I uploaded some photos via FTP and now when I try to submit them, all features of the editor work except the actual submission part. When I select the check box next to them, none appear to 'select', so I can't hit the submit for review button, as it's still greyed out.  Hitting 'select all' doesn't select any, either.  This happens on both firefox and chrome.  Anyone else?

Frankly, I'm surprised so many people here think our photos are being sold for too little (royalties are another can of worms, I'm talking only about retail price).  This conversation always makes me think about music.  We are all happy to buy an mp3 for a dollar, and those songs take more work from the artist than do my photos, in my opinion.  And the royalties are probably even worse.

Cool, thanks... just curious!

and my little recent spike was indeed nov's PP sales rolling in

Scanned books that whose words are actually searchable are thanks to this type of captcha.  It's like tom said, but once enough people type in the same thing for the 'unknown' word (your diamonds), that unknown word is then catalogued in the book as whatever it is.  I am more than happy to deal with complicated captchas to help provide this service.

$1,000,000, if there's a buyer

I once asked a beggar if he wanted a huge sack of pennies I had in my car, and he was thrilled.  I guess it all depends on the quantity.  (which also sucks, lately)

I have 10 waiting since Nov 20.  But my main reason for asking: these were my initial 10.  Did I do anything wrong?  It just says "10 pending" under the normal upload place, but did I need to upload them somewhere else?  Also, should I expect to wait longer for my initial batch?

I'm aware of that.  But many people with small portfolios, in aggregate, can be as meaningful as several people with large ones.  Hence any data is useful for those wishing to compile a large picture.

Holy sh*t I'm confused.  Where did all these random numbers of people come from?

More importantly, why?

Quote from: mtilghma on November 09, 2011, 15:31

Now I've been in micro awhile, but just started actively paying attention to the overall numbers and economics recently, so I might be ignorant, but...
when has this happened before?  I thought the number of contributors in the microstock industry as a whole has pretty much increased monotonically since its inception.

Not so sure about that, it was a climbing number per year and then two or three years ago, new members started dropping. I don't think it's been growing at a constant rate at any point. If you want, I'll start another topic and show some new artist numbers for the last seven years? I always enjoy investigating and looking at trends.

As for the number of photos, yes, that's seems to be increasing at a rapid but steady rate.

the number of new contributors dropped, but the number of total contributors kept growing.  monotonically does not mean linearly, it just means it kept increasing (ie, the total number of contributors never decreased).  For instance, a plot of sqrt(x) for instance grows monotonically, even though the slope keeps decreasing.  Lagereek was claiming, or so I thought, that actual total number of contributors would decrease, not new contributors each year.

Yes I agree, the microstock market is probably really profitable.  Was just saying that the "well they sell more of item X, so can afford to take a smaller cut" is, in general, a valid argument.  Look at the automobile industry. Cars have an average profit margin of 3%.  3%!!

And if we're going to talk econ...

there's really not all THAT much speculation to go around.  We know getty bought istock for 50 million.  We know that companies do a breakeven analysis when making an offer to buy another company, ie 'in how many years will my investment break even'.  There are things like inflation and discount rate etc that factor into this equation, but it is all 'in the noise' compared to two variables: income stream of said investment, and amount of years they want to break even by.

I asked some MBA friends what a typical number of years is that a company wants to break even by, when purchasing another.  I got more info than I bargained for, like 'it depends on many things like istock's debt or marketshare or leveraging their product against getty's product' blah blah blah which severely convolute what this breakeven number would be, but the point is that all those things do still go into some formula which pops out a number.  They were reluctant to give me a range, but I asked whether 2-20 should cover all extremes of riskiness and conservativeness, and they seem to think it would.

That means istock was probably generating somewhere in the range 2.5 to 25 million in pure profit each year.  So yea, given how few execs it takes to run one of these, that's pretty profitable.

That would mean 1% of the collection was having to pay for storage and administration of the other 99%.

uh oh.... time for "occupy MSG"?