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Thank you for your answers. No doubt that competing with the beat to death subjects is thougher than ever. The air is getting thinner everywhere I guess. I hope that I can match Istock performance in the last year. I know that the good old days (for me 2012) will be impossible to match. 1 year time is what I give myself to see where I am standing and if it is worth the time.

Hello:

I have a question to the contributors that have more than 1000 images online on Shutterstock.
I was the last 6 years exclusive with Istock......after their continous decline I have decided to abandon exclusivity and started to upload files to the other agencies. I have first focused on Shutterstock as everybody says it has the most earning power of all micro agencies once you are no more exclusive.

The weird thing is that despite uploading 2500 images in 3 weeks my earnings are the same
when I had 200 images online. Earning the same now with 2500 than with 10 times less files give or take. The probability of this happening without any intervention is not low but I would think that probabilistically impossible.

Have any other contributors have experienced the same? It might be possible that some equation makes that uploading a large portfolio in a short time puts some kind of cap in earnings.

It would be great to know because maybe it is wiser to upload to all the agencies at the same time and not in a row so the uploads are more spread out in time.

I am speechless too. 

Scary move by Getty/Istock. This is NOT a way to treat one of the most succesful stock photographers of Istock.

He will be succesful in any new endeavour he starts.

Wowww. Indeed exclusivity looks less and less appealing nowadays. I hope it is a bug ....wishful thinking I know......

Unfortunately, our IS buyers are accomstomed to quality images, without noise or artifacts that are sharp.  Killing off that rep is risky.
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Not if they are marked some way that inform buyers about their nature. I think it is much riskier to loose potential or established buyers searching for this kind of images to go and shop elsewhere. I would bet that the Flickr collection has been very successful and that might be one of the reasons they want to explore new territories at Istockphoto.

Thank you all.

It is still possible to make a living from micro although the wall is getting taller as each day passes.

I can perfectly understand the reserve and suspicion that many macro shooters had and still have against micro. When you see it from outside it seems absurd to sell images for such low amounts and I would agree with them if I had not seen the volumes you can sell at this price points.

Micro and macro professional photographers are really not that different, both want to make the most revenue from their agencies and their effort. Different strategies to arrive to the same point. We have examples at both fences and I guess that some of you that posted here are in the same range of earnings than many macro photographers. At a time were agencies were closed to new talent it was quite logic that new opportunities would appear and many would embrace them. The digital revolution did the rest. It is what it is, and no fence could have stopped it.

But I can perfectly understand too that for many photographers this business does not work and personally I would never recommend some type of photographers to try micro and at the same time I would encourage some micro to try macro or at least send some type of images to the macro distributors. There are still buyers out there that for exclusivity or because they don't find that kind of images or simply have the budget are willing to pay top dollars for them. It's all a personal decision and a very difficult one because sometimes weird sales happen. I still get sales in Getty for very simple images,also available in the micros, were I get paid thousands of dollars for their use. In some ways that is part of the magic of this profession, you are always playing, guessing, getting surprised at what sells, sometimes enjoying a shooting session and sometimes getting bored as hell.

At the end of the day I try not to be too serious about it.  When the time comes were I can no longer bear it for whatever reason be it financially o creatively I will move on. Until that day I will enjoy all the good things this work is giving me back.

Cristian

At risk of repeating myself (I keep posting this thought from time to time):  the agencies, and their owners, would really like everything to be subscriptions, because they want to escape the commission model entirely and have the bulk of their income in the form of up-front subscription fees.   Payments to contributors become totally arbitrary amounts, with apparently no floor below which they can't sink.  

And more importantly - since the link between sale price and commission is removed - they can raise prices to buyers without paying more to photographers.

The fact that Getty's new owners are immediately talking about their love for ThinkStock probably says it all in terms of a future direction.

Entirely IMHO of course.

I fully agree with you. As a Getty and Istock exclusive I am much more afraid from the subscription model than any other agencies out there. I am participating to Thinkstock to test the waters and from my experiece there and the Premium Access in Getty the income I generate from those compared to the commision model is pitiful. If they are going to dedicate their resources to that model it's going to be a tough ride.

Great article. The titanic effort was well worth it. A great and easy to navigate site that for sure will have a strong audience.

The 24-70L is not good for stock. It is a convenient lens but with many problems. Borders are unsharp, many chromatic aberrations and uneven quality depending on the focal length. Primes trump any zoom always. Tele zooms are ok but wideangle ones in Canon territory are of borderline quality to pass the inspection process.

$$. When this is no longer there I might switch to the "indie" troop.

 I'd love a year without vague announcements, major site outages, 'projects that are good for the company and not for us but about which we're supposed to do back flips'.....just make the site work, let us do our work, with the bar set firmly in a fair position. lose the drama.

Lets hope so. Istock can command higher prices than competition....because of "some" exclusives. When those are throwing away the ring that binds them, that reasoning is over. The trust seems so deteriorated for many that a bone is not going to recover it. If they don't start to improve relations with contributors and attain a reliable site 2012 might be a "complicate" year.

I'm not sure if you are better off shooting "popular subject and style" against Yuri, Andre and 500 others or shooting unpopular subjects against one or two people nobody ever heard of. I do OK without "popular" stuff. Big fish in small pond or tiny fish in huge pond ... who gets more?

"Popular subject and style" is much better suited for micro even which a much tougher competition. I really think micro is not the best place for niche images. If you shoot really niche images, that anybody can access or create then your potential buyers will be willing to pay much more because they have no other choice to do so. This is the reason why macro still exists. Some images are just not viable as micro and at the same time so unique that they still sell for the thousands.  With Vetta and Agency they created a realm in micro were images with more "artistic o production value" were financially possible to create. That's OK and good for the photographer and good for the client that gets images that would not be there in the first place if it would make no economic sense to produce them. The problem comes when many of those "Vettas and Agencies" have similar competition with much cheaper prices so shouldn't wear the Vetta/Agency tag in the first place. This gives a bad impression to buyers that don't understand with good reason why they are priced tenth fold.