microstock act in a supportive fashion to their competitors. Those that don't, well, liberal use of the Ignore button helps.
Pages: 1 ... 34 35 36 37 38 [39] 40 41 42 43 44 ... 58
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
