The powerconsumption cost from the computer while uploading/cathegorizing with Bs is about the same as the earnings.   But 30-50$ who cares...

The high percentage of low earners that have consumed the power, paid the invoice, and would more than welcome any pay out amount, including the $30 payment level that they agreed to when they signed on and they have been slowly building towards.

I am not affected by this change, but do empathise with fellow photographers   

David  

Is it not another example where the Agency have changed the T&C's without any consultation, and yes the contributors agreed to the T&C's, but a little respect and communication when changing how you pay someone would be a good thing, otherwise it just looks like they can just do what they want, and do not care about the suppliers of the assets they do not own but trade.

David.

No excuse with the technology out there, paypal are releasing a micropayments API later this year, there are now sites that pay at month end no matter what the balance.

It could be that they have many dormant accounts that are slowly reaching the payment point and this is just a way to hold on to the revenue longer, as it will be earning interest, it should be accured ready for payout, but my understanding is that some companies will use it as working capital.

On the positive side I had a newsletter from the3dStudio just yesterday stating that they are scrapping the payout limit and as I have a few dollars already in my account with them, it is good news but in the current economy it is not good when other businesses are holding your payments.

David 

Haha guess I better check my email inbox soon ^_^

Maybe not 

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I don't believe they are having to cut our commissions, they are doing it to make more money.

If we all just used one or two sites, why would they raise our commission?  They would be able to do whatever they wanted.

The stocksites are the same as the photographer and run thier business on RPI, thiers is the required RPI across all assets in the library and would be calculated for thier business plan, based on what would be needed to run thier business on the current and projected market share, revenue needed to covers overheads, marketing, and all the other running costs to produce a minimum profit margin.

When there were fewer sites competing the RPI was easier to predict, but increasingly it is coming under pressure from changes in buying patterns, the recession, the number of new sites with the same model chomping away at the same revenue, as much as we like to think that businesses are run on pure greed it is not always the case, and supporting smaller sites with higher commission may not be of benefit, you may make 50% - 60% on the new website but loose more revenue longer term when the bigger site have to squeeze the contributor to maintain RPI.

And you are correct that as the smaller website fail and the revenue returns to the larger websites they will not pass this back down to the contributors, still the same questions must be asked with a new site, what is the model and where is the customer base coming from, if it is from the same pool of customers we should avoid the new website, but how many are just taken in by the hype rather than asking the questions from a business perspective.

David      

Hi Amos,
Use the social networking site for marketing, Twitter, Facebook etc:

You need to connect with the people that would use your plug-in

I have posted another Twitter Tweet to help out, my last one about your plug-in sent 60 people your way.

B.T.W. The plug-in is no use for me, like many other i use the free 'Windows Live Writer', so WLW and the latest Microsoft Word will need plug-in's as that is the way a lot of content is uploaded, not just to WordPress blogs but other blog services, web pages and articles as well 

David  

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RM is full of unedited images because there are buyers who need do to THEIR OWN editing afterwards and this couldnt be possible or very limited starting from an overphotoshopped image.

Sergey, from what I read you shoot photojournalism, social documentry and travel, and when you are shooting or talking RM you would have editorial in mind, lets look at Alamy where they sell over 80% editorial and RM, in a lot of editorial area's any image manipulation other than slight adjustments of levels would get you 'No Sales', and has got the editor fired more than once from thier jobs, so it is horses for courses, what works for one area of the stock business is a no-no to another.

Commercial images for advertising and advertorial are often enhanced as they are trying to sell something and make you dream of the blue skys and hot summer days, where your gritty type of social documentry and editorial would look silly enhanced as the images are meant to be realistic and bring the hard reality home to the reader.

The oversaturated images are not replacing your social documentry images and affecting your bottom line, on the other hand if the oversaturated travel images are hurting your revenue, then maybe you need to look at how you can enhance your travel images.

David 

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Let IStock self-destruct by themselves, whenever a customer searches on a competitors site, and finds what they need, that they were unable to find on IStock, the more likely they will do it again in the future.

Is this not the same argument the exclusives will use, "they can go to the other big sites find the exact same images including most of those rejected by istock, all sites, same images, same artists at different price points, how frustrating for the buyers, then they can come to istock and find quality exclusive content, and more likely they will do it again in the future".

I am not a contributor to Istock so I have no hidden agenda, but your comment does not make sense, if I am looking for a specific images what is the point of me looking on many websites and only seeing the same 100 images for my search time and time again, when I find a website that has some of the better images I have already seen and a few more good images that were not on any of the other websites where will I look next time I want a image?

It is more possible that the other 'open door' websites will self-destruct by presenting almost the exact same set of images for a search as thier rivals, then to one that will win would be the cheapest, and the only way to be the cheapest is by lowering commisions. 


David 

It would depend on a number of factors, you can open a WordPress blog and keep it seperate or download their software to your own space to extend your website, then you decide on what the blog is going to be about and post your blog.

If you write it, they may come.  In other words, don't worry about the numbers

They may come, but only if they know your blog exists, so you will need to market your blog, decide on who your target audience is and how to reach them, what value your blog will be to these readers and what will make them want to bookmark your blog and come back, milions of readers is something of a dream, thousands of readers will be a good blog.

Will your blog be like your posts here and offer your opinions on the industry, some workflow ideas, tutorials etc: a tool to raise your profile amongst your peers and get your name out there to fellow artists, sometimes this might be better as a seperate blog away from your business website and customers.

If your blog going to be a marketing tool for existing and potential customers where the content here would be much different, and this would then be a blog to extend your website, to inform customers of your activities.

There is an option to have both, and once you have a plan of action you will need to directly market your blog, if it aimed at fellow artists then there is the blog section on this forum, you have a few hundred followers on Twitter, not sure if you have facebook, posting links on these social media websites will bring some traffic to your blog.

The amount of traffic will be based on on how good the content is and how well your direct and viral marketing is, since I moved my blog to my own webspace a month ago, using MSG, Twitter and Facebook for marketing I got 925 visitors in the last 7 days.

925 visitors may seem ok for a blog that has only been running for a month, but if the visitors are not returning just opening and closing the page then it is no good, I know from my blog statistics that 35% went on to read more than one page which is a positive, 40% were new visitors, 20% of visotors returned again within the seven days, and 658 of the visitors were from the USA.

I know from Google Analytics the average time and bounce rate, readers of my last post 'The transition of Microstock' which was quite short spent on average 2.37 minutes, the post before that 'Affordable Editorial Images for Blogging' the average time was 8.48 minutes on my blog.  

So it is not just a matter of creating a blog and waiting for the visitors, you have to decide on your market and how to reach them, then analyse and track that visitors are reading your blog and not just hitting the site from a link and closing the browser.

David

i think you're way too optimistic about blogs.

casual bloggers will never pay for images, and in the rare occasion when they spend some time searching for a picture instead of stealing it right away from google images, they end up on Flickr.

WHO told you they're ready to pay 5$ or even 1$ for every image ? who ?

besides, it makes financial sense only for medium sized blogs, and there are not many around.

also, most of their posts are about news events, sports, politics, they need fresh images about celebrities and VIPs, which in a perfect world would mean Getty, AP, AFP, etc, but in this rotten world it means they just steal the picture somewhere claiming it's "fair use".

not to mention most of these  bloggers have no idea about copyright, go figure what do they know about RF or RM or CC or ...

Sergey,
You answered your own questions, you asked me how I qualify that bloggers will pay for images, I like many others do already blog and pay for images, just look at the many blogs that do already use stock images, then you say that most of these  bloggers have no idea about copyright.

You are correct that, there is a shortage of 'blog editorial images', many bloggers do not use images, many use images they download from Google, many use CC images from Flickr.

But then many internet users may not listen to music, many will buy thier audio tracks, many will use audio they download from the internet, others know it is theft and use file sharing.

So should we just ignore this market, many internet users are just not aware that downloading an image is an infringement, but they do know that to get a music sound track they have to pay, how did they get to this awareness?

Because the music industry is very proactive in protecting thier artists royalties, thier own investments and revenue streams, to do this they ran an agressive campaign to educate the internet users, under threat many ISP no longer allow music sites that are not squeeky clean, one woman in the US recently got a $1 million fine, 20 music tracks @ 50k each.

But with images I can go and create a blog today, write a post and insert images that I ripped from the web, while I am doing this there has been no message about copyrighted material, when downloading or inserting an image no file information, there is no default plug-in for the blog software to source licenced images.

To correct this there are two steps, one is to educate the bloggers and article writers, the second is to provide tools as default that source our licenced images, these can be free or paid for but the key is that they are licenced by the creators.

We can try to look at ways to change this by making bloggers more aware and providing services to facilitate image use, or just take another approach and rant that the scumbag bloggers will never use licenced images!


David          

So, tell me what plugin you will need to sell you photos on your blog, maybee we will create one.

I will think about how this can work over the weekend and contact you 

David

Sorry Keith,
What I was trying badly to communicate is that there is a general miss-trust of applications that ask for your username and password, it was not meant as an attack on the russian third party developers, but in reality it is just the way it is.

Both ProStockMaster and Isyndica had questions about usernames and passwords with photographers not willing to use the products.

These applications should be commisioned and developed by the stock sites and not third parties, the developer has a partner ID so they are known to Fotolia, but I can get and API developers key for many API's, but if this was a Fotolia or any other respected stocksites plug-in it would have more chance of being taken up more.

Regards

David