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Topics - iStop

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Getty just increased the download targets necessary for exclusive contributors on photos sales in 2020 to 8,500 downloads to reach 35% royalties and to 34,500 to reach 40% royalties. In 2019 you needed only 6,500 to get 35% royalties and 26,500 to get 40% royalties. To get 45% royalties you now need 515,000 downloads, up from 396,000 downloads in 2019. So they are basically cutting peoples royalty again and perhaps within another year or two they will make the targets so high that everyone who is exclusive will end up on a flat 20% (or less).

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iStockPhoto.com / From Getty With Love...
« on: December 24, 2017, 09:28 »
The News

Quote
In 2017 the Download Target system has rewarded Exclusive contributors as we had hoped. Many have achieved higher royalty rates during 2017 and will keep these as their starting rates for 2018, plus many more contributors are moving up than will move down.

Really? Really? But wait, it gets better. All that hard work has paid off for you. Your being rewarded and here comes the love:

Quote
Were now pleased to share the Download Targets for 2018, which will be effective from January 1, 2018. Youll see that the targets are higher in 2018 by about 10%, which is designed to balance out these customer download trends.

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iStockPhoto.com / Ode To iStock
« on: June 25, 2014, 08:30 »
iStock now resembles the deer that was shot by the master hunter and fatally wounded. It has run swiftly and further into the winding forest after being startled by the sound of the huntsmens gun and being deeply pierced in the neck by the rifles bullet. It now can no longer run anymore after having sprinted long and aimlessly on borrowed time whilst carrying the lethal lead in its flesh. Exhausted by its deep wound, and weakened by its blood loss, it's sprint has now slowed to a subdued trot, deliriously delving it deeper into the unknown forest. The buck is losing its footing bit by bit each step it struggles to take, slipping on damp, moss covered rocks, stumbling ahead, now barely able to even maintain any sure footing. Alas, it is finally faltering, grappling to continue to lumber forward at all. Lay down and rest my poor, tired beast. The flesh quivering on your bones, you are only moments away from resting your weary head on the soft earth that awaits to pass you lucidly into the afterlife. iStock my dear, RIP.

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Following is in my opinion a summary of the top 5 reason why sales on iStock are tanking for Exclusives.

I am curious if other people feel the main reasons are the same or different?

My list goes in order, starting with what I think is the top reason:

1 - No Upload Limits For Indies & Lower Quality Acceptance Criteria Than Before
2 - Overall Loss Of iStock Buyers
3 - Subs Pricing Available On All Photos
4 - High Pricing On All Exclusive Content
5 - No Views Or Sales On New Uploads

Also, the search results probably don't help either. The fact that the best match is always changing, and often not for the better, isn't good. Plus, Exclusives no longer being able to choose which collection their content goes into is a setback too.

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iStockPhoto.com / Royalty Percentage Drop, Bug Or Not?
« on: January 08, 2014, 09:08 »
According to my stats, my royalty rate has dropped one level at the start of the year even though iStock had said that we would be kept at the same rate for the coming year.

I wonder if this is a known bug, if other contributors are seeing the same issue, if iStock has said anything about this yet, and if they are going to fix it and pay us later for the remainder of royalties due as of the start of the new year?

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I know a lot of people aren't uploading much to iStock anymore, but I uploaded a bunch of stuff this month and I was amazed how most of the pictures I uploaded got inspected within just a couple of hours. On top of that, everything I uploaded was accepted, including some stuff that would have perhaps never passed inspection before.

From this I draw 2 conclusions; Inspectors don't have a lot of pictures to review these days (because uploads are down so much) such that when you upload something it gets inspected right away. Secondly, they have dropped their standards of quality tremendously to encourage people to start uploading again and that is why I have a 100% acceptance rate now. They also aren't nearly as concerned about duplicate images from a shoot as they were before.

The fact that they will pretty much accept anything though is a dangerous double edged sword. Sure, it makes life a lot easier for contributors. For one they don't have to work as hard as before to achieve a certain standard of picture to get something up on iStock and they can add to their portfolios faster by throwing up lower quality images which are easier to snap quickly. The bad thing though is that the buyers are not being offered the same standard of quality as before.

What always set iStock apart from other pixel peddlers was that they had a more discriminately curated, high quality collection and buyers recognized that. Now the standards of quality are all over the shop. This has to start hurting sales further at some point though when buyers can no longer tell the difference in quality between pictures on iStock and other sites. And if there is no difference in quality, then why will buyers pay more for pictures on iStock at all?

The fact that there are no upload limits, combined with the fact that they will accept just about anything now, makes the whole situation much scarier.

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iStockPhoto.com / iStock Site Down?
« on: July 12, 2013, 23:54 »
I can get onto the main site page, but can't login or access the forums at the moment. I get a 503 error page. Anyone else experiencing the same? I don't see any announcement about it on their Twitter page either.

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iStockPhoto.com / Feb Getty Bump
« on: March 26, 2013, 08:57 »
I don't get it. I just got my Getty bump for Feb and I had many sales where I was paid $1 to $2 in earnings only. How can this be? These are E+ files that on iStock even at an XS sized sale will earn quite a bit more than that. I realize on Getty we only get 20%, but the prices are much higher to start with for RF on Getty than IStock. This makes no mathematical sense. This means some of our E+ files are selling on Getty for $5 if $1 is 20% of the sale price. Can this be true? Are we getting hood winked here?

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iStockPhoto.com / Tweaking The Dials
« on: January 25, 2013, 06:25 »
There is all this talk over at Camp-iStock about tweaking the dials on the best match. This is what I was talking about when I said before about "too little and too late" measures to try and breathe life back into the site.

All that's going to come of this "dial tweaking" is a few different files are going to sell than the types of files that have been selling most recently. Is it going to increase sales for people? No, how could it?

As we already know, best match only controls what files people buy, but not how many.

So while people have hopes of a best match tweak messiah, you can't sell more files to people who aren't there to buy them in the first place.

And Getty isn't going to do what they really need to do to increase traffic which are things like lowering prices and spending money on marketing campaigns. So everyone should get used to the status quo of sales and not be hoping for anything more. You will never see Getty reaching into their pockets to spend money to make money unless it is to buyout another small stock agency and bury it.

I also don't think we have hit bottom yet on iStock. Many people this month are poised to sell less than they did even last month.

That means if we follow the heavily declining buying trend that started in September, then February could be even worse than January.

I guess that serves us right for believing in fairies. Maybe the next person from HQ who shows up with empty promises of ways to improve our sales will be named Santa.

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iStockPhoto.com / September: The Start Of The Sales Sham
« on: December 17, 2012, 03:26 »
I find it interesting how all of a sudden sales fell off a cliff for most people when they rolled out the site changes at the beginning of September.

But why did sales fall off a cliff? Well, because in part they flooded the site with more Getty Agency content than any buyer could ever need and pushed lots of iStock best sellers and E+ files to the bottom of the heap.

So I think it's clear what happened really. The best match didn't break and the buyers didn't all run away so quickly all of a sudden come September.

What happened was Getty saw that we are coming into the high selling season on iStock. So they felt what better way to make more sales on high priced Getty content (with only 20% contributor payouts) than by pushing all the popular selling iStock images out of the way and to the back of the best match and move all the Getty stuff right up front on iStock.

At the same time, all of the top selling E+ iStock content was supposed to be moved over to Getty since around the end of the summer if I recall correctly. But alas there was site problems all of a sudden with the content migration onto Getty and the iStock content didn't get moved over to the main Getty site really until the high selling season was nearly over. Interesting coincidence there too.

Now all of a sudden iStock is finally starting to acknowledge a best match mix problem as countless contributors point out issues along with screen shots showing examples of how the best match is so heavily weighted against iStock contributor content.

Again, very serendipitous timing though with their tweaks to the best match the other day to try and appease iStock contributors, but given the fact that the high selling season is now over. In fact, the best match tweak came out only once we are into December, one of the worst months for sales of the year.

Is the timing of all of this perhaps only coincidence?

Meanwhile most iStock contributors were scratching their heads wondering how iStock could possibly roll out all these site changes and allow the site to get screwed up as we came into the high selling season. The truth is they didn't screw up the site at the beginning of September. They merely screwed iStock contributors out of their rightful selling opportunity during the high selling months and Getty came out the winner instead.

I also find it interesting how Getty content on iStock comes up at the top of the best match results and how E+ content on Getty comes up so low in the Getty search results.

I guess what we are seeing is how little value iStock contributors really have to Getty and how they are only really interested in using the iStock site traffic mainly to sell more Getty content via iStock while iStock contributors get cannibalized by the lack of sales on iStock's own content.

I also imagine September through November were good sales months for Getty contributors with lots of Agency collection pictures on iStock.

Now it makes more sense why the HQ admins say that sales have been meeting "their" expectations. They are speaking of Getty as a whole.

All of this will also help improve Getty's bottom line for next year as many iStock contributors miss their RC targets and end up falling down on their royalty rates.

I would love to think none of this is true. But I think a lot of the evidence is their to support all of this.

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iStockPhoto.com / Blatant Lies - iStock Refund Policies
« on: December 13, 2012, 07:49 »
Quote

3. Why do we remove royalties for fraudulent downloads?

It stops contributors (real or faked) from self downloading with credits bought with stolen credit cards and absconding with the royalties.

Is this saying the only reason they charge back contributors on fraud is to prevent contributors from using stolen credit cards to download their own content and then pocket the royalties?

Interesting. How many stolen credit cards do you have lying around at the moment? Well, last time I checked, I had none. Funny that.

iStock really has a lot of gaul suggesting their contributors use stolen credit cards to steal money from iStock. This is simply salt in the wound and what they have done here is twisted things around to say contributors are guilty of fraud and the punishment is for contributors to be charged back when in fact it is iStock that permits a contributor's intellectual property to be stolen and wrongfully used by criminals. Leave it to lawyers to come up with schemes like this though. Well, I think it's more than obvious the real reason they charge back contributors on fraud. Nuff said.

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4. What is the refund policy on iStockphoto.com?

Customers have 14 days to return a file for credit. When they return a file, they agree to not use that file going forward. In order to reduce any abuse of their agreement, we closely monitor patterns of refund behavior by customers. Additionally our compliance enforcement team handles unlicensed uses.

I have at least 120 refunds this year. 40% of them are from sales that were made last year and at least 80% are on sales that are older than 14 days.

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iStockPhoto.com / Zoom Tool Is Back But In Cognito
« on: December 12, 2012, 01:40 »
Alas, a hidden zoom tool. If I couldn't find it at first glance, then how will buyers even know its there? The image close up page looks the same. Buyers will just assume nothing has changed if they go to an image and don't bother to search for a stealth mouse over function. A note by the side of the image saying "Click On Image To Zoom/Enlarge" or something of that nature would be helpful. I am sure more than 50% of the buyers won't have a clue that its back nor will new first time buyer visitors know that it's a site feature.

Often a disappointment when they enact something it seems. An email directly to buyers would be great to at least let them know its there now rather than just a post hidden within the belly of the contributor forums, although don't hold your breath. They are not known for their efforts to keeps buyers informed of site modifications or problems.

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iStockPhoto.com / The Fall Of An Empire
« on: December 03, 2012, 19:53 »
Historically empires rise and fall. This may be a first time in history where an empire solely destroyed itself.

Reading this post from a buyer makes you realize that all of the recent destruction of iStock's buyer base could have been avoided if iStock just knew the meaning of "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It".

Just having to read this kind of post from a buyer makes you realize that if someone knows how to run a business that things would never ever reach such a critical breaking point. It's a shame a buyer is left to feel this desperate. What a pity.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=349485&page=1

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iStockPhoto.com / Downloads Versus Uploads - Last 12 Months
« on: December 02, 2012, 09:15 »
I did a calculation and discovered that I grew my portfolio with new uploads by 25% over the last 12 months starting from November of 2011.

Meanwhile, my downloads in November 2012 are 60% lower than they were in November 2011.

I wonder how my percentage of uploads to downloads compares to others for the last 12 month period?

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