Quote from: djpadavona on October 01, 2013, 22:38

Quote from: Alamy on September 30, 2013, 05:49

- Sale clearing times. Unlike many other agencies, we report sales in real time. This means, you get notification of the sale when the licence is ordered, not when the client pays. When the client pays, the sale becomes cleared and your balance updated in your Alamy account. Why do sales take at least 45 days to clear? For account customers, depending on who they are and their deal with us, some will have long payment terms. This is normal in the industry, and that's one reason for the time delay. The other, is to allow a grace period where a refund can be issued for the customer. Projects get swapped around and changed frequently and we need to be flexible and allow cancellations of licences within a short time period. If you've ever had a 'refund' on an Alamy sale as a contributor, then it's likely that the sale had never cleared. With that in mind, a refund is more like a cancellation.

"At least 45 days" is very vague. I had a $245 sale in early July, and we are going on 3 months without clearance yet. It doesn't give me much confidence that the buyer still hasn't committed to the image after a quarter of a year.

Hi Dan, same here, 21 June, I emailed MS and their reply was distributor sales will take longer than 90 days to clear. MS said it could take up to 120 days or more !!!

So I have to wait another 3 months to get paid, thats 8 months. Screw that, I am dropping Alamy as soon as that payment has cleared.

I've been waiting for a payment to clear since June 2012, that's well over a year now!!!! I think I can say goodbye to that sale.

I got the email this morning, just sent them my link to SS portfolio. They probably won't be taking vector files but still sent them the link anyway. You never know 

Is it worth to work for almost zero $?
I have already reduced upload on 123, CS, and DP.
And stopped on BS.

Yeah, I see where you are coming from, it does feel like working for peanuts. If the amount of sales were vastly increasing I wouldn't mind the drop in royalties too much, but that is just not happening, well not for me it isn't.

I do vector images and I've recently signed up and loaded some of my port to a new vector only agency who are offering 70% commission, and the cost to a buyer for each standard license is $19.99, so 70% of that amount is great, also their EL licenses sell to buyers for $99.99 and the royalty on those is still 70% which is super duper. I've heard some are getting sales from this new agency, so I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will take off. If I start getting results from there, then I will seriously take a good look at all the low paying agencies to consider whether to carry on uploading or not.

Quote from: toots on February 20, 2013, 07:41

Yeah, I deactivated all images except for one and I'm seeing my commissions rise almost everytime I refresh the page.

I checked thinkstock and there is only that one image there, all the rest have gone, so how come all of a sudden I'm getting downloads from the pp on just one single image - weird.

BTW that image has never had any sales on IS.

I had luckily already cashed out before I deactivated and only had around 3$ in my account, now it's up to almost 9$ just for that one image 

When did you deactivate your files?

This is the January payout

2 or 3 weeks before D-day. As soon as I heard about the google drive deal.

So I suppose these royalties are coming in from January sales on pp sites. Just thought it was weird that they're coming in daily and almost hourly. I would have thought that all royalties from the month would arrive in one go.

I'd only just started to upload my port to IS in late November/early December I think, so I'm probably a bit naive as to how the pp royalties are normally paid out.

Yeah, I deactivated all images except for one and I'm seeing my commissions rise almost everytime I refresh the page.

I checked thinkstock and there is only that one image there, all the rest have gone, so how come all of a sudden I'm getting downloads from the pp on just one single image - weird.

BTW that image has never had any sales on IS.

I had luckily already cashed out before I deactivated and only had around 3$ in my account, now it's up to almost 9$ just for that one image 

Question for Chris @ ToonVectors:

As toonvectors is basically a vector site even though you throw in a jpg version, should we upload designs with e.g. "sample text", "vector EPS10 transparency" text within the design or would you prefer we left such text off the vectors along with their corresponding jpg's.

Placing text like that on some images sometimes gives a visual representation to buyers as to what the image looks like with text on, sort of bringing it alive if you know what I mean. It's the jpg version that you're including which I'm concerned about.

I wouldn't want to lose sales because I've included text, but there again I'm more for selling the vectors of which text is easily removable.

Just sent you a PM. This system has always been very easy for me. Hopefully we can figure out what is going on.

Thanks yeah I got your pm, but it was dinner time so I had to come off computer, then got a visitor doh. Always happens when you're trying to do something new eh 

Hmm, it uploaded my .eps file but wouldn't upload the jpg, now I can't find out how to upload again. Shucks a learning curve coming up here me thinks.

All of my deactivation files are still on Thinkstock.  It was 3283 three weeks ago.  I deactivated 21.  Nothing happened on TS.  A week ago I sent a nice (really nice) e-mail to Support, they appologized for the delay and told me the files would be gone in 48h (and they sincerely thanked me for supplying the Thinkstock file numbers!).  48h later 20 of the 21 were gone.  Now I'm on 3263 images, one of the early deactivations is "stuck", and the 1052 I did yesterday too of course.
I hope they don't expect me to look up 1052 Thinkstock numbers .... 

With the amount of deactivations yesterday I wouldn't be surprised if it will take longer for all those images to come off Thinkstock, however with technology as it is today it should really be an automated procedure where the images are removed almost instantly imo.

Quote from: StanRohrer on February 02, 2013, 10:31

Quote from: tickstock on February 02, 2013, 02:26

Quote from: Poncke on February 02, 2013, 02:22

Did someone keep track of the image number on IS? Did someone write it up?

Total files 12706381
Waiting approval 62295
http://www.istockphoto.com/stats

Now:
Total files 12696943
Waiting approval 63614

Total files 12694959
Waiting approval 63822
(11,422 files in the past 12 hours)

Don't forget that Getty has started uploading thousands of their clipart.com images to Istock in order to get them through to Thinkstock. With all this going on I would think it a bit difficult to estimate the totals as we don't know how many cliparts are in the waiting approval queue or in the total files number 

MacTribe tweeted about an interview with Jonathan Klein - including blurb about the award he received last year and the awful quote about protecting IP and contributor livelihoods. So I replied with a link to Sean's blog about the Google mess:

https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/296380318284386305

Unbelievable 

Lies, lies and more lies 

Lisa, does that include people from the IS forum, or only people here? My guess is only people from here, but just checking.

I was wondering that too, coz the last tallied total I saw was over 44,000.