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Messages - VB inc

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101
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 30, 2015, 12:59 »
I actually buy pictures. Do you?
Oh, you are a buyer, that's why you love it. You don't have to pay anymore. BTW, do you sell pictures?

Look at the watermark at stocksy. subtle and barely seen.  ::)
But much smaller image sizes.

You just keep expressing vague ideas without any justification.

Im both buyer and contributor but mainly vectors. I discovered istock as a designer for a client i was doing website for back in 2005. I started to contribute both photos and vectors around 2008-9 as exclusive contributor. I joined SS around 2 years ago as a contributor. I hardly make anything new for the micro in the last 2 years but i still come here to check out any news on this industry as it still gives me a nice amount each month.

What is a vague idea? I just don't have any more time to worry about another stupid issue thats worth my time to get all upset over. Misery loves company so keep being miserable if that makes you feel better.

The real issue is how many of you is thieves in here? "Oh your a buyer, that's why you love it"... that's you thinking that all/most buyers are thieves.... again clueless over reaction. So your basically saying that if you are a buyer yourself, you would just be stealing these images.

102
General Stock Discussion / Re: Kozzi promotion site
« on: October 30, 2015, 12:45 »
lol i couldnt agree more to a lot of the articles comments. However, since buyers especially in microstock are from countries not so trendy and cool and usually behind in time anywhere from 5-10 years, your still gonna get handshakes and 90% caucasians and ridiculous smiles to sell stuff.

103
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 30, 2015, 12:22 »

I am one of those that get really irritated by seeing obnoxious watermarks. At some point it really starts to affect the image and i think thats a fine line that is different depending on who you ask.

LMAO to the red remark.
depending on who you ask, you say?

that is like asking the petty thieves in my neighbourhood do they really feel it is necessary for us to have barbed wire around our property 6 foot walls to deter them from breaking into our homes.

the only ppl who consider watermarks obnoxious are the ones who do not think it is important to protect someone's else property , in this case, the photographers and vector artists.

are you by any chance one of the mgt fellas of ss who implemented this obnoxious idea of making it easier for ppl to steal our work???

I actually buy pictures. Do you? Or are you actually a content producer who has no clue about the other side(buyer). I've actually stated my case against vectors and simple shapes as this new watermark isn't good enough for those. You sound like you have never bought a picture ever before. Tell me you haven't seen ridiculous watermarks that even a 90 yr old person can see without glasses. And more often than not, no thief would like to steal that image anyways. Microstock is filled with mediocrity because so many who submit never buy and have little clue.
If your a buyer of images, the more subtle the watermark it is the better. If your a thief, you would want none what so ever. But really what percentage are we crying about anyways thats gonna steal your precious images? I would probably say the percentage of people stealing images would be less than 5% and do you think shutterstock will cater to the less than 5% chance of thieves stealing content that they don't own or catering to the other 95% of buyers who dont give a rats ass if the watermark is too subtle. Look at the watermark at stocksy. subtle and barely seen.  ::)

104
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 30, 2015, 11:59 »
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but in order to see the big watermark preview, you have to be signed into shutterstock where the company knows who you are.

How do you know that?

It's a serious question. Not snark. Please clarify.

If i just type in shutterstock in my web browser and the website comes up. I am still able to search images without logging in. When I click on the small image preview box, the new window i get is to subscribe to one of their image plans. Am I the only one getting this and not the image preview box that most of you guys see? Maybe you guys have cookies that the website remembers who you are even if not logged in.

105
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 30, 2015, 00:05 »
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but in order to see the big watermark preview, you have to be signed into shutterstock where the company knows who you are. Are you guys worried that registered buyers or contributors on this site will take time out to cover up and steal your images? I'm probably gonna get flamed but i think theres a bit of over reaction going on over here.
I am one of those that get really irritated by seeing obnoxious watermarks. At some point it really starts to affect the image and i think thats a fine line that is different depending on who you ask.
HOWEVER, I do believe that they have to make the watermark better for the vectors and photos that is mainly flat shapes as that is real simple to level out in photoshop.

106
PhotoDune / Re: Envato's UNSTOCK site. All Photos $5!?
« on: October 27, 2015, 11:41 »
wow... these images are huge! this has to be a mistake or an oversite. or just plain stupidity.

107
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 21, 2015, 17:34 »
For all you guys complaining the watermark is too small. STOP YOUR COMPLAINING. it might be problematic for vectors or illustrations with lots of solid shape areas but for photos, it is very effective watermark as you see the image and also doesnt deter from it.

So you don't care about the problem for vectors (such as graphic icons) and illustration?

I care more for vectors as thats the only thing i contribute. But i tire of the non stop complaining posts in here. My point was for the photgraphers who might be getting overly worried that they might lose some penny sale because an image thief will really come to shutterstock and steal these photos and then spend at minimum 15 minutes to clean up photos that are bigger than the blog small size.

Just count how many small shutterstock logo that you can see on shelmas red bg background. then there the actual word shutterstock then theres all these lines. just pretend you have to spend 5-10 seconds on each element. Even that simple background is time consuming to clean up. Not worth the effort a thief is gonna do to clean that.  Any image 300x200 pixels is a non starter. do it full size and see how long it takes you to clean and view it at 100%

108
There might have been some type of big news media coverage regarding adobe stock.

Or a better reason is that it seems a lot of sell off today in market and the losers get sold more...

109
Shutterstock.com / Re: Large image previews on SS ?
« on: October 21, 2015, 14:13 »
For all you guys complaining the watermark is too small. STOP YOUR COMPLAINING. it might be problematic for vectors or illustrations with lots of solid shape areas but for photos, it is very effective watermark as you see the image and also doesnt deter from it.

I have spent 30 mins cleaning one photo up with lots of solid areas so its easier to cleanup but it is still a lot of time consuming work to clean. I am an expert at photoshop and illustrator and know what I am doing and to get a photo to a point where the watermark isnt detectable requires a lot of work. It isn't worth the effort to erase the watermark so it is doing a good job IMO.

Before you complain, try cleaning up one yourself and you will quickly realise it is good enough.

110
Off Topic / Re: 10 dead 20 wounded in school shooting
« on: October 06, 2015, 10:11 »
Dig down deep enough, it all boils down to capitalism and corporate interests in the states. Politics is pretty much controlled by capitalism and corporate interests in both parties but it seems to me that its little more obvious on the republican side. The gun lobby has a lot of power.
The real painful issue in our lifetime is that the human population is multiplying unchecked and we all want that great way of life which is certainly not good for the planet as we see the real effect w climate change. Our generation will probably be responsible for the mass extinction many species. It would be sad if our grand children live in a world where there is no rhinos or gorillas, elephants etc...

111
GLStock / Re: Signs of life
« on: October 05, 2015, 19:25 »
As a contributor who gets a download here and there, I really would like to support this site. As a image buyer, it is very tough to search their site for any pictures due to the lack of variety in their search results. I shouldn't see the same contributors photoshoot with the same model being shown over and over again in the first pages... Maybe it is lack of sales from my searches but i spent 20 minutes on it last week and had to move to another site to check.
I think they need to spend some money fixing this problem if they plan to step up their game.

112
Shutterstock.com / Re: Cap on daily earnings?
« on: September 30, 2015, 13:16 »
I am just curious on how much of that is going around which we will never find out.
It's extremely easy to find out the answer and the fact that no one has shown it to be the case casts a lot of doubt on the theory.

Extremely easy huh? like 1+1 easy? No wonder you get very little support in here with these type of remarks.

If its so easy, how come none of us have any clue on the type of variables that go into the search algorithm. You can program so many variables into this search algorithm, its almost impossible to figure it out without direct access. It can be 99% generic and that 1% or 1 line of code is all thats needed to have major bottom line profit margins for the company. Bunch of naive people up in here.

113
Shutterstock.com / Re: Cap on daily earnings?
« on: September 30, 2015, 11:14 »
Shutterstocks bottom line is more profit. It makes more sense from the company perspective to have fresh new diverse content. You get more diverse content by spreading the wealth to more contributors to keep them motivated to keep uploading. As many others stated before me, some sort of capping makes a lot of sense to me and doesn't seem like a conspiracy theory at all. I am just curious on how much of that is going around which we will never find out.

As far as the search positions go, I would like to know how many of you guys are actual buyers of images. I buy from time to time and I usually stop searching around page 10 or so. So if anything, the real search placement you would need to check is from pages 5-10 and not pages 1-3.

114
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Getty has a new CEO
« on: September 25, 2015, 16:47 »
God i wish there was a boot button. I seldom come into this site these days and when i do its to find out whats been going on in this industry and why do i feel like zero talent has to hijack these threads with his narrow minded views on life. Yeah we get it, you dont think anyone is greedy and big govt messes everything up. can we move on? ::)

115
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 29, 2015, 10:21 »
Why would he do that?  He could just take the money and enjoy the rest of his life without having to bother about microstock ever again.

I think he has moved beyond money now and is probably more concerned about his/shutterstock legacy... But I'm just speculating as usual...  :D

116
Stocksy / Re: Call to Artists 2015
« on: August 29, 2015, 09:51 »
white has absolutely nothing to do with microstock. Repeating that doesnt make it true. Just look at all the macro agencies that sell on white for hundreds of dollars including offset. Working with white has been around long before microstock existed.

It is extremly useful for designers and sells for years and years and years.

That is why it is a very strange decision, because they accept all other solid colours, solid pink,black etc...without shadows.

the micros also have millions of images on wood, on black, people outdoors and beautiful food and landscape photography.

You can find anything stocksy or any macro or niche agency has cheaper elsewhere. The difference is the time spent in going over a huge pool of files.

the editing for that specific look is very good. But I also dont understand why anyone compares stocksy to the micros, because stocksy is a professional macro agency, I dont see any amateur content there. The competition for stocksy is getty,offset,corbis,masterfile,tetra,blend etc...which is where you see a lot of stocksy artists contributing.

It is not a crowd sourced, community driven plattform with thousands of people from everywhere on all levels of photo expertise.

But all agencies have great artists, no agency has a monopoly on them.

ETA: your files on stocksy have hardly any competition, so by comparison with 50 million images on SS your files are outselling stocksy in that environment. In absolute money at the moment stocksy has the advantage. I hope it stays like this for you, but you are obviously doing very,very well on SS and your files are holding up against all the competition. Congratulations.

This is just my guess. Pictures with solid white background are very useful to designers because they can easily be clipped out and used in conjunction with other design elements to make a new design. So this is more like clip art. I guess other colors don't really convey clip art as much as white. Maybe stocksy doesn't want to sell clip art and want to sell photos that stand on their own as a whole image with maybe subtle text overlay. This way the image is still the prominent portion of the design rather than an add on. This might be the message that stocksy is saying to their customers.

117
Shutterstock.com / Re: SS now at 60 million images!
« on: August 23, 2015, 12:00 »
This is a very good documentary on netflix that deals with fast fashion and its global impact. Movie is called "True Cost". Companies like H&M and others are selling dirt cheap priced clothing that people really like but at what cost to us? It sort of reminded me of the microstock market which has brought prices so low that I feel it devalues digital imagery in minds of many.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss

118
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 14, 2015, 13:28 »
Not sure how politics got into this thread... I have zero idea how that happened.  ;)
Funny how big government is always blamed by the right wing. It seems to me that government (at least in the US) is closely tied with big corporate interest as it is usually a revolving door between them. You leave office and you get a corporate job you just passed a bill to give yourself a raise because it is in your self interest and not greed...

119
Shutterstock.com / New images hardly sell
« on: August 13, 2015, 14:04 »
It has been my experience that new files generally sell right off the bat once approved and put out in the database (vectors). It seems to me that with the sheer number of new images being accepted, it is very hard for new images to compete or even be seen.
I will give example. Last year i uploaded something to do with baseball right before baseball season started... it got bought a couple of times right away and then proceeded to pick up steam. It is in front page of search for baseball and has over 800 downloads getting anywhere from 1-6 downloads a day.
I do the same thing for football this year earlier. It got downloaded right away also. but after a download or 2 later, it has disappeared. I know this file will succeed if given the chance.
It seems the window of opportunity for your files to succeed has gotten a lot shorter. Am i the only one seeing this trend? Or is this a known thing for some time and I just realize it now because I only upload a couple of files a month and haven't noticed...
If this is the new normal, I probably would stop producing for the microstock market.

120
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 11, 2015, 13:01 »
...

On the other hand, that 2007-08 collapse happened because of too much government intervention in the free market.
Yet another good and noble intention (affordable housing) which ended up with disastrous consequences.
The government intervention made mortgage lending virtually risk free, messing up the free market. The banks reacted to that incentive, the same way normal people reacted to abnormally cheap mortgages.

Let the market decide the lending and borrowing risks, and you will never end up in such messy situations. The supply and demand tend to miraculously agree with each other.

A friend of mine was one of the managers at Freddy May a year or two the collapse and he got promoted to manager because he was really good at selling loans. This guy was a gangster i knew from my old hood with very thuggish mentality. He would tell me he would yell at his minions to close sales no matter what... He said it is sooo F***kn easy to close these things to grandmas and and the non speaking english as they were clueless to what they were getting themselves into. I remember thinking to myself... holy... this is some gangster stuff going on right here. Sounded like they were conning these people. One year later that whole thing collapsed.

121
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 11, 2015, 12:51 »
Zero Talent,
You seem to be in the same mentality of Gordon Gekko in Wall street where he says greed is good...
I see it more in the lines of right and wrong. I believe there is a little bit of both in everyone but depending on conditioning and life situations, you can be a saint or a complete a-hole.
Greed might be a good thing if there is a presence of some form of empathy to keep greed in check. This is the reason why I came to the conclusion that Jon Oringer does not care too much for creativity as he has none himself. If he did, he would value that asset.
Publicly traded companies answer to shareholders. Stocks go up due to company making more money. Company gets bigger and buys out the smaller competitors with all this excess cash. Streamlines the process and usually sheds off employees from the bought out company to make it more efficient which means more money for the company. Outcome is more jobs are lost! Now why do we as a society celebrate these big companies??? I for one don't think this is any good for the future human species as a whole. So i come to the conclusion it is WRONG and greed plays the main bad guy in it...

122
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 08, 2015, 22:05 »
I don't know about everyone else, but i started to to have doubts about shutterstock about a year ago. It probably is due to a fact that they admit to continue selling cheap to gain market share while the quality of the images rises. istock started at 10 cents a download but they adjusted their price along the years to reflect the quality at least. Did shutterstock raise their's? I am not sure on this matter.
I also bought shares of shutterstock when they were originally in the 40s and sold them in mid 90's when the Getty free images hoopla happened. I felt the general consensus among many of the members here turn from yay to boo around the same time my feelings turned south. In my view, there has been no positive news for contributors lately.
The market isn't stupid. This business model depends on crowdsourcing. The market see the pitchforks being sharpened by its contributors and many are voicing their complaints. I think the stock reflects the overall contributor mood which is going south...

I had my doubts regarding Shutterstock in 2007 when I first started to play in the microstock arena. 0.25c royalties were a complete insult 8 years ago, and they are a complete insult today. Needless to say I never sold myself out.

I was istock exclusive since 2007 or so and quit being exclusive there about 2 years ago. I am happier for leaving exclusivity as I didn't need the blood pressure spikes I would get from the sheer greed of that company when getty took over. I also have to say that I never did this full time so the decision for me to leave is a lot easier than someone who is a full timer. I am a vector artist and would never put anything i deem to have any real creative value into shutterstock portfolio and concentrate on simple general images that brings me hundreds a month with minimal effort from my part.

The sad fact is if you are used to getting so much more money for your images, anything less than $1 is an insult. But for many who got into this industry in recent years, it has become the norm. I believe those high paying days are gone and Shutterstock played a huge role in bringing this industry to where it is today.

I blame it on Jon Oringer. He isn't a creative person. He is just a tech geek that took thousands of snap shots in his first year to start this site. i am sure he took hundreds of photos a day with no creativity at all. Anyone who is creative person values creativity and knows it takes hard work and lots of passion to get to a highly skilled level.

You say you never sold yourself out. Its guys like Jon, or the suits at Getty that have absolutely no respect for creativity that really sold you out.

123
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shares Plummet
« on: August 08, 2015, 00:49 »
I don't know about everyone else, but i started to to have doubts about shutterstock about a year ago. It probably is due to a fact that they admit to continue selling cheap to gain market share while the quality of the images rises. istock started at 10 cents a download but they adjusted their price along the years to reflect the quality at least. Did shutterstock raise their's? I am not sure on this matter.
I also bought shares of shutterstock when they were originally in the 40s and sold them in mid 90's when the Getty free images hoopla happened. I felt the general consensus among many of the members here turn from yay to boo around the same time my feelings turned south. In my view, there has been no positive news for contributors lately.
The market isn't stupid. This business model depends on crowdsourcing. The market see the pitchforks being sharpened by its contributors and many are voicing their complaints. I think the stock reflects the overall contributor mood which is going south...

124
GLStock / Re: GL resume uploads?
« on: July 15, 2015, 13:32 »
A lot of us did support them as much as we could but they decided to stop accepting new images.  They could easily of had a 20 images a week upload limit and that would of made it better for buyers and contributors.  Now I am more wary of them because not accepting new images for such a long time makes absolutely no sense to me.

I think acceptance of millions of images from any agency is the real killer to this industry. More images just devalues the collection as a whole to the individual contributor. Great for buyers tho...

125
General Stock Discussion / Re: Earnings with vectors
« on: May 07, 2015, 08:45 »
Some people do amazingly well with several hundred illustrations. Others do amazingly well with tens of thousands. And everything in between. Develop a unique style, find a niche, upload regularly and pay attention to keywords.

+1



It's quality over quantity in this vector business. Do something that is useful for many :) Easier said than done, but it's the same in every area of business.

A successful vector image needs these:

- usefulness (a broad audience is a must)
- eye-catching (try to amaze your customers with colors and quality)
- do a collection (yes, you have to "cut" the price by doing a collection, because customers will buy these to their repertoire even if they don't need them at the moment)

Pick a niche. Study it. Own it.

I'm generating about $6/vector/month. I have a considerably small portfolio, but have been pushing some quality vectors. I'm sure there's people who make better dollar per image. So remember quality, quality and quality.

Bolded by me... That is pretty impressive. I am generating $3-$4 a month per vector piece if we are averaging it out. But this is just on SS. And a lot of my pieces are sets or collections which take more time to create.

I am curious if your portfolio is less than 100 pieces when you say considerably small. Mine is in the range of 200-400 range. And most of my vectors have been created years ago when i was exclusive at istock. These days, I concentrate my efforts in my career which isnt in micro.

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