Today's class is about how to create a solid stock photo business:

1) Instead of paying contributors a fair return, drastically reduce everyones royalties and tell them its because the business is Unsustainable. This will motivate contributors to offer their images elsewhere and you can then pay them even less royalties.
2) Reduce the price of half your collection by over 50%. Price reductions of this magnitude are Sustainable and will attract buyers from other sites.

The fact that it would have cost less to pay exclusive contributors a fair return (say 50%) thereby creating more exclusives and less competition in the first place will not be discussed in this class.

http://nikonrumors.com/2012/04/19/dxomark-verdict-nikon-d800-95-canon-5d-mark-iii-81.aspx/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NikonRumors+%28NikonRumors.com%29

Interview with Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto / Getty Images

Kelly gets markedly uncomfortable when asked about royalty cuts (watch his fidgetting and hand movement increase during this segment). Then he answers by saying that "royalties don`t matter as much as the total amount of money we can make for our photographers and I think we`re doing a better job than anyone else with the total amount we pay out in royalties far exceeds our competitors..."

I read this as: iStock can take a larger share of your pie because you suckas can`t get more net dollars elsewhere. So even if iStock promised in writing that commission levels would be grandfathered, we will not honor our promise to you because we think that we can get away with taking more of your hard earned revenue.

I stopped being exclusive because of this and have found that I am getting more net dollars than before.

 

Since free speech is not something that is encouraged on the iStock forum, I thought it might be a good idea to have a parallel monthly sales thread here.

There seems to be a particularly high level of contributors with falling sales.

I am reposting here what was removed on iStock forum:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/istockphoto.com/   (Re-posted Noodles`s link - picture is worth a thousand words)

The first step to fixing a problem is admittting that you have one (see above link). iStock needs to acknowledge that they have made mistakes when they screwed everyone over with commission cuts, then make things right by keeping their original promise of grandfathering canister level commissions and not reducing commissions on V/A. Although untold damage has already been inflicted, I don`t think that its too late yet to turn the boat around. The effects of their short sighted policies are just now becoming self evident.