|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - marcopolo
51
« on: June 01, 2007, 23:38 »
The more specialized icons, such as the "signs and signals" and the science and medical ones should do well for you. I've lightboxed both of them for future projects myself. Smiley Have not looked on here for awhile and just saw this, thanks for the compliment. I am trying to make a combination of popular stuff as well as looking for possible gaps to fill. I wish those two were doing well for me, the science icon set got 3 dowloads the frist 2 days it was up and then nothing for the last couple of weeks, kinda strange as I had high hopes for it after getting a few downloads right away. The inspector even liked it and gave it 5 thumbs. I am not too surprised about IStock losing market share, when I compared it to Canstock in my other thread I was kinda exgagerrating, they are still my highest earning site but Shutterstock is catching up. My illustration sales are steady and are still increasing proportional to my uploads, but my photo sales have been going down consistently every month and really tanked in April and further tanked in May, so my illustration sales are basically replacing my lost photo sales keeping my income at about the same level. It also seems it is much easier to get accepted as a photgrapher there these days than it does as an illustrator. From what I have seen on the forums they generally only accept illustrators if they have something original to add to the collection. It is interesting how they are more selective about that than they are about new photographers, when there are many more photographers then there are vector artists.
52
« on: June 01, 2007, 23:06 »
May was up for me, mostly on vector file sales, however, this last week has been slow like others had mentioned and today I had my WDE, well, my worst non-holiday weekday ever since 2005. I had about half of the sales I had on memorial day, which is about a third of the sales on an average day I had the week before, so about 1/6th my normal sales day for May, and about 10% a normal early December sales day. I hope today is a fluke and not a trend, and I like to try to keep a positive attitude, but everytime I had a radical sales drop at Istock it really was the worst possible scenario, ended up being the trend and not a fluke. Basically if this trend keeps up Istock will be making about as much as Canstock does for me.
53
« on: April 21, 2007, 01:56 »
My sales there have been really horrible, especially this month. They are at about the level they were in September when I had about 200 less photos and 50 fewer vectors. You can check out Marcopolo9442 and see all the new vector files and some others I uploaded since then, and then realize that my income this month is the same as before I uploaded all that. I disambiguated about 100 more files last month in the hope that I would see a sales increase in those files but I have not yet, so I am not sure it is even worth the effort to disambiguate the files I have not done yet, which is probably still around 30-35% of my portfolio there. If I saw an immediate improvement as a result of disambiguation I would have done the rest by now. I wonder if it is possible that your overall postition in the search engine declines proportionately to the files you have disambiguated, and that is why my overall sales are so terrible?
54
« on: March 15, 2007, 22:17 »
It remains the case that iStock appears to have the customers. Where else can an image get 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 downloads in a three month period (looking at the top downloads list). That depends on how thier best match algorithim decides to treat your images
55
« on: March 15, 2007, 00:19 »
so people like phildate, andresr, lisafx, rinderart, and many more who are not exclusive at iStock are just weekend shooters? ohkkkkay..whatever. I think the opposite is true about the serious business vs hobbyists. For anyone running this as a serious business who wants it to be a significant part of their income, it is not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. Just today iStock changed their search engine again, and my sales were off by 60% there today. Maybe it is a coincidence that my sales are off, maybe not. It sucks but at least I have my stuff at other sites as well.
56
« on: March 14, 2007, 17:21 »
I am not sure you should start making serious decisions about this business with only 38 images online at IS. You have a long long way to go...
I have 2800+ images at IS and my sales have been slowly declining now for a few months despite uploading what I can (I hate the upload limits and procedure!). My suspicion ever since the DA'ing fiasco and Best Match algorithm changes is that the search engine is favoring exclusives. I could be wrong but there is still much shuffling to be done in the industry and until things smoothen out, I would just go with the flow.
I suspect that this month IS will come in third overall for me, with the new prices at DT pushing it in to #2 spot, still with FT #1.
ARe you sure? It doesn't really make economic sense for IStock to be too biased against exclusives. You generate twice as much revenue for them then you would if you were exclusive there. I would think that IS would want to promote exclusives just enough to make it enticing for a certain percentage of people to go exclusive, but not be too biased because they actually get more revenue from non-exclusives.
57
« on: March 14, 2007, 17:14 »
I was just looking at my portfolio in best match again, it seems that IStock very recently changed it so that ratings now mean little to nothing. An image of mine that was getting many recent downloads but did not have a rating was suddently in front of my over 1000 image portfolio. What inspired me to check my best match today is that my sales have suddenly taken a dump on IS, especially vectors. Sales are about 15% of normal today and no vector downloads. But then alot of my older images don't have any ratings at all, so I would think if ratings no longer counted those sales would pick up. don't know what to think.
58
« on: March 07, 2007, 16:44 »
Why did you choose $45 rather than $50 (I assume you changed the prices once you made bronze.
I understand PhilDate has some of his set at $100 and gets sales. I just decided to keep it $5 under the maximum. Perhaps it is kinda silly but it is the same idea as charging $99.99 for something instead of $100. It is interesting that Phildate get sales at $100, he is also one of the top photographers on mictostock, so I imagine he can get away with it. It has taken me a year and a half of spending all my spare time doing this and nearly 2000 files on the site to get even this far, and I don't know if it is a fluke that I have been getting more EL sales in the past month or so, but I hope it continues. Also if I were getting 2-3 El's per month per week from one site alone, at $45 a time, I wouldn't be wasting my time here, I would be out picking some new lenses! I got some new lenses this time last year, I think I need to upgrade my camera next before I get any more lenses  . Really, want to be making enough at this I can quit my job by this summer, microstock is the frist step in my master plan to try to become an artist while avoiding starvation. 
59
« on: March 06, 2007, 23:18 »
really? they have really taken off for me, I am now getting quite a few EL sales there which makes it my third best earner after IS and SS. At this rate they will soon be at the same level as those two, especially if they raise their prices a little.
60
« on: March 06, 2007, 23:16 »
I currently have my extended licences priced at $45.00. I am thinking this may be too low, I am currently getting 2-3 EL's per week at Fotolia. I am afraid if I raise prices these will go away, has anyone else raised their EL prices over $50? Have sales been affected negatively doing that?
61
« on: March 06, 2007, 03:29 »
April is an excellent month to be visiting that area. True San Jose itself is not that great, but the area around it presents good photographic opportunities. anywhere along the coast, the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin Headlands, even Mt Tam and Point Reyes (a little more than 3hrs from San Jose, but well worth it). This is also the season when everything is in bloom, there are lots of rolling hills with oak trees and wildflowers growing on them. There are also redwoods near Santa Cruz. Along the coast rom Santa Cruz to SF there are many great spots to stop for sunset photos. You may also want to check out a book by Galen Rowell called "Bay Area Wilds", it has some excellent photos of that area. He is a famous photographer who grew up in Berkley. good luck.
62
« on: October 19, 2006, 16:10 »
My illustrations make in terms of revenue a ratio of several to one compared to photos. They do well on iStock and Shutterstock, and the rasterized verstions do a little better than average on the other sites as well. It is just alot more time consuming than photos, so it evens out. I think that illustrations will hold thier sales value longer than photographs because they require alot of skill and are difficult to produce, where most stock photos will eventually become diluted to the point that no one can make serious money being a photographer anymore.
63
« on: October 10, 2006, 22:37 »
For me, what would be even better news is if Canstock increased the number of downloads I get. A 20% increase of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
64
« on: October 10, 2006, 22:28 »
The Shutterstock server seems to be having some problems today, none of my pages have refreshed since earlier today, which is really strange. There is a thread in their forums and apparently the same thing is happening to everyone there. I suspect the difficulty you are having has something to do with this. Just hope the buyers can still get in.
65
« on: October 09, 2006, 00:47 »
Actually, I think the Sam Abell one may get alot of downloads on iStock with the right keywording, but the photographer needs to learn how to use a noise reduction software program such as Neatimage and run it through a couple of times first. The rest are just snapshots.
66
« on: October 09, 2006, 00:40 »
Man, I didn't know those photographers were so horrible and took such mediocre snapshots. How did they ever get famous?
67
« on: September 06, 2006, 14:59 »
That kinda confirms what I have been thinking
68
« on: September 05, 2006, 20:37 »
Sometimes I put minimal effort into the categories, when I am in a hurry only putting in as many as I have to sometimes. How many here max out the categories at every site, including StockXpert which doesn't make you use categories at all? Do you think that it helps sales much? Has anyone experimented to see if it does?
69
« on: September 05, 2006, 20:34 »
Difficult to tell at this stage, but today was a dismal bust and I expected just the opposite. I made less than 50% normal sales today.
70
« on: May 25, 2006, 19:20 »
I didn't know it was open to buyers yet, last time I looked they were still getting ready.
71
« on: May 25, 2006, 13:21 »
No one? It would be beneficial to help me because if I don't know I will be more likely to price too low, which will undercut others' business, so I don't know why this is such a big secret that no one wants to share with me?
72
« on: May 24, 2006, 19:08 »
I put up an image with them and it is ready to price. However, I have never done this before and have no idea how to price it online. How much should I put as "profit" to get a consistent(with others) and fair price for a 6mp image?
73
« on: May 24, 2006, 18:53 »
Actually, I don't think converting a jpg to tiff is all that big of deal. Simply converting it from one format to another doesn't seem to degrade the image quality much, and I have done this in the past with a few Alamy submissions. I think the problem arises when you do a bunch of saves in jpeg it degrades the jpeg quality, which is why some people recommend to convert a jpeg to a tiff file, do all the changes, then convert it back to a jpeg after that. Ironically, Alamy is now insisting on submitting nothing but jpeg files now.Ii admit I am no expert on this, just repeating what I have heard and what seems to work for me.
74
« on: May 23, 2006, 04:07 »
I don't get why more sited don't accept vectors. I wonder if that is even one of the reasons IS and SS are the two top sellers, is because they accept vectors and no other site does. Are the owners of the other sites idiots or is it just technically really difficult to provide a system for uploading vectors? I don't get it.
75
« on: May 23, 2006, 04:04 »
Are you saying they now have separate application processes for illustrators and photographers? In September when I signed up when you were accepted for one, then you could submit both vectors and photos without having to go through a separate process.
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
