Quote from: hoi ha on November 01, 2011, 02:03

It looks like you're not submitting much to iStock. I think that explains it more than anything, especially with the increase in really good competition. imho.

You really believe that? Honestly? That the lack of sales is down simply to that?

Our competition is uploading 200-600 high quality images a month. 3 a month just won't compete these days, no matter how good they are.

I realize you're having great sales at the moment, and that's excellent. However there are several major contributors in the stats thread who are reporting small sales growth compared to portfolio growth or sales and download drops in spite of substantial portfolio growth.

I've been around iStock a while and the pattern I've noticed is that when people are having great sales they often try to cast it as a problem with the contributor, their portfolio, their uploads, etc. when others are not having the same experience. If it were one or two complainers, it'd be easy to dismiss, but I think that the stats thread is pretty clearly not so good for the big contributors overall.

So enjoy your good sales, but don't dismiss other people's experiences out of hand.

Most of the flaws being discussed here have already been discussed, sometimes many times, in the iStock forums. The last big round of overall discussions (as opposed to those about particular keywords) was when they introduced editorial. What is the logic of adding brand names - which aren't translated - to the CV? As the size of this list, if you took all brand names world wide, is unmanageably large, and the value (in translating names) is zero, what on earth is the point of taking that direction.

The addition of "other" to every single branch of the CV tree is a reasonable thing to do - although as Sean points out, the substandard state of iStock's IT efforts has denied us even that - but it isn't the whole solution.

I'm not a huge fan of Corbis' CV-like system either, but in discussions with support once, they pointed out that when their system sees two keywords they know go together - in the case I was asking about it was Georgetown and Grand Cayman - they automatically put two and two together and disambiguate the Georgetown for you. Intelligent code versus the brute force approach of Getty putting a ridiculously large pile of terms into a system that is guaranteed, all the time, to be out of date. It will always have sports teams that don't exist and be missing the new hot products - Nest, the cool programmable thermostat that ends up hotter than iPods.

...In this economy who can really blame any of them for following the corporate road map. In the end its every man/woman for himself in this business.  ...

I don't think a poor economy is an excuse for lapses in ethics.

In particular, the promise of grandfathering royalty levels, people acting on that promise and then you later say "oh, never mind" and don't grandfather anything.

That, in my book, isn't just following a corporate road map but amoral and unethical behavior. It's not illegal, but it's scummy business practice. Some businesses don't care about anything but staying on the right side of the law, but I can certainly blame anyone who has no higher ethical standard than "it's OK as long as it isn't clearly illegal".

I watched the whole thing from beginning to end. I thought KKT did a very poor job. Just because I have a negative opinion of him, what he did for iStock and this interview doesn't mean I'm out to get them. That's just my honest opinion. Other people's mileage may vary.

And having said many times that you feel people here are reflexively anti iStock, it's really rich, SNP, for you to throw out the idea that people might be commenting without watching. Talk about making wild assumptions...

I loved the quote from KKT that iStock runs like a well-oiled machine - I realize things are more stable now, but they can't even get new content showing up reliably every 24 hours. Broken down jalopy might be too strong in the other direction, but well-oiled machine is just fantasy land.

There was also some blather about how accepting content that iStock formerly rejected and sending it to photos.com instead would make photographers better in the process. He also mentioned clipart.com several times, but the quality of the content there is so horrendously low that I can't see how that site can do well without a huge makeover.

No timetable for all of this, but as I've already decided that iStock won't get any new content content - not sure if I'll have them lag by 6 months or more; enough to give all the other sites first bite of the apple before Thinkstock gets it - I'm not in any hurry.

Be interesting to know what she's after with this technique - an interview with her would be interesting. As it is, I can see it's a clever trick, but it doesn't seem to add anything to what you'd get if she just painted it on canvas.

I must be the odd one out, I've already beaten my 2010 income.

That old expression about not looking a gift horse in the mouth comes to mind

Everyone's experiences are going to be a little different - mix of photos and other media (or not), few mega-sellers vs. broad base of good sellers, seasonal specialties, whether you uploaded at a time when a glitch favored (or hampered) future best sellers, best match luck of the draw when a new file catches or doesn't - it's a long list.  Certainly those with a substantial Vetta/Agency presence can have the potential for big wins.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on October 25, 2011, 06:34

Quote from: loop on October 25, 2011, 04:03

Quote from: aeonf on October 25, 2011, 03:21

If one is a higher ranking exclusive at IS (at 35% or 40% levels) expected income can go down by even 70%-80%
Maybe Jsnover can gives us better figures.

I don't think so. Staying at IS like non-exclusive, would get you about 50% of what you were earning there. Let's say 35-40%% if you have Vetta and Agency pictures. From here, any new income adds, so reaching 50%-60% in the beggining should be easy.

It's probably worse than that because exclusives have higher commission percentages AND higher file prices, so even without vetta they lose out twice over if they cancel. It isn't just going from 30% to - say - 17%. The exclusive base rate is the same as the independent "photos+" rate, so you might lose another 30% there. The decline could easily exceed 50% even for a silver or gold level contributor without Vetta or Getty earnings. They might also see the 17% commission rate drop to 16% after a year, because lower prices mean fewer "redeemed credits" even if your sales are unchanged. It's a serious issue for them.

True indeed.
+ add to the equation the fact that because of worse best match for non exclusives  fewer of you files will be downloaded = even less income.

I know of one diamond exclusive which lost 70% of his income.

As far as the price difference between exclusive files and not, Photos+ has largely taken care of that. I used up most of my quota on any of the files that sold well so they were at the same credit value as when I was exclusive. I had removed my Vetta files in September 2010 (back to the main collection) when they jacked up the price and mandated that the files move to Getty, so I didn't have any dependence on Vetta income to worry about in the exclusive to independent shift.

As far as the size of the initial drop, it's hard to nail because even people who stayed exclusive are seeing drops comparing 2011 to 2010 (same month). My feeling was that it was only a matter of when, not if, I left exclusivity after the April 2011 contract changes Getty forced on their contributors. Better get the pain over with sooner rather than later and not waste time measuring the delta. I am fairly certain that even if I had stayed exclusive, my 2011 income would have been lower than 2010, so then we're only quibbling about how much lower - but yes, there is a temporary smack in the face while sales build elsewhere. In my case I can't contribute to FT, which most other people switching to independent would want to do.

I think it's a variation of the old question Ann Landers used to suggest people ask when considering leaving a spouse - are you better off with him or without him? When it was just iStock with Getty in the background, for me the answer was a clear win for exclusivity. After H&F tightened the screws to wring every last bit of profit from the business regardless of future consequences, I decided I'm better off independent and I'm fortunate I can afford to take the financial hit in the short term.

The point about refusals is something to consider - all the agencies refused images that were proven sellers. With one or two at SS I resubmitted with a note pointing out how many times the image had sold at iStock to suggest LCV wasn't really appropriate, but for the most part I've just been willing to let it go. I've no energy for arguing about it.

Had enough of this crap. I am going to give up exclusivity as this month has taken a dive from a pretty good start. I am going to get my images i8n as many libraries as possible.

I don't know if this last quarter of the year is typically a busy one for you, but you might want to at least consider waiting until January to leave (or early December to put in your 30 days notice) so you can get the maximum from your portfolio during the fall/winter season and take the hit during the process of uploading elsewhere during the quiet time at the beginning of next year.

The alamy license requires a credit if the image is used for editorial purposes. If someone puts your image with other material into the blog banner, that's not editorial - it's essentially promo or decoration for the blog.

About the only thing that would be a no-no is someone claiming copyright in the derivative work made from (in part) your image. Otherwise, I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

You can read some more about the dismal per-credit prices at iStock here

It's possible that things may have dropped even lower - I think as some of the big buyers got really upset about prices (esp. Vetta/Agency) begin jacked up they offered big discounts, beyond what you can get by buying directly from the site. As iStock does not make it easy for contributors to find out these things we can't really track what the average price per credit is - and whether it's going down or up over time.

I got a popup for the survey (which is the second in as many weeks). I completed it.

In spite of the bad news for iStock contributors of the idea of global searches and purchase accounts (given forced participation in other Getty sites - Agency/Vetta on the high end and PP for independents on the low), I think it'd be a great idea for customers to have a single login and purchase system.

I did think the silliest notion was the set of questions about having badges for customers for different purchase levels or other activity levels on the site. Just how sophomoric do they think their buyers are?

The overall tone of questions - about what you like/don't about credit systems, what sites you're going to in addition to iStock or instead of - suggests they've got the message that buyers aren't all happy. I wonder how many people of their bread and butter buyers (i.e. not me who just wanted to see what the questionnaire said and acted the way I think buyers would) would spend the time on the survey. I also wonder if they're contacting former buyers who don't go to the site any more (via e-mail perhaps) to ask them to fill it out.

I'm also new here, new to microstock but not new to photography. Come from a background of sports, PR & news photographer. Been out of the game for a few years and want to get back in. I enjoy reading you guys. Hope it will be of some help.

Have you figured out what you want to do, if anything, about selling stock via the micros? There are plenty of people here who can point you in the right direction if you need it (as long as it doesn't follow the line of one earlier new poster's thread which basically asked how they could dump a library of 30K slides on some agency without doing any work themselves!).