Canstock implemented a new contributor website a few months ago.  My first reaction was annoyance at some removed capabilities around releases, but that's turned to fury at their sheer incompetence.  Here's my problem:

I had a request from a model to remove her images. Never mind why; her reasons were personal and I decided to accede to her request.  So I looked for an easy way to locate her images.  I noted that the release page has a count of images tied to each release, but sadly no way to actually get to those images.  So I did it the hard way, which in my case meant locating them manually among more than 400 pages of images.  Okay, annoying but not a big deal.

Except it isn't so simple.  First, the links to move among pages only permits moving to the next page or the one after, which gets old when you need to move ahead by more than 100 pages.  And then I ran afoul of some major bug, where before I can get to the page I need, my page forward request freezes around the same place every time.

Bugs happen, but here's where poor design makes things infinitely worse.  Old style web pages use URLs to navigate.  That's good because they can use parameters within the URL to indicate where to go.  If there's a parameter for page number (or image number for that matter), it's easy to edit the URL to move ahead an arbitrary number of pages.  Shutterstock, Dreamstime and others do it that way and make navigation easy.

A more modern approach to web content is called Ajax.  It uses Javascript to permit content to be updated in place.  Instead of going to a new web page, the current page replaces one set of content with new stuff.  In theory it's a cleaner and potentially more efficient design.  Except that you lose any ability to override parameters and skip a bunch of content you don't need to see.  Or to go back to a page and try again, like when there's a bug that keeps a particular page from loading.  Or to use the Control key to open a new tab or window for new content.  In essence, you lose a lot of the benefits of a web interface.  And if you're stuck because of a bug, your only option is to go back to the beginning and hope against hope that it won't fail this time.  Which it does, every time I've tried it for a couple of weeks now.

I put in a support request before the New Year.  Still waiting for anything beyond an automated acknowledgement.

Here's a new one, at least to me.  I was about to submit some new images to BigStock when I discovered that my previous batch had been rejected and were back in the edit queue.

Reason: [[MISSING MODEL RELEASE DATA: Each release must contain the printed names and signatures as well as contact information for the Photographer and the Model, and name and signature of the Witness.

The releases in question were filled out in full.  The new requirement: contact information for the photographer.  And sure enough, the release BigStock offers has space for this.  But what changed that the Getty release isn't good enough any more?  And, given the fact that they already have my contact information, what's the reasoning behind demanding that same information on every release, a release I only share with BigStock and other agencies that also have my contact info on file?

The easy answer would be to add this stuff to these releases.  But an easier answer would be to suggest they piss off.  Is the small amount I make from them worth any extra effort?

(Okay, rant over.  Thanks for listening.)

A little earlier today, 123RF finally passed by StockXpert for #5 in lifetime earnings for me.  That it took so long is a reminder of how good SX used to be, before iStock bought it up and then fscked it up.  But it's also an indication of how well 123 has done for me.  Over the last year it's been my #3 earner, behind only Shutterstock and iStock.  As I continue to reduce my iStock port, I wonder how long until 123 moves even higher.

It's been agonizing to watch my slow sales the past few days, so close to the $10,000 milestone and a royalty increase.  The wait's finally over thanks to an Extended License.  Even sweeter, the image was among the first taken with my new 10-24mm lens:


It'll take a while to cover the cost of the lens, but suddenly I don't mind quite so much.

Doing my way-too-many-times-a-day check of the agencies when I stopped dead.  My total revenue at Veer had jumped an order of magnitude!  Three medium sized sales, followed by three extended licenses for each of the same images.  Total revenue: $110.25.  Let's do that a few more times, shall we?

I tend to get pretty cranky when I read the perceived wisdom of a new microstocker, full of pronouncements based on a couple of months' sales of a couple of hundred images.  Part of that reaction is general crankiness; I've reached that age, after all, and enjoy the privileges it confers.  But part of it is my own experience after doing this for a while, and my own understanding of the proper use and limitations of statistical methods. 

It's generally a bad idea to extrapolate from small data sets.  That was brought home to me today, when I saw that my balance at BigStock has nearly doubled since the last time I'd checked.  Lo and behold, this doubling was the result of a single extended license sale, the equivalent of between 40 and 80 regular sales there.  That was enough to vault BigStock from 7th to 3rd place for December, and to make a mockery of any attempt to estimate my sales for the month.

Fortunately, I've figured out a better way to look for revenue trends.  Instead of looking solely at sales by month, I've adopted a 12 month moving sum.  The idea is that for each month I add all the sales for the past year, with November including everything from the previous October, October going through the previous September and so on.  Not only does this give me larger numbers of sales, so a single or even a few surprises won't affect the total much, but it compensates for seasonal variations; every figure includes a result from every month of the year.  So assuming sales tank in December, or during summer holidays in the Northern Hemisphere, what I'm seeing are the success of my growing (and partially aging) portfolio, the microstock economy and perhaps the economy as a whole.

The attached graph shows two trend lines.  The blue line tracks monthly revenue, the red shows revenue for the year leading up to that month.  Blue shows an increase in revenue, but it's hard to tell with all the variation in customers' buying habits over the course of the year.  The red line makes the trend more obvious, and shows where my portfolio was gaining real traction.  Of course, I could also track the size of my port or other events that would explain the trends.  But the important thing is to eliminate as much of the noise as possible and concentrate on what's happening over the long haul.

I hope somebody else finds this interesting.  It does require of course that you have enough data, which is why my graph begins around my first anniversary with Shutterstock and iStock.  Before that point, I just didn't have enough information to form an insight.  Oh, and apologies for not including any scale information.  There is such a thing as oversharing, right?

No joy trying to fulfill my upload quota this morning.  The web interface claims my image isn't big enough.  It is; it's a full 12 megapixel image.  I wouldn't mind quite so much if their quota system didn't penalize me for every minute I'm permitted to upload and don't.

According to their website, they've been fixing upload problems.  Guess this one's still waiting to be repaired.

Just watching tonight's Rachel Maddow Show, and was fascinated to learn that a clean coal grassroots organization is drawing its grassroots membership from the iStockphoto collection.  Yep, it's twoo: all their members are stock images!


Apologies for anyone who finds this too political, but it does raise interesting questions of appropriate use.

A question on the Micropayment Yahoo group got me thinking about agency performance in a different way.  The member reported a sharp drop in sales at Shutterstock and Dreamstime this year and wanted to know if others were seeing similar results.  To be a little scientific about it, I compared the past twelve month's sales to the previous period: September, 2008 - August, 2009 (extrapolated to a full month) vs. September, 2007 - August, 2008.  What I saw surprised me a little.

Here's the thing: Shutterstock did 62% better for me this past year than the year before.  Dreamstime did half that: 30% year over year.  But iStockphoto was the shocker: a grand total of 1% better this year than last.  All that time and energy uploading just to stay where I was.

Of course, part of the difference is that I'm able to grow my portfolios at Shutterstock and Dreamstime (and others) as fast as I can create new images.  On September 1, 2007 I had fewer than 1700 images at Shutterstock.  By 9/1/08 I was up to nearly 3000; now I'm over 6300.  (I submit the same images to Dreamstime.  Any difference in port size is down to DT's review process.)

By comparison, iStock's upload limits have held me back in a major way.  My iStock port was under 1000 on 9/1/07, just under 1600 on 9/1/08 and around 2300 today.  Given the way images age and the vagaries of search algorithms and other factors beyond my control, the best I can expect is to tread water there.  And I doubt somehow identifying my best and most salable images for upload would change that result all that much.

Which is all food for thought.  Measuring incremental effort against potential gain, looks like there's a lot more value in generating more content for Shutterstock and then feeding it to the others than there is from the two hours a week I spend uploading and disambiguating on iStock.

Every time I think I've seen maximal arbitrariness, iStock proves me wrong.  Today's batch of acceptances and rejections included four rejections:

Upon initial inspection, we have determined that your file Blonde requires a model or property release for it to be considered for inclusion in the iStockphoto library.

The following note was supplied by an administrator:

Incomplete information (addresses, phone numbers etc.) Please have a new release filled out and uploaded.

++missing signature date for witness++

I find a few things interesting about this one.  First, that the rest of the batch were accepted with exactly the same release.  Second, that this hasn't been an issue with any of the releases I've submitted over the past year and a half.  And third, because I always have the release witnessed by someone who was there to see the release filled out.  After all, how can they witness something they didn't, ummm, witness?

So I wrote in the date the release was signed (and witnessed) and uploaded it.  We'll see what happens.  And then we'll see what outrage they come up with next.

Would someone please tell me I'm overreacting?  I'm going through my latest review notices from iStock.  Some of the images were rejected for inappropriate keywords, others were accepted despite their disapproval of those same keywords.  The keywords in question: women & child.  The subject: a fifteen year old girl.  Am I wrong to think that a client might find either one relevant, in addition to words like female and teenager?

Of course, a keyword rejection is a double whammy at iStock.  Since I get so few upload slots in the first place, it's unlikely I'll ever have the chance to revisit the rejected images.