|
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 - gostwyck
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9 10 11 ... 210
126
« on: August 13, 2014, 08:17 »
Yep, same here. It seems that every reincarnation of this app has new bugs. It should / could be such a useful app but it's constantly beset with annoying little bugs...
Looks like the developer has lost interest too. Last time he was logged on here was 16th June.
127
« on: August 12, 2014, 10:31 »
I would think yes, assuming that it was the eBay seller who bought the EL. The seller appears to be particularly transparent in their business dealings by crediting your name to the image.
128
« on: August 10, 2014, 17:36 »
Hi Gbalex,
Thanks. You're absolutely right. Actions *do* speak louder than words. And the fact is, our team is one of the few teams out there right now in external forums, in international forums, traveling to different countries to speak to contributors, sponsoring big events, nurturing international communities and encouraging connectivity between artists, creating grant programs, and bringing contributors in for product research to hear their opinions and act on them. We're making more investments in contributor education and community than ever before.
There has been very little active moderation in the Shutterstock forums over the years and it's reasonable to moderate forums. Leaf does it here. We're going to do it in our own forums. There are plenty of threads where people have expressed their opinions and thoughts in a constructive way.
Best,
Scott
Well said Scott. I have absolutely no idea why Gbalex always singles out SS for criticism, whilst ignoring the (usually much greater) faults of all other agencies? It must be because the financial transparency of SS is so much greater. After all no other agency actually publishes any audited data or statements for him to pick apart and invent his conspiracy theories with.
129
« on: August 10, 2014, 13:01 »
Holy Cow! 64,000 contributors that are "active". That's even more troublesome (financially for myself) than just more photos.
I don't know what means 'active' in this case. If you upload 1 picture a month does that make you 'active'? Probably no more than a couple thousand or less reach payout each month.
I think the term 'active contributor', for the purpose of bigging-up the numbers in the financial report, would simply require a portfolio to be held with at least one image available for licensing. SS reported 31M downloads in the last quarter so, over a full year that would mean the 64k contributors would have an average of 1900 each per year. If the 80/20 rule applied here, which I'm sure it would, then about 13K contributors will have generated 80% of the total downloads (about 96M). The other 24M downloads will have been shared between 41K contributors ... which is an average of fewer than 600 downloads per year each.
130
« on: August 07, 2014, 19:04 »
SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc.
- Second quarter revenue increased 41% from prior year, to $80.2 million
- Adjusted EBITDA increased 25% to $16.8 million
- Quarterly paid downloads increased 30% to a record 31.5 million
- Collection grew 42%; currently exceeds 40 million images
http://tinyurl.com/mowfcp8
Bar-stewards, eh? Thieving from their loyal contributors even more? I think we need one of your conspiracy theories to explain what they're doing to us all again. Don't let us down!
131
« on: July 20, 2014, 07:31 »
Once the USA didn't act when Syria used gas (crossed the red line) Putin knew Obama was a *, all theoretic, and it was easy for him to invade Ukraine without fear of USA reprisal. And so far he was right.
Wrong there. It was actually the 'rebels' that deployed the Sarin gas against the Syrian population NOT Assad. It was later proved from the gas signature. That's why Obama didn't act. Even at the time I found it incredible that Assad would have deployed the gas as he would gain no benefit and had much to lose. The rebels, on the other hand, had everything to gain if they could provoke the US into action.
132
« on: July 20, 2014, 04:48 »
Please give a single example where someone asked US for the military support & help.
Most of the time it is the US invading some country claiming they have nuclear weapons/no democracy/whatever while the only real guilt of the target country is that they have the oil and refuse to follow the US directions. And no, they didn't ask for that "help".
I'll give you 2 off the top of my head but there's plenty more. Kuwait after having been invaded by Iraq. Britain during the Falklands War (the US provided material support for British operations). Oh ... and not to mention the minor matter of the USA support of the Allies in the 1st & 2nd World Wars.
133
« on: July 02, 2014, 14:53 »
I don't get it? You refer to Jon and then finish with a quote from Yuri (who you will recall went exclusive on IS?) to prove your point? Hmm, IS with subs and Thinkstock and discounts upon discounts and that proves that, as usual from your perspective, SS is the problem and cause?
Please, there are 1000 other agencies, trying to win the race to the bottom at our expense. SS happens to pay people a fair about and I mean Bottom Line, not 70% of nothing and promises.
Would I like to be rewarded a fair amount for my work, of course. We all would. We should get 80% and the agents 20%, not the way it is now. Reversed.
But you are ignoring the market and suppliers and throwing every brick you can at SS and it's investors. Please don't post the four page financial expose' again, the last 50 times were enough.  They spent the money they didn't do it for us, they did it for their benefit and financial profits. Of course they will get paid in stock and sell it off to re-pay their outlays. It's not unusual or anything different than any other business.
How about the Microstock market as a whole, not blaming SS or investors for what's wrong? How about that the top four on the right are roughly the only four viable places for artists to make a reliable return? Why is that? You're going to say, it's all because of SS?
Hard for me to accept that narrow viewpoint.
Excellent post. Very well said. I'm sure we'll get the same financial conspiracy theories posted another 50x though.
134
« on: July 02, 2014, 12:47 »
Jim Pickerell mentioned in one of his articles that istock had a revenue of 180 million. And a few years ago an istock admin told us that the revenue was over 300 million.
It is of course possible that some of that revenue has been redistributed to getty or thinkstock. But this doesnt help the istock exclusives who make most of their money on istock itself.
ETA: he says that 75% of their sales make 180 million in revenue. So total revenue would be a little higher. Sorry.
http://www.selling-stock.com/Article/can-istock-turn-midstock-sales-around
Ok thanks. I thought it was being stated as an audited fact rather than just Jim's guesstimate ... although I don't think he's too far off. I'm pretty sure that IS's revenues have been in constant decline for ages anyway. You only have to read the monthly sales thread for the evidence of that. It's interesting that exclusives are reporting sales declining by say 30%, compared to the previous year, whilst revenue has usually declined by a lesser number like 5-10%. It can only mean that IS are still trying to maintain revenue by continually bumping up prices ... which leads to fewer sales ... and so on. When will they ever learn?
135
« on: July 02, 2014, 10:26 »
istock revenue used to be over 300 million dollars, now it is just 180 million.
Where did you get this information please?
136
« on: June 30, 2014, 15:36 »
A number of posts were removed from this thread. One off topic post and one insult and the posts that went along with them.
In regards to posting stock market data for Shutterstock. Yes it is interested and relevant but it is off topic in regards to exclusive / non-exclusive. It can be kept to a separate thread about investing or Shutterstock stocks.
Why did you remove my post? It was a direct reply to the OP's question and offered different perspectives for the case. You could have simply removed a line you didn't like. This place desperately needs a little interaction between posters. You are making it so dry and humourless that you will just be left with the newbies asking the same old questions time and time again.
137
« on: June 30, 2014, 15:29 »
You can still search for this illustration, but it says it's deactivated, so buying is not longer possible.
I think it was worth it. It was a SR-EL for 3 years , and i got 210 dollar for it.
Maybe that's not much for most of you, but considering it is a simple illustration which took me appr. 1 hour to make; I'm happy with it.
The price you are happy to accept should not be based on how long the illustration took you to produce but instead what it's earnings potential might be at all agencies over the 3 year period. I have lots of images that took me much less than an hour to produce but they make a lot more $s than that each year. There's no way I'd accept that price for them.
138
« on: June 30, 2014, 03:43 »
I never joined there - it always seemed like a race to the bottom sort of place. I am quite glad of that now. We really need to send the message that treating contributors this way is not acceptable.
I thought exactly the same. Very glad I was never tempted to upload to DP.
139
« on: June 20, 2014, 09:08 »
The way you have quoted that it looks like I wrote it. I didn't. If you read his site he defines his use of the terms. I think his definition of midstock goes back to the piece in which he was extrapolating iStock sales from assumptions derived from credit agency report about Getty corporate funding.
My mistake. Modified. I'm not sure I remember that definition. It just seems like one of those terms thrown around a lot without many agencies defining themselves or being defined as that.
I think the term 'mid stock' is conceptual rather than being accurately definable in terms of $'s. When microstock arrived there was such a wide differential in pricing between it and traditional stock that it was always assumed that there *must* be a market for images priced somewhere in the middle. Many sought to discover it but it was always incredibly elusive. Maybe Istock's Vetta and Stocksy have finally established it?
140
« on: June 18, 2014, 06:30 »
I can't even bear to click on the video to hear what Klein has to say. Ugh.
141
« on: June 18, 2014, 04:57 »
Don't you think it is about time to start demanding fair compensation?
what % should Jon pay us? 50%?
Actually, he might be poor if he paid us that much because the company wouldn't be making a profit. They could always raise prices though. I guess that is a question to ask yourself. If a company can't afford to pay you 50% with their expenses, are they charging enough to their customers.
Well, I always wonder how apple app store can pay 70% to the developers and run a much bigger business than IS. Even vimeo's rate is 90%! They definitely have a bigger bandwidth demand etc etc. That makes the unattainable 45% IS royalty rate (and all the Microstock agencies rates) look a little bit unfair.
Apples and oranges. Every image has to be inspected and stored. The smaller the business the larger percentage of turnover the same advertising exposure costs etc. etc. etc.
If you want to know what % commission would wipe out profits you need to do the calculation from the published figures. Not that it matters.
Not really. Apps have to be tested and conform with far more detailed criteria than images do. Electronic books operate under the same 70% royalty and of course it is the publisher that sets the price not the selling agent. Same with iTunes. If the 'agency agreement' works for apps, books and music then there's no reason at all why it couldn't work for images. The difference is simply where the market for each started from. Steve Jobs needed to entice the music industry to sell their catalogues via his new format so made them a good offer and then that became the standard for apps and books. You can't really work backwards to "know what % commission would wipe out profits" because the current business model with the existing pricing architecture isn't the only way it could work. For example there was a time that IS was selling images for $1 and paying 20% to everyone ... and yet were apparently still profitable. At that time, had they wanted to, they could have increased the price of images to say $1.50 and given all the extra money to artists. That would have ensured a royalty of nearly 50% without having incurred a significant cost increase to IS. Of course they did increase the prices by far more than that ... but Brucie-babe just chose to keep most of the money for himself rather than rewarding artists fairly. Those of us that were around when IS introduced exclusivity know that had IS been just a bit more generous with the terms at the time, say 50-60%, then we'd almost all have gone with them. SS, DT and FT would barely have got off the ground and the market today could have been radically different for both IS and their contributors. If only IS had viewed contributors as valuable partners, rather than worthless suppliers to be screwed as far as possible, then things could have been very different. Of course that didn't happen so instead SS had to tread the narrow tightrope between paying their contributors as much as possible (to prevent them going exclusive with IS) whilst remaining competitive on pricing. The big problem (for us and them) happened when DT and later FT decided to also enter the subs market. The annual and monthly cost of a subscription is big enough for customers to be price-concious and we the contributors have ended up being the squeezed suppliers in the middle of a battle for market share between SS, DT, FT and more lately TS. None of them have dared to significantly increase the prices of sub packages for years because of this. To some extent we independent contributors are partly to blame too because we have our own portfolios, effectively competing against ourselves, at each of the various agencies. I know Gbalex likes to blame SS for everything bad in microstock but he is wrong. SS simply steered their ship through the tricky waters better than anyone else.
142
« on: June 12, 2014, 17:27 »
A big pile of posts were removed from this thread.
One reason was the cat fight taking place and the other for discussing other members is a negative tone.
That's a pity. I was out playing golf so missed them. Makes me wonder what the big fuss was all about!
143
« on: June 11, 2014, 13:22 »
I think what's happening to MSG is symptomatic of what's happening in microstock generally.
There's precious little optimism about the future which is in stark contrast to the first few years of microstock. I think most 'old timers', say those that have been doing microstock since 2006 or earlier, largely accept by now that their incomes from microstock probably peaked a couple of years ago and the only question now is how rapid the future decline will be ... and whether it is even worth trying to do anything about it.
With so many new images coming on-line each week and the difficulty of getting early sales for new work, before they disappear into ignominy forever, it's increasingly questionable whether the time and effort are worth it. When at best all you can hope for is to slow the decline it may be the time to devote your energies elsewhere.
It's not really fun anymore and therefore some microstockers are simply less motivated to discuss issues.
144
« on: June 10, 2014, 06:01 »
I'm a bit concerned in case Dollar Photo Club is behind some of the earnings decline in the last few months. It's impossible to know, of course, but if it is starting to undermine earnings it is potentially disastrous.
I'm virtually certain that the DPC is still very much in it's infancy and is having a negligible effect on sales elsewhere thus far. When I opted my port out of the DPC I compared my sales on FT before and after having done so. There was no noticeable difference in volume. If sales on DPC been significant then the effect of opting out should have been obvious.
145
« on: June 10, 2014, 04:51 »
It looks as if sales have collapsed in Yuriland.
My sales have also collapsed at IS. Could I have somehow found my way to Yuriland too?
Maybe Yuriland is the new reality for all of us.
"Relax, " said the night man, "We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave! "
146
« on: June 10, 2014, 04:46 »
I don't do searches to check how best match responds, I can tell from my sales when they've turned exclusives 'off'. The fluctuation is too great and the date / image collection sold is too regularly grouped for it to be random.
My daily sales look to be about 15-20% down on March but I guess that's well within the norm for seasonal variation. I do seem to be selling the same, relatively few images from my portfolio over and over again ... even if they happen to be fairly crappy images from 2006 say. The images that sell regularly are largely the ones that appear at the top of the sort-order when viewing my own portfolio (set to best match). There's no logic to it at all. It appears to me that we are simply witnessing the inevitable slow death of a once-great business that has been appallingly mis-managed for several years. I'm just waiting for a major announcement from Getty that they are 'consolidating' some of their agencies, shedding (more) staff and closing (more) outlying offices.
147
« on: June 10, 2014, 04:15 »
My sales have also collapsed at IS. Could I have somehow found my way to Yuriland too?
148
« on: June 10, 2014, 02:48 »
it seems yuri needed another more account on istock http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=11721662
It is very interesting that only 33 of the 682 images in the PeopleImages collection are at Signature+ prices. 649 are at the lower priced Signature prices. Nothing in Vetta.
Wow __ those 682 images have only generated 8 sales in 2 months! If they cost an average of $20 to produce and upload then they represent an investment of $13.6K. If the average commission earned per sale was $20 then the portfolio is generating about $80 per month. At that rate it would take over 14 years for Yuri to get his investment back. That's insane. Even if you halved the production cost to $10 and doubled the average commission to $40 (both of which seem pretty unlikely) then it would still be nearly 4 years before Yuri turned a profit. I just don't understand how this can be viable. Does anyone?
149
« on: June 06, 2014, 22:39 »
Well, in the United States, it's about the same as using the n-word. If someone had used that for their user name, I could see someone else not liking it.
I had never even heard of it until this thread, and I highly doubt it's in the same category of words as the n-word here in the US.
There's even a restaurant with the name in California. If it were equal to the n-word, I'd expect some pretty negative press and an angry mob outside the restaurant.
I didn't make it up. Feel free to google it.
Do you spend your time examining everyone's user name and trying to work out if someone, somewhere could possibly take offence from it? I've read that 'robhainer' was a disgusting slur in the Aztec language. Feel free to Google it.
150
« on: June 04, 2014, 06:08 »
Yuris Numbers
With his original Yuri_Arcurs collection Yuri hit 1.5 million career downloads on iStock sometime in the first half of 2013. He is still listed as having 1.5 million plus downloads which means that he has had something less than additional 100,000 downloads in the last more than one year. When he went exclusive he had about 18,000 images in his non-exclusive collection on iStock.
After going exclusive iStock created a separate Yuri collection. His 1,257 best selling images from the Yuri_Arcurs collection were moved to the Yuri collection. All of them have been downloaded from iStock more than 200 times and 294 of this group have more than 1,000 downloads each. Currently the Yuri collection has had between 54,000 and 55,000 downloads since it was established. It is not clear why there are two collections as all the images in both collections are exclusive.
Yes. All his "original" work he had already submitted while being non-exclusive was moved to a new account, first called "Urilux" and then renamed to "Yuri". Ever since the move of those images (including all his prior bestellers) the new downloads on those images are added to the profile page of the new account. So to me it reads: "With his 70,000 images he generated 54,000 new downloads within about a year"
The original "Yuri_Arcurs" account still gets fed with new images, though. The oldest image in that account is dated February 2013, so there was an overlap when his team had probably sent 60,000 images to iStock/Getty directly - those were added to the Yuri account - and at the same time maybe newly produced images continued to be uploaded to the existing account. That is my thought why the old account has so many pictures again.
In the new account, you can see that just 100 out of his 45,000 new images have generated more than 10 downloads. Roughly 8,000 images have had exactly 1 download, and about 4,000 images had more than 1. Using some guess work and statistics, you could assume that the downloads on this portfolio would add up to about 8,000 * 1 + 4,000 * 4 + 100 * 40 = 28,000 downloads. Give or take, maybe 30,000.
So my guesstimate would be that in total he had about 80-85,000 downloads on 115,000 images within the past year on iStock itself. Far from the download numbers we used to expect in microstock but considering that the average royalties paid to iStock exclusives are more in the range of $12-$15 these days plus IS exclusives are making an additional 10-30% of their royalties through the GI Sales, it's still more than a million dollars in revenue.
He made a million on Shutterstock as well as I believe, not counting his other 23 agencies. If thats the case, he might actually be making the same or less after his move to IS. Seems like a case of shooting himself in the foot.
its way below than what he has doing, he was already at 3M back in 2012 (the year before going "exclusive")
Income way higher than $3 Million a year, 8 figures in sight
Yuri licenses over 10 million individual images each and every year (which works out to about 5000 per day).
http://hunchmag.com/interview-yuri-arcurs-the-top-selling-microstock-photographer/
Don't believe everything you read. Personally I doubt very much that his 'income' ever approached $3M .... and that's before expenses. In the same article he claims it is 'nearly impossible' to return a profit on a shoot inside of 30 months. I'm gutted if I'm not in profit within 30 days! Classic case of "sales are vanity, profit is sanity". It must be very difficult for Yuri now. If new images just aren't shifting on IS, as we've all experienced, then how long do you keep ploughing the big bucks into new shoots that aren't getting the sales to justify the cost?
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 [6] 7 8 9 10 11 ... 210
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
