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Messages - pet_chia
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76
« on: November 08, 2010, 22:41 »
I have had quick sales sometimes from fairly new images. But I must say that these are nearly always rather unique images, of stuff that however non-commercial it may appear, they don't have a lot of competition from existing images. Other images, unique or otherwise, seem to be comatose for a few months and then mysteriously start getting regular sales.
As for the OP's question, getting 10, 50 or 100 views with no sales is pretty common, at least for me. If you just keep shooting and uploading, you may be very surprised at which images really take off (eventually) and which ones get hundreds of views with no sales.
77
« on: November 07, 2010, 21:48 »
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If buyers want to be able to search the lowest priced images, then Istock is likely to come up with a way for them to do that.
Agreed. It's only normal e-commerce. Practically every other website does it - they have "price" as sorting option, or even "price (low to high)" and "price (high to low)". Anything else is just going to annoy their customers and drive them away. Unless it is actually their devious plan to drive the company into the ground (and I can't see how it could be) then they're going to have to give in and do this. They cannot offer similar-looking, but (vastly) different-priced goods for sale without this feature. Amazon does it, expedia does it, and Istock had darn well better do it unless they want to look like a bunch of fools. The existence of this feature and the way that customers use it might also force them to think hard about pricing. Is run-of-the-mill stock imagery really worth many times more than what professional but non-exclusive artists have produced, just because it was bought in bulk from god-knows-where and stamped with an "agency collection" seal of approval? Their customers will let them know pretty quickly, as soon as they have the means to differentiate.
78
« on: November 03, 2010, 19:02 »
I think Mr. Nielsen is just a jealous ex unsuccessful stock photographer who wants to assure buyers not to buy stock images, 
Has a plain-looking spouse, children and/or dog and nobody bought his stock? LOL
79
« on: November 01, 2010, 20:35 »
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My post was saying that it's beyond belief that a large site has so few checks on code that handles money that a royalty rate change could just get onto the site by "accident".
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You are absolutely right, it is beyond belief. Only two possible explanations occur to me right now - either they're the most incompetent people ever to run a multi-million dollar e-commerce site, or else they are absolutely desperate to make some kind of number for end-of-quarter or end-of-fiscal-year. I've seen and heard of lots of corporate skullduggery when the management knobs are desperate to make their numbers. For example in manufacturing it is (or was) some kind of rule that you don't declare revenue until the product has been delivered to the customer's door. Two scams I heard of were, (a) when you can't ship the product fast enough to the customers, make a rectangle of tape around a corner of your warehouse and declare it to be "customer property" and pile up all the crap there which the management weasels are desperate to declare as "revenue" for the current quarter; and (b) ship stuff to customers that they never ordered, just drive up to their shop, unload and take off. The inevitable product returns can be kept off the books for many quarters if necessary. But I suppose it's more difficult to scam when you're doing e-commerce - either the credit card/paypal transactions happened, or they didn't. If (hypothetically) a bunch of management weasels were desperate to put lipstick on an e-commerce pig then I suppose that making "mistakes" with the software would be about the only way, either overcharging customers or underpaying suppliers. I don't have to tell you, when these scams occur they do not end well for the company management or shareholders. When the chickens come home to roost a wrecked share price is the least of their problems ... civil lawsuits are very common and criminal investigations are not unknown.
80
« on: October 29, 2010, 20:50 »
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I'm pretty sure. I contacted them a while ago and they explained that they use the pseydonym due to the higher price point. They didn't want potential buyers to come straight to them, buying the images for a fraction compared to Pixmac prices.
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That kind of reminds me of something ... I heard a sports radio talk show guy once who said that some professional sports teams are operating what are for all practical purposes in-house scalping operations. For reasons of "fairness" or to get good PR, teams usually charge the same ticket price for all regular-season games - but in reality some games are much, much more popular with fans. They avoid the bad PR associated with jacking up prices for those games by moving large blocks of tickets to an apparently arms-length third party company who basically scalps the tickets - but in reality the company belongs to them. They have their cake and eat it too. It's slightly different in this case in that stock photos are not actually a scarce commodity, and identical product is available simultaneously in unlimited quantities at 2 different prices, but it's essentially the same trick being played on the paying customers.
81
« on: October 29, 2010, 17:35 »
Are buyers rushing to use up subscription credits at the end of the month or something? I had an absolute flurry of sales today, probably BDE which is getting close to making Oct the equal of Sept which was BME.
Or perhaps my non-exclusive, non-Agency, non-Vetta are just the kind of bargain that people are looking for.
82
« on: October 28, 2010, 17:12 »
... it looks like a bait and switch scam when you have similar images like that in so many different collections at different price points ...
Bait and switch ... or ... [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7YSXCp8tpc[/youtube]
83
« on: October 28, 2010, 11:20 »
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Is it wise? If you like selling files less frequently for more money, it may be 'wise' for you.
It's a dilemma alright. There is a saying - "Sell to the classes, live with the masses. Sell to the masses, live with the classes." Which means - if you run an expensive, exclusive restaurant which sells fine, gourmet food to the wealthy and discriminating, you will probably not get rich. But the person who owns a chain of drive-thrus which sell happy meals to the proletariat will become filthy rich. I don't know if it's true in this case but as they say, business is business. Is it possible to experiment by splitting similar images between the premium aisle and the bargain bins and seeing which ones come out on top? I suppose that it makes a lot of difference whether the search results are skewed or not and whether customers have a fair chance of finding either the AAA prime steak or the hamburger depending on their preference.
84
« on: October 28, 2010, 11:02 »
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Is this another one of iStock's 'dirty little secrets'? I wonder if the CEO Jonathan Klein is aware of the staggering level of nepotism going on at iStock. AFAIK, Getty doesn't suffer from conflicts of interest like this.
I don't know if this is true, I don't know who any of these people are and I have no axe to grind other than wanting a fair shake. But I will say this (again): any organization that want's to be successful in the long run had better be customer-oriented, not supplier-oriented or insider-oriented. If problems are occurring because upload approvals and search algorithms are skewed by contributor/insiders, then I recommend a corporate shift towards purging those with conflicts of interest and instead recruiting from the ranks of long-term buyers. As I related before in other posts about my experiences in other corporations, some of them are highly skewed toward insiders' benefits - in the most shocking ways. Conrad Black (according to reports) was a notorious example and well known, because he was brought down. But many of them are never punished, except that the companies inevitably whither and die. There are however companies which are absolute models of ethics and fair play. After witnessing heinous insider dirty work in one large company, I was pleasantly surprised when being trained in another, larger and more successful company that they had a code of conduct which absolute forbade ANY conflict of interest or even APPEARANCE of conflict of interest. What they said was, we understand that occasionally in this business people have investments or other interests which intersect with the business of our company. You MUST declare this interest to your superiors, who will bring it to the attention of our board of ethics who will most likely allow you continue working for our company ONLY if you donate 100% of any gain from this outside interest to a suitable charity. Otherwise, it's the chop. This company with its code of ethics made far, far more millionaires of its employees and investors in the long run than the other company with conflicted insiders (chiefly the CEO), which had a good run for a few years but then stagnated and was sold to a competitor at something well below its all-time-high share price.
85
« on: October 28, 2010, 10:44 »
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I just did an image search on google using 2 of my popular keywords. Out of 13, 000,000 results my images were 1st, 3rd and 7th without any other sort of stock image in site. I'd say that this suggests that microstock is doing ok in general web searches. The one that came first in the search is a Dreamstime image.
I've been trying to work out why that image is doing so well in the google search. It only has 130 dls but has over 5000 views. I guess that at some time it must have appeared somewhere on the site where people would randomly click on it to get such a low dl/ view ratio.
ETA the one in 3rd position is actually a web site using my image but the other 2 are from DT and IS
Cool! (by which I mean, an expression of surprise and delight, not the keyword which brings $$$ to Vetta contributors) I just searched at images.google.com for [<something> +"isolated on white"] and one of my images was #2. A best selling image as it happens (though no flames, it isn't what you would call a highly commercial object). It is significantly lower than that in the equivalent best match search at IS, with a lot of "crowned" images coming first. Maybe we should spread the word to customers that they may find that a better "best match" can be achieved with google than by trusting the potentially skewed best match at IS. I say that because AFAIK google's whole point, and the reason for its success, is that it uses clues (such as links from other web sites) to defeat scamming. The same scamming tactics allegedly occurring at IS (keyword spamming and search result skewing) are what google specializes in beating. Here's a little exercise for you to do at home: try searches like this, and see if the results have been gamed towards crowns/agency: http://images.google.com/images?q=cool+%2B"istockphoto.com"
86
« on: October 27, 2010, 20:30 »
87
« on: October 27, 2010, 20:26 »
Ya but I'll say this ... that thief has good taste. Guess I'll be ready for the big time when people start stealing my stuff. 
88
« on: October 26, 2010, 18:25 »
The Agency Collection is about 9,000+ images from multiple sources (most are company names but who knows who that actually is) sold on gettyimages.com. I don't know that there's any way to know the terms under which that content is licensed to Getty. IS is displaying a portion of that content . I assume IS is just a storefront in this case as the images are still shown on gettyimages.com as well.
The IS Agency collection is now at 5,000+ images but some of those are from real IS contributors - those who submitted an application and got approved the way all of us did.
Thanks - just trying to find out of there is any reason such as personal pecuniary interest which might cause a lapse in standards or an undue haste to push the new content ahead of other images. It's a private company and all of this is their own d_mn business, but a supplier is naturally curious as to who is their competition and what deals might have led to the store shelves being positioned and stocked in one way as opposed to the other.
89
« on: October 26, 2010, 17:23 »
Forgive me if this has already been discussed, but I have wondering about something for as long as these new collections have been discussed.
Where did the collections originate, i.e. from what other company(ies)?
What artists produced the images, and under what commission/royalty arrangements did the artists provide the images? Where are those artists now, have they any stake in Getty such as ownership, management or exclusive contracts? Do they still receive commissions from their images or did they sell them lock, stock and barrel?
What was the nature of the financial deal which brought the images from (somewhere) to Getty? Was it for all cash, was it for nothing except the promise of royalties/commissions, or was it a combination of the two? (or something else completely, such as swapping ownership shares in Getty)
Did Istock acquire the collections directly from the original owners/artists, or did it acquite the collections from within Getty? (either the parent company or another subsidiary) Did Istock the subsidiary of Getty have to pay another subsidiary of Getty to acquire the right to sell the images? Will Istock have to forward a share of the sales to another subsidiary or to the parent company? Or to some third party?
Who owned/controlled the collections before they came into Getty's hands, and what compensation did they receive from Getty when it acquired the collection? What future compensation might they receive from sales of the images? Do the original owners of the collections have any ongoing stake in Getty, as owners, managers or contributors?
All of this is just an elaborate way of asking the age-old question, Cui bono?
90
« on: October 23, 2010, 23:12 »
I think that there are a lot of buyers that worry about the security of Micro model ... releases in general. It can really hurt and has many times since Micro has been strong that there are legal problems. The agencies keep this pretty tight lipped for good reason but this isn't based on just opinion. There have been several cases of improper releases in Micro.
You are right there Jonathan - I know for an absolute fact that there are a fair number of contributors who "fake" model releases ... so this is a proper area of concern for some.
Oh, crikey. You mean they never phone a random sample of models at their given phone# (or write letters) and try to determine if they're fo' real, fo' sure? I would think that using one's gut instincts one could pick out the likeliest suspects for this ... for example someone who has a lot of candid-looking photos of different people as opposed to having a stable of familiar models. Even if the agencies spent very little time and effort doing this, I think it would be pretty good business practice to do it some, especially for a photog who appears to be "just too smooth or too * lucky" convincing dozens of complete strangers to sign releases. And most important of all, let photogs know that your agency is going to be doing this and seriously scare them about the potential legal consequences of messing around. Remember that Turkish guy who found his face on a can of Greek sardines, or whatever it was. If there are many problems like that, or even a perception that there are a lot of problems, then I can see things moving away from crowdsourcing back to agencies using a stable, trusted handful of image factories.
91
« on: October 22, 2010, 18:45 »
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A big ratings buying gang was busted in November 2007 (thread maybe was deleted?) that consisted of a number of contributors who had effectively figured out the best match formula in use at that time by buying their just uploaded images through a dummy account and giving 2-3 5 ratings all within the first 12 hours or so. Their images would go to the top of the best match and stick for quite a while leading to big big sales.
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That's what you get for being contributor-driven instead of customer-driven. What good would the book ratings be at a place like amazon.com if you knew that they were mostly done by the authors and publishers instead of buyers? That's why in microstock the acceptance reviews, the star ratings and even the best match algorithm should be done by and for the buyers (long-term buyers), not the contributors or (worst of all) by and for the interests of combined contributors/corporate insiders.
92
« on: October 22, 2010, 13:45 »
I would like to know what effect ratings have on best match algorithm (if any). I would be happy to spend a bit of time looking at people's photos and giving their best ones 5 stars (nobody seems to give anything less than that) but I have no idea if this means anything in the scheme of things. I would think that sales to actual customers are a lot better indication that a photo is worth looking at than ratings by other contributors.
93
« on: October 20, 2010, 10:37 »
New mail from IS. Learn all about collections. They say "Agency Collection photos cost from 55 to 200 credits. " XXXL images cost 250 credits but I guess that's not meant to mislead anyone, just a typo. They also say vetta "cost between 30 and 125 credits. " XXXL Vetta is 150, another typo? They also say "Exclusive photos can cost between 2 and 25 credits" not exactly an E+ XXXL costs 35 credits, maybe it's a typo too?
The whole thing is so convoluted, even IS is confused.
Sounds too consistent to be a result of error and confusion to me. But what do I know? I will say this - in my life in non-photography and non-graphic arts business, I've heard lots of tales of financial skullduggery. Especially when a company is desperate to present themselves as being in more robust financial health than they really are. Once they become convinced that impressing their shareholders NOW is more important than maintaining good, long-term business relationships with their customers and their suppliers, there is practically no dodge which won't be employed. Mostly these are bookkeeping scams involving the recognition of revenue, hiding returned products, chiseling suppliers, etc. (especially the small suppliers who have no leverage to complain or cut them off). Another thing which is apparently common in business (see Conrad Black) is executives with conflicts of interest. I have seen the founder and chairman of a multi-billion-dollar company spend most of his time and energy on "side" businesses, which he used to offer services, etc. to the main company. For example he had developed or purchased some product as a personal side business, then used his power over the main company to convince it to purchase the products or the entire business from him, and then promoted the new product to the skies in order to convince the shareholders of the main company that he had sold them a "winner". Ultimately, while the main company's revenues, earnings and share price were stagnating, it turned out he was literally making 100s of million$$ off the side businesses, almost entirely due to the leverage available to him from controlling the main company. It takes really committed, vigilant shareholders to keep this kind of scamming under control, but at times the economy is such that everyone just wants to make a quick buck off their investments and can't see any point in trying to nurture or diligently supervise them. Just saying!
95
« on: October 13, 2010, 12:27 »
The article implies that the game plan of current ownership is "pump and dump". Buy a pig, put as much lipstick on her as she'll hold, and then look around for a greater fool on which to unload her. And the author thinks that this is humorous because after all, the contributors are basically talentless snapshooters and, haw haw, a bunch of foreigners.
Leaving aside the "humor", the first part is worth considering. Not that you can do anything about it. In times of economic upheaval (read: inflationary bubbles and crashes), good old fashioned business practices (hard work, honesty, patience) must be thrown out the window because the environment has been stacked against them in favor of speculation and deception. It's tough to make an honest buck when the monetary foundation of the entire economy is dishonest.
96
« on: October 13, 2010, 09:51 »
Maybe they have a lot of trainee reviewers hired to replace or reinforce the ones who were disgruntled by the change in commissions.
97
« on: October 12, 2010, 18:51 »
I thought that getting something signed and witnessed for a refund of $20 was baloney, then again it might have been one of many photos picked out for a big job that got canceled. This is the first time it happened to me.
98
« on: October 12, 2010, 15:43 »
Evidently, to get their $20 back they provided a signed statement swearing on the beard of Zeus that they deleted the file. Talk about counting pennies.
99
« on: October 12, 2010, 15:35 »
I noticed the account balance dropped by a couple of dollars or so, then I saw that I had an email. Evidently a customer asked for a refund on a file they decided not to use. No problem with that, but I am surprised that anyone would go to the effort of sending in a "signed and witnessed Certificate of Destruction" for a $20 refund. My impression has been that the cost of microstock is a tiny fraction of the other costs of graphic art design (such as the artists' time). Things must be getting pretty tough out there 
100
« on: October 07, 2010, 14:41 »
Why would you introduce and make a big fuss over "agency" photos? You ARE an agency already. It's like the New York Yankees announcing with tremendous fanfare that they are now offering their fans a new "Baseball Team (tm)" which is older, lousier, and more expensive than their existing sports franchise. Talk about muddying the waters. More like, trampling all over your brand.
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