I don't think everyone is motivated by price or that it is the only deciding factor. One telling sign for me is that of the last two companies my wife has worked (an ad agency and a magazine) they both used SS.

It sounds like Runeer you are considering exclusivity? When I was briefly non-exclusive, I found that my mirrored portfolios didn't compare in terms of earnings at all (20:1). I feel this was mainly because all of the sites sold rasterized versions which allowed the customer to purchase a small jpeg or something - of course with IS only allowing for the EPS to be bought. I can't justify to myself to sell at SS.

I've been an iStock exclusive vector illustrator (almost Diamond) since 2007 and for a few months non-exclusive years ago. I've been pretty inactive the last 2-3 years and sales have been steadily declining but stable for about the last 12 months or so. A small spike during the promotion a few weeks ago - really nothing good or bad.

Try using a blend instead... Easy and will achieve the same.

Based on the revised targets, it appears that I'll be going down again. Before this redeemed credit thing I was making 35% as exclusive Gold illustrator and patiently waiting for Diamond to roll over for the 40% cut... Now it's going to 25% the base exclusive royalty. meh - kills the enthusiasm.

I figure they would all do the job and it would depend on your budget. I have a small cintiq and it works great. Before that an Intuos4 which was good. @Cthoman I used a mouse for years and I think a lot of Adobe Illustrator users do.

I received the same e-mails -they sent a 2nd one just a minute ago. I've been a Getty contributor for a little while so I'm not sure why I'm receiving invite to the contributor site... I assumed it was just an error of sorts. To the OP, have you tried the credentials that were sent on the upload portal?

I have a small collection on istock and they do sell a bit. But it seems the only ones that ever amount to any amount of money are the ones I have in the Vetta collection – the few anyways. They do sell at the largest size, which for me is around 3500 pixels or so.

But by rasters, you do mean raster illustrations like digital paintings or comps not rasterized vector illustrations right?

Cheers

Quote from: Microbius on September 21, 2011, 12:51
for some reason when Getty took over they decided vector contributors had had it too good under the old system and they should be put in their place, the worst bit was when the targets were set it was decided to count a dollar being bought in by illustrators as being worth less than a dollar bought in by a photographer.

That about sums up my memory of the past few years. I agree with most and also could have written the original post myself. Buyer since '05, contributor since '07 and have watch sales take a massive dive. But back to the question about going independent... I've tried it for about 9 months a few years back spreading my portfolio through the agencies with terrible results - so in turn I went right back to exclusivity. You see what happened was my application with SS get rejected for mixed color spaces, so I had to wait a month to re-up and in the meanwhile I began making portfolios at StockXpert, DT, FT, CS. To make a long story short - my iStock income dropped in half after leaving and in return with the other sites I made up an additional $150 a month which was nowhere near half my earnings I lost. Frustrated, I applied for exclusivity again. If you do decide to try the field... best wishes!

Quote from: click_click on September 13, 2011, 22:01
Could you specify the $150 royalties?

Is that for each illustration per month?

Or is this for each illustration's lifetime?

In the good old days  $150 month at iStock for one file was great, but no I mean over it's life. My calculation is pretty simple: If I can produce 3 images a day, I'd like those images to produce about $400-$450+ over it's life for the day's work. That's generally what I consider a successful file.

I'm not a big sketchbook guy - but is anyone else looking forward to the release of the inkling? It looks pretty promising and low priced. I have a small cintiq which is what I use for my graphics, but I'm really looking forward to trying it for stock.

Cheers

There's some good info at www.illustrationinfo.com, Cory Thoman's site. It covers microstock basics and has some basic illustrator tutorials - may be a good place to start. A lot of microstock methodology and workflow is trial and error - and sometimes best to find out for yourself on subjects like exclusivity, subject matter, return per image, etc. Everyone's situation, talent, and lived experience is a bit different.

I've an exclusive vector illustration contributor at iStockphoto for some time now and generally happy when the file yields over .. um about $150+ in royalties. Downloads per month and all of that isn't too important for me, just the life of the file to justify the creation of it.

I'm a gold exclusive. Like the OP i feel the same. A few years ago I tried out being independent and 6 months later was exclusive again. It was alot of extra work I wasn't accustom to doing and my returns were about half (my situation at least). Returns have been diminishing, but I have been trying to focus on other freelance areas.

As for me mostly vector illustration with a few raster based ones.

I have a 12x18 lightbox, which I rarely ever use. I prefer comping in Photoshop. The LED tracer looks good if that's your workflow, but I think it's too pricey for an A4 size.

May be better to market to comic book artists?

I'm in one of the Getty collections, just started and experimenting a bit - though I'm sure it'll be mostly raster paintings when I get it sorted out. So far only one approved and it took almost two months to be available - so it's not quite as immediate as micro.