As this is specifically a microstock group, maybe you could tell us how to prevent our content, legitimately purchased and online, from being indexed by Google for subsequent free lifting by the world and his wife, which as I showed not long ago, Google openly advocates.

there are many ways, all server-side, these are the most common to avoid "hot linking" :

1 - block the googlebots using the robots.txt
2 - block them using ".htaccess"
3 - forbid bots from scraping any .jpg file

It's not just agency reps.  I think the greater loss is the big contributors, they had a ton to offer but were run out of here.  Sean is the only one I can think of that is still around.

cost/benefits analysis.

after a while all the most common topics are discussed to death and it gets boring.

Serban was not simply the agency rep.  He owns Dreamstime.  It was not his job to come here and answer questions.  He did it as a courtesy, and it was appreciated by many but just not the loudest ones.  When you own your own company you don't have to make contributor relations your job.  You can hire it out or leave it altogether.  I don't see that it is unprofessional for a CEO to decide they don't want to put themself out there to be attacked.

in my experience CEOs are disastrous at answering to complaints in public forums/blogs/socials .. these guys are used to give orders and to manage teams, it's not in their nature to deal peacefully with sneaky attacks from anonymous users and/or trolls.

bwahahahaha !!!!

stock photos are so fake and cheesy they've become a joke and it's going mainstream now !

I can remember the day Serban had enough and said he would never come participate here again.  Can't remember why exactly, but that he was attacked and I was a little disgusted with our behaviour.

That's very unprofessional, and if their job includes posting on forums and socials they better learn how to deal with their own user base or find another career.

I had to listen to the most ridicolous BS and trash and even a few insults when i was working in retail, face to face, i've never lost my frame and neither my colleagues or we would have been fired on the spot ...

I don't know why for so many it's so hard to deal with people online and with their complaints, i guess some of them are just plain jerks and they're even more jerks in real life ?

Adobe is an engineering company, as expected they're now reinventing the wheel ... but hey give 'em some time to fix all the bugs ...

Plurals : yeah and what about languages where apart the plurals you also use declinations etc ? all these search engines are just a big mess.

Are there any specialized RM agencies for those kind of shoots?

Blend Images, for instance, they're with Getty.

But .. if you seriously feel that those photos are top notch quality you could try selling them as Fine Art to art galleries or art exhibitions, or to fashion magazines that could be interested in that specific style/niche.

if the material is big enough you could also make a Fine Art book out of it.

I'm surprised nobody is outraged to see that Apple is paying more than 70% royalties while iStock is paying us as little as 15%.

it's the living proof that selling music is cheaper and more profitable than selling stock images.

the after tax net profit of agencies like SS is around 20-25% at best, in the very best scenario they could pay us 40%, maybe even 50%, but never ever 70%, that was unsustainable even in the 90s which is supposed to be the "golden era" of stock ...

But that single artist alone is worth Billions not to mention marketing and advertising.

What single Micro shooter is worth billions to any micro company?

Yuri aside.

Not to forget to mention that the music industry is completely different then Micro is by miles.

The music industry will back their artists with everything they have, what micro site is willing to do that for one contributor?

i still prefer to make 0.30$ per download on SS than 0.30$ on iTunes or Beatport, i can easily make a saleable image with little effort, but it can take days or work to make a song.

moreover, my photos will sell for a few years at least while the shelf life of a song is 2-3 months and if we talk about EDM it's 20-30 days !

micro sites will never promote a single artist, but the so called "boutique agencies" will, up to you to get the foot in the door, of course at this point they're the exception to the rule but it doesn't mean it's impossible to make a brand out of your images.

my opinion, the real problem we're facing nowadays is that people will be glad to waste 100$ on a dinner or to get drunk on friday night but they'll be literally shocked if someone asks them money for a photo or a painting or a song.

books are also the last thing they plan to buy, and what about commercial software or artsy merchandising, good luck with that.

for whatever reason, after decades of free piracy for all it's becoming now socially accepted and expected to pay nothing for anything digital apart their ISP and their 3G/4G connection.

now, should be blame and shame the users or shoud we accept that times have changed radically since the 90s ?
my feeling is the supply is NOT meeting the demand and of course it can't compete with piracy on any level.

if we look at countries where there's no enforced copyright laws and piracy is fully legal, the musicians make money only with gigs and private parties, especially with weddings, while the photographers too are big on weddings and fashion and assignment, nobody would make a dime with stock apart for wire news photographers and nobody would get rich selling CDs or t-shirts.

is this the future ? i think yes, this is what's in store for all of us basically, but stock will survive especially for news and travel but you need a huge portfolio to stay afloat ... while we discuss if 0.30$ per download is a fair price i see old ladies from eastern europe earning 8-10 euro per hour for cleaning toilets, just to give you a different perspective ... the equivalent of 20-30 downloads in just 1 hour, no matter if you're super fast at shooting saleable images, it still pays like sh-it ... what about specialized mechanical workers, 25 euro/hr ... what about lawyers, doctors, engineers, or even middle managers earning 100K/year ?

making and selling images will never make you rich, it's a lifestyle and has it's pros and cons, but all this discussion about money doesn't make any sense, even Yuri admitted he felt like selling cheap burgers considering how much he spent on production and that's true for him and true for us ... we should just keep microstock as a side hobby and focus on fine-art or other fields where our work is appreciated and paid accordingly.



 

So I have no clue how all these different versions of famous songs were even possible to be uploaded to Youtube in the first place?

and that's nothing, try searching any movies pre-1990 on youtube, there's so many of them, full version, some even 3 hrs long ! quality is hit or miss but you can watch it for free and nobody is complaining, only the recent movies are removed, it seems that anything at least 20 yrs old is OK and won't be taken down.

Apple may be ruthless but not stupid.

the music industry is in dire straits.

- paid downloads on iTunes etc are declining year on year.
- streaming is booming but is unprofitable.
- selling physical CDs is a thing of the past
- piracy and freeloading are now openly tolerated if we think about Youtube
- most of the mainstream music is stuck in a limbo since 20 yrs
- EDM in the USA is the "new Disco" and will soon crash and burn

matter of fact, i was recently listening to hard to find old tunes and guess what, i found 99% of them on Youtube, often with very good quality and i also found bootlegs and video from the same artists that i've never heard of .. all stuff that is probably not even on sale.

on top of this there are musicophiles forums specialized in obscure artists, providing tons of links and free stuff.

i was also searching for a bunch of Jimi Hendrix song, i ended up finding a lot more than that and just out of curiosity i grabbed a whopping 30GB torrent with his entire discography including cover scans and super rare tracks that you can't find in any online store since they've probably never been published .. suffice to say all the tracks are in FLAC format (lossless) and sound as good as the original CDs, a few have been remastered by hendrix fans.

now, what's next ? a single reason i should pay for anything ... i don't know .. at this point everything is going to change big time but how are the artists supposed to make even a tiny profit, who knows.

If Apple cannot pay artist for a trial period then who can?

Nobody.

Apple Music and the other music streaming services have been grounded on a solid business model, even the actual market leader (Pandora) is losing millions and it's ridicolous valuation is so high just because we're in the middle of another economic bubble ... their only realistic plans is for their early investors to sell the hot cakes to the muppets at the right time just as they do with all the other failed startups.

sure, music streaming can be profitable, just as long as the artists don't get paid.

i mean, they're paying zero compared to video streaming : on Youtube you can get at least 1$ per 1000 video views ... on Pandora it's around 1$ (gross !) per 15000 streams ... this goes straight to the publisher, not to you ... your final payout is maybe around 1$ per 60-70000 streams.

after all there's a good reason if radio advertising doesn't pay as well as TV ads.

even if Pandora or Apple Music triple their subscriber fees it just doesn't pay enough to make it a profitable business, this has been debated to death since more than 15 yrs, since the time of the first web radios.

As selling stock is a numbers game and today we're talking about agencies having archives made of 50+ millions images, why would they need to please a few stockers on a niche online forum ?

I dont see any positive ROI on that for the top agencies, it only makes sense for the small fries and the newcomers to come here and to get some free exposure for their products.

Market leaders like SS just don't need us anymore, they're well past the initial phase when they were dependant on the good will of the top uploaders .. now contributors are dime a dozen, including the top sellers, we've just no leverage now.