LOGOFF ... forever.

farewell.

i like your reply !

finally somebody here who knows what he's talking about.

Quote from: macrosaur on September 09, 2010, 06:52

the worst is still to come :

getty pays 20%, and now istock is getty owned, therefore the obvious conclusion will be that anyone including the top sellers will get 20% on istock before or later.

i think they'll announce it in january, wait and see !

But istock have exclusive contributors.  They wouldn't accept 20%, look at what is happening now.  I don't think they are that stupid but they have proved me wrong in the past.

exactly because they're exclusives they're "locked in" or better "screwed in".

only 10% of the exclusives wrote in the forum, the remaining 90% doesn't give a crap apparently
and will eat the soon-to-come 20% royalty without making any fuss, after all they chose to
be exclusive to put their eggs in just one basket isnt it ?

leaving istock would take months and months of re-uploading somewhere else,
and months again to stabilize their biz in their new agencies, that means only 3 options
by the way : FT, DT, and SS, and they'll be at their mercy anyways so is the migration
really worth the hassle ? i don't think so and so will think most of the exclusives, wait and see
by yourself !

As a few people know here, I'm working on a stock guild site. The scripts aren't ready yet for easy upload. It won't be a direct sales site but merely present a link to existing agencies. The purpose is to catch random traffic from Google etc... I have some indications that this tactic can work.

Setting up a multi-photographer stock site is very easy to do actually, and with total financial transparency. The problem will be server load when it expands. The scripts I have don't account for server load.

The initial investment is under 500$, the hosting might be 2-300$ per year. Consider Photoshelter (330$) and Smugmug (150$) per year with commissions 9-15%. Did those do anybody any good? Overview here.

To get any substantial earnings from it (pricing at 20$), it needs exclusive content or picscout and other aps in the making will find out. Moreover, anybody running the site will be perceived as a competitor by the existing stock sites, and personally, I don't like to give up my earnings and karma at DT or SS. Because, they will retaliate (rightly so).

hosting tens of thousands of images for just 300$/year ? good luck, you'll need it.

nothing will change soon.

the IS exclusives are too much "locked in" to make any quick move elsewhere.

if something wil happens it will take months to get noticed and despite the people ranting on IS forum
are very vocal they only represent no more than 10% of the exclusives there, the remaining 90% either
don't give a sh-it or are even happy to hear other competitors are leaving....

the rich are getting richer, and the slaves are fighting each other ... how sad !

you guys are all wrong :

we're selling a DIGITAL product !

if we look at the royalties paid in most of the Internet Marketing business i've never seen anyone getting more than 20% of the sale price for selling or re-selling or promoting someone else product on the web, and this is even more true for the biggest affiliate companies like Commission Junction, TradeDoubler, and Zanox who make millions of sales every day worldwide !

Getty pretending an 85% cut of the sale is just ... hahaha ... unbelievable and unthinkable even in their weirdest dreams, nowhere in the past history of stock an agency ever paid so low !

the real problem of microstock is that it started cheap and it started as a joke, and so it remained for the years to come, you can't expect a business like that goes up to premium prices and therefore premium payouts in a snap.

as a matter of fact the opposite happened, and i'm not the least surprised.

you're treated like monkeys now because YOU accepted these crazy low-payouts in the first place !

there's plenty of IT companies a lot bigger than istock who can pay all the operational costs and live just on advertising and that's advertising converting very bad by the way so we're talking of the bottom of the barrel and yet they make profits and they're in business, don't believe the getty hype ... Alamy pays 40% and no questions asked ... same for many other macros, all in the 30-40% range, only getty pays 20% but sales are going down.

Here it is:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=252322&page=1

hahahaha

you're screwed.

Quote from: macrosaur on September 08, 2010, 14:00

never say never ... i've read yesterday on TechCrunch that the users of Digg.com mounted a rebellion and left Digg in droves for their direct
competitor Reddit.com .. Digg now is dead and worth nothing, and all this in just one week !

What's Digg? Is that a shovel company?

www.digg.com

now is simply a sort of interactive RSS aggregator.

but until 2 years ago it was said to be worth 1 BILLION $ !

they had 30-40 million monthly users ... now i guess they're 1% of that ...
it was impressive how the rebels coordinated themselves and *removed coarse language* it up for real.

it gives us hope that people somehow can still change the world, i hope facebook
and myspace follow the same fate soon ....

BLA BLA BLA BLA ....

nobody of you will leave iStock.
you invested too much time and resource on it and now you're "locked in".

i predicted all this a long time ago, and i'm sure the entry-level royalties
will be lowered again in the future ... 10% ?  5% ? why not ! there's a fool
born every minute isnt it ?

p.s.
if you sell a fine-art photo in an art gallery you never get less than 50% of the sale,
and these guys spend real money in order to make an exibition, calling people by phone,
sending printed invitations ... getty instead doesn't move a finger, it's all computer automated
and the product is a digital download and pretends a whopping 85% !

you better flip burgers at McDonalds than getting 15% of YOUR work.

Quote from: macrosaur on September 08, 2010, 05:33

the real value of IS are their loyal clients, not the millions of photos.
photos are just a commodity nowadays, that's why they rightfully
treat you guys iike crap.

That is why we, the photographers, must target our actions in informing Picture Buyers about the exploitive nature of IS and that there are other alternatives in the market. Show them the agencies that give us the better commissions which allow us to invest and create higher value images.

Picture buyers only hear about the marketing of agencies telling them they are the best. Maybe it's time that the content producers have a word near the buyers pointing the best alternatives to both and putting the exploitative middlemen in their places.

well, i could tell you that Hewlett Packard months ago slashed the salary of their 100.000 employees
by 20% while doubling the salaries of their top executives ... i've read in Germany the former
employess of EDS (now owned by HP) even went on strike a few days, but yet nothing changed,
her CEO has been fired recently because of a love affair and now he's VP of Oracle, running
out with 40 million $ in bonuses....

so goes this world, my friends !
and picture buyers will never give a crap ... nor they give a crap about HP and their crappy
printers, all they know is the price is fair and the product doesn't sucks so much.

20% fee ... it's a joke already, and now with just 15% it's a pittance .. better post the pics
on Flickr and see if some buyer sends an email ... or make a photo blog infested by
ads ....

I wonder what would happen if the top istock contributors (like may the top 100 that probably make up over 10-20% of istock's revenue) set up their own site with mostly exclusive content.

nothing.
because the dirty work is getting clients and making sales,
and this will cost you millions in advertising especially if starting from scratch.

the real value of IS are their loyal clients, not the millions of photos.
photos are just a commodity nowadays, that's why they rightfully
treat you guys iike crap.

the new site design sucks big time... slow as a dog, confusing, bloated, full of shi, and the backend is even worse than before.

the home page takes forever to load as now they want to "impress" new visitors with full screen animation .. this looks sooooo '90s !

i'm not surprised of all the rejections ... they've millions of similar images, why should they add more and more ?

FT and SS look a lot better and faster and they've got ftp uploads.

as a buyer i would be frustrated using the new crappy design .. compare with the new Alamy instead .. very fast, solid, simple and barebone with lots of options in the sidebar, that's the way it shoudl be !