|
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 - MichaelJay
101
« on: May 27, 2009, 03:25 »
try sueing some guy in russia or china or india and see if you can get some money back...
good luck.
Can you point me to a few reports showing that Getty or Corbis has done so successfully?
102
« on: May 27, 2009, 02:19 »
Is there any restrictions on using Standard Royalty Free licence for CD cover? The reason I ask is that an musician has contacted me about using one of my images for the cover of the CD. It will be a small first run. There is no "standard royalty free license", each company has their own restrictions. You have to check with the agency that the license is being bought at. Though, in general, as it's only part of a "packaging" and not part of the actual product, it should be fine with most sites.
103
« on: May 27, 2009, 01:22 »
Fortunately for Stephen King and his fans, he understands what business he is in and how it works. It is a mass market business, and even the best band and most popular author will never be able to decree prices. Only the market can do that properly.
Well, that's a good comparison. There is a mass market which overcompensates lower prices with volume. Still I see a point that this is not true for all books, uhm, images I meant. There will always be a market for images that will not sell a single license more if you lower the price because the number of potential customers is very low or even one (compare it to scientific or special interest books if you will). For those images you have to find a way to figure out the maximum that this one (or few) customers is willing to pay to maximize your profit. In many cases you will find that the one customer would have no problems paying 50, 100 or 500 Dollar to use that image once. So while for mass market images it's true to say, you can sell your image 5 times for $100 or 200 times for $5, for some images the equation is you can sell it 5 times for $100 or 5 times for $5. Difficulty, of course, is to find out in advance which images are best for micro and which are suited better for mid and macro.
104
« on: May 27, 2009, 01:15 »
if you sell a double page editorial expect at least 200$ up to 400$.
and if you sell for Getty you can go up to the 1000s of $.
Oh man, how do I wish one of my images had paid me hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That would have been worth my time, really... And the only thing I'd have to do for it was to submit thousands and thousands of blurred and underexposed images and wait for five years to have five of them sell.
105
« on: May 27, 2009, 01:11 »
so it's better to know what's going on and stay ahead of the new trends.
I doubt you'll have problems staying ahead with an open mind like yours.
106
« on: May 25, 2009, 07:30 »
I think fair rice for subs would be not less than 50% of regular sales. Correct me if I'm wrong, and tell me where some example of so low subs prices for any product in the world. Actually I don't think a "real" product can be compared with this. There is (almost) no marginal cost to distributing a digital image. If your image gets downloaded 3 times or 50 times, you don't get an additional bill. The best product you can compare this to in my opinion is telephone services. Most providers for fixed lines already have at least two price plans: One offering pay-per-call (say 3 cents per minute) and one offering a fixed-price scheme (say 10 dollar a month). Translated into a hypothetical situation this would be 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 43200 minutes per month costing 1296 dollar... with the flat rate you would get a discount of more than 99%. It still works for the phone companies because most of the cost is fixed cost - and probably none of the users are getting even close to using the full amount. What we have seen in telecommunications market was a massive reduction of prices over the last two decades. I remember having paid 70 cents per minute at night time for an international call 15 years ago - nowadays I have to pay about 5 cent for the same call. As a result demand was growing faster than the reduction of prices and the total market volume has grown. But yes, a lot of companies made wrong decisions during that period and went downhill. Still, the total communication market has grown faster than the average economy in most countries. I don't say this example is perfectly transferrable to the image market but I think it's closer than any comparison to buying cars or magazines.
107
« on: May 25, 2009, 07:20 »
I have always rejected subscriptions because images are sold too cheap. I find it outrageous, regardless of how much I earn. I know the microstock world started cheap, but it really doesn't need to be like that. It doesn't make much difference charging US$5 or 6 or maybe even 10 for an image - if this is what a buyer needs, he will get it. I often have clues this is true. Your example is most likely true. For that customer it wouldn't have made a difference if the second image would have cost $40 as well. And you will still find examples of customers paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for images if they find them the best for their project. But concluding that "all customers are not price sensitive" is a different thing. Would you think a group of college students would spend $3 for a graphic they could use for the party posters? Yeah, I'd say this is most likely. Would they pay $50 for the same image? Doubtfully. And I believe there are lots of different customer groups. By supplying images at a low price point you might indeed lose some income with some customers. But you will win income from customers who wouldn't buy at higher prices. Finding the right price point to get the best return is not a simple thing.
108
« on: May 25, 2009, 03:39 »
109
« on: May 25, 2009, 03:27 »
Value is a subjective judgment. A photo has a different "value" for each buyer. All I worry about is sales and that is out of my hands. It is determined by the market - i.e. how many buyers place a value on my photo that is greater than the price.
Microstock has dramatically increased the supply of images and this has lowered the cost of using images. This has made the value of images greater than the price for many more customers.
That sounds like a great assessment of how markets work. In addition I would mention that the cost of production has come down dramatically. The digital workflow requires more investment but reduced marginal cost. It has also led to a devaluation of know-how. Formerly, a photographer had to be quite sure how to set up an image before capturing it on film, otherwise his cost would rise. Nowadays someone can make 20 different shots within a few minutes, see the results immediately and use a trial-and-error approach to get the result he wants. This has allowed people without years of learning the techniques to enter the market as supplier. And at the same time the demand for images has increased dramatically as well. Obviously, the lowered cost of media production within the WWW (anybody can put up a blog at zero or very low cost and try to sell ads via AdSense) has led to an explosion of content that is fighting for attention of the reader. But also print media have profited from digital workflows - do you remember how the next event in your local disco or the college party has been advertised with hand-drawn illustrations from a copy shop 10 years ago? Nowadays you see those ads in full color with professional imagery.
110
« on: May 24, 2009, 06:41 »
And yes - my images are a bit more mid-stock than microstock ;-)
So why waste your valuable time sharing your wisdom with us mortal beings...
111
« on: May 24, 2009, 02:56 »
Thanks for moving out from our field of interest and our income source... I hope many others will become iStock exclusives so we can earn more ;-)
Good Luck there!
I hope that for you, too. Because apparently your images aren't good enough to make it a competitive field.
112
« on: May 22, 2009, 05:50 »
The main issue I have is one little sentence in the original anouncement:
Starting in August, everyone who contributes to Photos.com will receive the standard Getty Images commission of 20% for these single image sales.
With this sentence they allowed their real goal to slip out.
Is that something new? I thought everybody who supplied images to other Getty collections already know that 20% is their standard commission in the RF field and most other areas.
113
« on: May 21, 2009, 18:07 »
Yay - on "photos.com - powered by iStockphoto"
114
« on: May 21, 2009, 17:54 »
Wow. Thanks. You've added sense to my life, Catastrophe. 
115
« on: May 20, 2009, 04:41 »
And, please learn a bit of economy before you start to speak loud. Sure... as soon as you learn some manners before speaking to other people.
116
« on: May 20, 2009, 04:00 »
Wow, those 27 uploads have 1356 downloads. istock should be trying to get your portfolio on their site.
Less is more 
Exactly what I thought when I see 10.000+ images on Dreamstime of which less than 2% had 10 or more sales. There are certainly quite a few brillant images among them. Why not drop the other 98% and double the amount of work spent on the rest...
117
« on: May 19, 2009, 08:26 »
that's ridiculous. I think it'll be simple enough to have -person and -people for 99.99999% of the cases. As it is for most of the searches. Look for yourself and you'll find out that "nobody" is not that popular in fact.
I agree. That's what negative search options are for.
I also agree. So I suggest we teach buyers to search for "hamburger -nobody" if they are looking for some people eating hamburgers.
118
« on: May 14, 2009, 07:26 »
Don't forget FACTS: I have finished art school, I am quite productive and I have photographic memory. So, I am able to draw anything with just once seeing it and with any known artistic style in execution! You say I am superior compared to you - Well, it may be so!
Ok, I think no need to explain more. You are a great artist and a great person, and it's a loss to all agencies who don't invite you personally to enrich their libraries. I already feel sorry for all agencies who didn't understand this. I am sure market will prove them wrong.
119
« on: May 13, 2009, 09:19 »
Did someone notice acceptance ratio of 0,00% ?
Yes, everyboyd. Apparently the hardware broke down during a script run... Those numbers should correct themselves automatically with the next script run (most likely tomorrow morning)
120
« on: May 13, 2009, 05:45 »
Servers are back alive as it seems.
121
« on: May 13, 2009, 04:46 »
Perfect! Then it is as it should then.. (apart from something is down) what time is it over there now... must be realy yearly to get up now..
Something like 3:45am now? Worst time for a server downtime - too late to be still up and too early to wake up. :-)
122
« on: May 13, 2009, 04:30 »
Some of the Admins pager or cellphone should beep now.. so they can get up and restart things... 
The beeps worked, people in Calgary are on it for an hour now. Don't know any details but hopefully problems can be fixed quickly.
123
« on: May 12, 2009, 10:27 »
IStock can have any keyword rules and search algorithms they want. The difficulties contributors have with the current rules are:
1. They're different from all the other microstocks.
2. They're different from what they used to be.
3. They're not clearly spelled out anywhere, at least not that I've seen.
4. Various IStock contributors will give you differing spins on them.
5. IStock's reviewers apply them inconsistently.
6. Even IStock's own people can't give you definitive answers (see thread about "business").
7. Guess wrong, and your AR is dinged and you go back to the end of the review line.
I would agree if: - Photographers would shoot images by the same standards - Designers would follow the same ideas and ways of using images - The world would stop turning Photography is not an absolute science, neither is keywording. Things develop. Humans are imperfect. That's how the world works... Asking for perfection would require to start being perfect. And I doubt any of us are.
124
« on: May 12, 2009, 02:37 »
Didn't MJ say you had checked "Asia" and not "Asian Ethnicity"?
No. The rejection notice would say "Asia," if I had accidentally ticked the wrong box. It says "Asian Ethnicity." And I just looked at the file in DeepMeta, and everything is properly ticked.
The rejection reason really is "Asian Ethnicity." 
No, I didn't state that it was wrongly disambiguated, just bringing it up as a potential reason. In this case I'd have to agree that the rejection was unjustified (yeah, well, even inspectors are humans) and you shouldn't have a problem to resubmit with the same keyword.
125
« on: May 11, 2009, 16:13 »
I'll bear that in mind - since I don't have access to studios, it's difficult to get those professional images of people, since that's typically what sells the most I guess.
Actually it hardly takes more than a reflector and/or a flash light (that can be triggered off camera) to get pretty useful shots. Not everything has to be shot in studio and with perfect light. Just imagine a couple of friends enjoying a day in a cafe or on the beach. You won't be able to shoot that in a studio. But it's not require to have all people shots. There are quite a few landscapes and business concepts selling pretty well.
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
