I've wondered about this often.

If I were the agencies, trying to give buyers the most appealing search results, one of the factors I'd use would be a weighting per photographer based on sales success.

Now, you couldn't use gross sales because that would vary with portfolio size. You'd have to use a ratio, and the most obvious one would be total sales divided by portfolio size.

This is total speculation, of course, but if it's true then you might improve your search ranking if you reduced the size of your portfolio.

This is much wider than nudity.

I once did a silly little shoot with a couple of friends involving a man in a suit crawling on the floor wearing a dog collar, being led by a woman in stockings and heels (only her feet and lower legs visible). Deactivated yesterday. Stereotypical gender roles, I guess.  It's a shame, because some of them were sellers.

I'm a little more puzzled by the removal of impassive headshots of women with tape over their mouths, intended to convey the idea of censorship and/or lack of a voice. Apparently they're being interpreted rather differently. I have a picture of a gagged male child, as well -- so far still active.

And then I have some shots of a woman wearing a dunce cap. Also a man, but only the shots of the woman are being deactivated.

Surely there must come an equilibrium point when returns reach the lowest level able to keep a useful number of producers producing.

Odd: the twee monster message appears only in English and German. The French and the Spanish are spared. Wonder why.

Quote from: Xanox on May 20, 2013, 07:19

Quote from: Dantheman on May 19, 2013, 20:23
Believe me, the area his house is located at isn't as cheap as you might think!

well, there's an interesting (and a bit apocalyptic) article on today's BBC :

I thought John Simpson was a better journalist.

This is a country with millions of poor people. That some whites should become poor when no longer unfairly coddled is neither odd nor wrong. Nor is it news: I remember seeing a heartbreaking photo essay more than 10 years ago.

Farm murders are a difficult subject and they have several probable contributing factors, including farmers' sadly commonplace maltreatment of their labourers. That some farmers should be hated is unsurprising. Rural whites were, after all, a key racist constituency that elected apartheid governments and then gave support to the neo-Nazi AWB. And they often look like lonely islands of astounding and tempting wealth, relatively speaking, in a sea of rural squalor and exploitation.

Anyway, all these unfortunate whites that Simpson cites can number no more than 10% of the total. And Yuri, most certainly, is not and never will be among them.

Simpson seems to have swallowed the right-wing line unexamined.

If you want to read some apocalyptic material that actually contains intelligent thought, try Disgrace by JM Coetzee.

Paranoia knows no bounds for some people. I've never owned a gun, my children frolic in the park and I walk the streets of my suburb by day and by night. At the moment I'm on the beach with my kids in one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

Yes, crime is high here, and you'd best be prudent, but it's mostly confined to deprived areas and it's not the siege some people think it is. I lived in the UK for years and didn't feel dramatically freer or safer. Anyway, back to the topic ... I don't think Yuri is exactly suffering in reluctant exile here.

I think too many conclusions are being drawn on the basis of inadequate and possibly misleading information. Obviously Yuri didn't spontaneously decide to go exclusive and therefore he has received a sweetener, which, considering the scale of his operation, must amount to a lot of money.

So I wouldn't be drawing any conclusions about the health or otherwise of microstock.

And, by the way, I live in Cape Town. It is anything but a hellhole. I'd far rather be here than in Denmark, regardless of costs.

I'm still trying to decide whether the old Kool-Aid cult was preferable to the present corporate cold shoulder: yes, it was, but you must admit it had its icky side too.

Like others here, I don't post on iStock any longer. I've lapsed a couple of times in the past year or two but I usually feel it was a mistake. I don't post here much either, mostly because I prefer to keep my head down for reasons others have mentioned.

On the bright side, my iStock sales slide seems to have stopped. Still way down from last September but at least the graph has been flattish for a while. There's been an uptick in the past few weeks as well, but that's probably because the best match has turned to older files.

I think it looks very promising. Obviously it's possible to nitpick but on the whole the images look great, and as a collection it already has an aesthetic that's clearly somewhat different from everywhere else. Questions of marketability and critical mass will remain for a while but it's an auspicious start.

Quote from: cobalt on March 23, 2013, 10:19
We just decided we want a less stressful life and fun way to earn money.

And after all these years of shenanigans do you still feel it's less stressful?

I'm shocked speechless. They've lynched the voice of reason, the elder of the tribe. An astounding decision.

My thoughts and best wishes go out to you and your family, Sean. I hope your comeback will be swift and sure.

Quote from: lisafx on January 29, 2013, 16:14
RapidEye, I just noticed your avatar pic.  LOL!  Love it! Kind of reminds me of that famous scene in Trainspotting

Ha. Thanks. I have to confess to a certain amount of inspiration from the movie, but I thought the pic summed things up.

Quote from: lisafx on January 29, 2013, 16:11
I believe you misunderstood my post.  I didn't say Getty were crazy.  I said if someone had told me all the cr@p they'd be pulling over the last few years I would have thought that person was a conspiracy theorist or crazy. 

You're right. My apologies.

Quote from: ShadySue on January 29, 2013, 16:07
The worst of it with iStock is that no matter how bad I think it could get, they always manage to trump it. I hadn't foreseen the RC chicanery and would never have imagined the GoogleDocs disaster.
They certainly manage to exceed my conspiracy-theory-fuelled expections, and always in a negative way.

Yes, I'm entirely weary of opening the iStock forums in the morning with a sense of impending doom.

Quote from: lisafx on January 29, 2013, 15:59

I tend to agree Cathy.  If someone told me in 2009 all the things that would go down at Istock in the following three years I would have assumed they were a conspiracy theorist at best and more likely batsh!t crazy.  And yet here we are....

It was predictable that Getty, after buying iStock, would try to drive costs down and revenues up -- i.e. royalty cuts and price hikes. It's a manoeuvre that seems to have failed but only because it's overshot, not because it was completely crazy. The whole disaster can probably be summarised by greed overshoot coupled with a lack of understanding of how crowdsourcing could work against a corporation that becomes disliked.

Quote from: cclapper on January 29, 2013, 15:53

Conspiracy theory? I think not. Almost every "conspiracy theory" that has been put forth in the past couple of years by contributors has come true. One only needs to list the facts of what has actually happened in that same time period to come to a factual conclusion. Some people just don't want to take their beer goggles off and take a true look. 

Depends on what we're referring to. Very good theories are often forthcoming from contributors, and I wouldn't dream of calling those conspiracy theories. But you must admit that notions about iStock's motives have been known to get a tad fanciful. You'd be surprised if you could look inside my head sometimes, for that matter.

Quote from: ShadySue on January 29, 2013, 12:05

You'd think,  but in recent times, they don't seem to have been looking after their exclusives at all; it has seemed to me like they'd like us all to ditch our crowns so that they could earn more percentage off us. Crazy to me, this profitability vs profit choice, but it really seems like it's the way they're going.

But I agree with:

QuoteI think the hapless responses of the Istock management and the increasing irritability of the forum moderator are quite telling on just how concerned they are (mainly for their own futures).

This is the kind of thing that's driving me crazy, quite apart from my falling earnings. iStock has become so inscrutable it's no wonder that people resort to conspiracy theories.

Well, I stopped uploading last week, for what it's worth.

What's with the TIFF? It looks a tad misleading, considering the original upload is a lossy JPG.

All the best, Michael. I hope you do well. Congratulations on making the hard decision that many of us are still agonising about.

Lisa, good point about the cash prices. Something caused the iStock cliff in September, and I don't think it was the broken zoom. I'd bet on the naked greedy cash prices being shoved under buyers' noses, causing panic attacks all round.

Far from encouraging thrifty buyers to buy cheaper credits instead, the cash prices dealt a deadly psychological blow. I know I nearly fainted when I saw them, and I'm on the side of the fence that might be expected to like them.

Flooding iStock with expensive Getty content is not going to help either brand very much, even if iStock does have 10x the traffic. Micro buyers will just be driven away and macro buyers would surely have gone to Getty anyway if that's what they wanted.

I find it hard to imagine the management can be so stupid. It's not as if there's a shortage of competitor sites.

But who knows? Corporations have done dumber things. And if that is the strategy, it looks as if we may be entering the death spiral.

Getty needs to see that IS and Getty are fundamentally different businesses and stop the cack-handed integration.

Prices on iStock need big cuts. Royalty rates need to be boosted to keep suppliers happy. There needs to be heavy investment in technology and advertising.

All bad for next quarter's results, but the only way to avert a death spiral. Perhaps Carlyle will be able to take a longer-term view than we've become accustomed to.

Thanks for the helpful advice, gostwyk and jsnover. Appreciated.

Quote from: gostwyck on December 12, 2012, 20:34

Anyone thinking of ditching their crown needs to consider the timing in order to minimise loss of income and give their images the best of starts at the other agencies, most especially at SS. Right now is probably the optimum time to give the 30-day notice or close to it . Sales accelerate sharply from mid-January until the end of March so that's when the demand for new images is at it's peak. Early sales are a huge help in getting images to the top of the sort-order at SS and, as an independent contributor, that's where 50% of your microstock earnings are most likely to be coming from.

Great advice, thanks. Is there a similar high-sales period at SS in Sep-Nov? I ask because my ark is not yet even half-built.

Quote from: Equus on December 11, 2012, 19:23
Haven't they told us several times that the best match we see is not the best match that their customers see?

Yes, they used to tell us that. Interesting they haven't mentioned it, not even a peep, in the latest round of excitement.