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Messages - stockmn
101
« on: November 07, 2015, 15:11 »
It may seem like SS is giving away images for free, but we must understand that it's not SS that determines the market...it's the buyers. And the buyers are disagreeing with the macro stock business model.
Why wouldn't they disagree with the macro model? They're being offered a product for a few dollars that they were (at one time at least) willing to pay hundreds for. The microstock model has a place in the market as there are a ton of graphic designers and small businesses that need images at a low price. In my opinion, however, they should get what they pay for. Micro buyers should be getting simple images and elements at these prices. Not ones taken with thousands of dollars of professional gear and worked on for hours in post processing. If they want high production value images and advertising concepts they should have to pay more. These are the images that shouldn't be found in micro. Unfortunately, we have all bent over backwards to create these images and sell them for a few bucks through micro.
102
« on: November 07, 2015, 13:37 »
The best are the aggregates, Blend, Image Source etc.
I have around a thousand images through two of the biggest aggregates and my RPI is higher on the lower quality images I have in microstock. Pretty sad.
103
« on: November 05, 2015, 17:43 »
I think in some ways micro is going to return to what it should have been - low cost images sold for low prices.
I agree! This is where everything went wrong. Getty should have used iStock as a farm team of sorts and identified the high quality, high production contributors and moved them and their images into the Macro market. While microstock is a needed low end market for a certain segment of buyers, it allowed buyers who were quite happy paying MUCH more for an image to get used to high quality images for pennies. Using thousands of dollars in camera equipment to produce images that sell at micro subscription prices is not and has never been sustainable. It just seemed like it to some for awhile.
104
« on: October 30, 2015, 10:22 »
In typical iStock fashion, this announcement leaves more questions than answers. The confusing messaging and less than transparent reporting along with the past history of how these things usually work out for the contributors mean that I'm withholding judgement until I hear some further clarification. Currently this whole non-subscription, subscription plan sounds like a cut in overall earnings to me.
105
« on: October 21, 2015, 17:57 »
Meanwhile in Prague, the whole company in one place enjoying their vacation ...Guess who? Pond5
Why would anyone give their files to this bunch in hope they will sell it? 
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154323719409972&set=p.10154323719409972&type=3&theater
Employee says: "I'm starting to Realize-that I have a job! Not recommended for everyone, but this one rocks! #emptychairismine - in Prague, Czech Republic."
Ha ha, just incredible ... on eternal vacation while living on our 50%.
Got to love Pond5! 
Good for them! A company that pays us a fair 50% AND takes good care of it's employee's!
106
« on: October 21, 2015, 11:56 »
about $700 
Somewhere between $800-900 here.
107
« on: October 20, 2015, 12:24 »
2000 files at Canva. 50-100 sales a day.
Wow, you're doing a whole lot better than me at Canva. With 781 files I've had 83 sales this month so far. Although 2-300 of those files are one's that I put up when they first opened that are still listed as "pending cut-out".
108
« on: October 14, 2015, 20:23 »
I recently uploaded a few pics to 500px. They're in the prime marketplace but I don't understand the message to buyers about being the first to license the image and needing to leave a deposit and wait up to several days for 500px to secure the license. Can anyone enlighten me what this is all about?
109
« on: October 10, 2015, 14:21 »
-Refunds have been given to customers for purchased images/clips since I can remember. VB has chosen to adopt this policy. Maybe it's one way of attracting more buyers. Live with it and quite whining.
How exactly can an agency attract buyers since refunds propably mean:
1)Bad video quality and various technical issues that the agency either chose to ignore or has no means to check or simply doesn't care.Would you buy products from a shop that has no means to verify their quality?
2)Agency is new and being taken advantage of from people who want to download and get a refund."The client is always right" mantra doesn't necessarily inspire confidence.
Am i missing something else?
I get occasional refunds from EVERY agency I've ever worked with. As for VB I've had dozens of downloads and maybe three refunds. Also they do seem to be checking the quality of all incoming videos. While it's true I haven't had many rejected, I have had a few.
110
« on: October 08, 2015, 13:26 »
iStock has just made my life easier. With this new "subs" deal I no longer feel any reason to upload anything to them. I stopped uploading video over a year ago and now I can leave them off my upload list for stills as well.
111
« on: October 07, 2015, 18:54 »
How long before the sale is cleared, refund-wise? I haven't had a refund yet, but it would be annoying.
For the refund I had yesterday it's been a couple of weeks since the sale was made.
112
« on: October 07, 2015, 10:13 »
I had a refund yesterday as well. I've had 2-3 refunds total over the last few months. The refund notice yesterday let me know that the video was never downloaded by the client.
113
« on: October 05, 2015, 13:23 »
Low priced sales at SS.
Do you mean web sizes or lower than normal priced hd?
114
« on: October 05, 2015, 13:20 »
Yep, for several days last week, previews of all of my hd video at fotolia were showing up on Adobe Stock. The previews didn't play and they are not showing any longer. I had an email awhile back from fotolia asking me to upload more of my video prior to the launch on Adobe Stock. I believe it said that hd videos would be priced at $75 (same as on fotolia) and 4k would be "competitively priced" but they couldn't tell us the exact price at that time.
Sounds encouraging but I won't be uploading any 4k until I find out what "competitively priced" really means.
115
« on: October 02, 2015, 15:38 »
Is there somewhere to go to set all of your extended license prices in bulk?
116
« on: September 25, 2015, 01:14 »
The article says he created the image in 1998. 1998 was several lifetimes ago in the stock photo industry. What was quite possible then is not at all likely today.
As a matter of fact, today I received a royalty statement from a large macro agent and I saw that I had made several .04 sales on images that I had traveled half way around the world to get. Yep, 4 cents. I can tell you from experience that wouldn't have happened in 1998!
117
« on: September 04, 2015, 13:43 »
I hear you both. It's hard to know where to draw the line when the sand is always shifting. I'm just doing the best I can.
Pond5 is definitely my favorite as we're able to set fair prices and receive a fair royalty. Pond5, however, was once easily my best earner but it has fallen over the last year to #2 and sometimes even #3 on my monthly earnings hit parade.
118
« on: September 04, 2015, 11:59 »
Just received an email from Dissolve telling me they are lowering my clip prices next week to $49.
There were a couple of options. One is I can send them a list of all the clips in my collection that aren't available for $49 elsewhere (you gotta be kidding me, I'm not spending my time doing that) and they will only change those prices.
The second option is I can request for them to deactivate all my clips so they can be easily reactivated at a later date.
Interestingly enough, at the exact same time I got Dissolve's email I also got a notification of a sale from VideoBlocks. I profited over $47 dollars from the single clip sold at VB! With Dissolve's new pricing I would have received just $14.70
It seems pretty clear to me who I would rather support.
Update:
In the end I chose to ask Dissolve to deactivate my 2,000 clips. This is a slippery slope with nowhere to go but down. I'm tired of this nonsense from many of the agencies. An agency that's trying to control how and where I submit my clips to other agencies and one who's immediate response to every challenge seems to be lowering prices is not for me and won't be good for my business or the industry long term.
I think you made a wise choice. Following this thread for a while now and good to see some action is being taken by contributors to punish unfair agencies.
I just felt that if I allowed my clips to sell at Dissolve for $49 and at a lousy royalty rate, how long can SS hold off before they are lowering their prices to compete? While I'm not fond of the $49 price, I applaud VideoBlocks for thinking outside the box and providing a model that is beneficial to contributors. They've come up with something that is a win for all parties. Dissolve is just following in the footsteps of so many other agencies that completely fail when it comes to innovation that benefits both buyers and sellers as well as the agencies themselves. Ultimately this may doom them to failure.
119
« on: August 27, 2015, 01:18 »
The plot thickens.
I think you mean the plot sickens
120
« on: August 26, 2015, 12:21 »
I'm waiting to see what the pricing for video will be at Adobe. I hope they support standard pricing. If they come out with a price lower than the industry standard of $79 all the other players prices will be forced to change and that will be bad news. Companies like Dissolve will lower their prices asap.
121
« on: August 21, 2015, 10:47 »
Craig says in the video on his latest blog post that they were also hit by a Google penalty. Does anyone know why? Can't find more info about it.
And this is a reason to not pay on a regular basis?
I don't know, he mentioned a patent troll lawsuit and a Google penalty hit, but the latter must have been some time ago. Thing is, it's not clear to me why they were penalized.
They had a "duplicate content" penalty. Their website was setup in such a way that google kept seeing the same content displayed on different pages of their website. Google does this so that you can't make a website with only 100 pages of unique content into a website with hundreds or even thousands of pages. This is a difficult area for stock as it makes sense for the same images and video to appear on different areas of the website. For instance, footage of snow falling may appear under the category of "winter" as well as the category "snow". I believe they've fixed the problem but recovering from a google penalty is not generally fast and easy.
122
« on: August 18, 2015, 10:24 »
Just received an email from Dissolve telling me they are lowering my clip prices next week to $49.
There were a couple of options. One is I can send them a list of all the clips in my collection that aren't available for $49 elsewhere (you gotta be kidding me, I'm not spending my time doing that) and they will only change those prices.
The second option is I can request for them to deactivate all my clips so they can be easily reactivated at a later date.
Interestingly enough, at the exact same time I got Dissolve's email I also got a notification of a sale from VideoBlocks. I profited over $47 dollars from the single clip sold at VB! With Dissolve's new pricing I would have received just $14.70
It seems pretty clear to me who I would rather support.
Update: In the end I chose to ask Dissolve to deactivate my 2,000 clips. This is a slippery slope with nowhere to go but down. I'm tired of this nonsense from many of the agencies. An agency that's trying to control how and where I submit my clips to other agencies and one who's immediate response to every challenge seems to be lowering prices is not for me and won't be good for my business or the industry long term.
123
« on: August 13, 2015, 18:31 »
On a site like Dissolve's it further penalizes those contributors who haven't placed their clips with a lower priced site. If I'm a good boy, my clips will remain for sale at $80 right next to the clips selling for $49 ??
That sure makes me feel special. Every time they make a move it looks worse. Whack-a-Mole strategy.
Good point, I hadn't even considered that! In addition, they're heading towards the customer confusing iStock strategy of pricing a potentially lower quality clip at a higher price and the customer can't understand why clips are priced as they are. No agency in their right mind should be following the iStock model. The Whack-a-Mole strategy comment was right on the money 
124
« on: August 13, 2015, 12:05 »
Just received an email from Dissolve telling me they are lowering my clip prices next week to $49.
There were a couple of options. One is I can send them a list of all the clips in my collection that aren't available for $49 elsewhere (you gotta be kidding me, I'm not spending my time doing that) and they will only change those prices.
The second option is I can request for them to deactivate all my clips so they can be easily reactivated at a later date.
Interestingly enough, at the exact same time I got Dissolve's email I also got a notification of a sale from VideoBlocks. I profited over $47 dollars from the single clip sold at VB! With Dissolve's new pricing I would have received just $14.70
It seems pretty clear to me who I would rather support.
125
« on: August 09, 2015, 10:28 »
And stop screwing around with their pricing model. Have some confidence in the product they are selling and show that confidence to buyers and contributors.
Well said! If they were hoping to slow down uploads with this announcement they've succeeded. I won't be uploading new work unless/until this gets worked out. Even then they've shown their colors. What will be the next change? Maybe we shouldn't have expected more from an agency run by ex istock management. Man, I'm tired of being messed with.
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