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Topics - perkmeup

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General - Top Sites / SS forcing me to go Exclusive....??

« on: February 11, 2009, 06:00 »

I have been submitting to Microstock now for over three years. I haven’t posted a lot on the forums, as I rarely have the extra time, but I do cruise thru every few days and read up alittle, and occasionally post something. I have watched my income continually drop over the last 10 or so months and I don’t see it changing much in the future. Most of this is due to the subscription plans that most of the sites offer now and of course the huge number of new photos being submitted. I was never a big fan of subscription in the first place, but SS made up for the low .25 commission with huge download numbers, but nowadays the downloads are rapidly falling off, and the thought of selling my photos for pennies, is not appetizing. I use to sell around 200 photos a day on SS……now I’m lucky to get 70 or so. I’m not sure what to do……I never thought that I would ever consider going exclusive with IS, but now it is beginning to look pretty good. The income I generate from IS has been fairly constant…..except for the last 5 months…due to the Best Match which almost killed most nonexclusives……. The new Best match has brought my dls back up to what they were before….. If I could double my IS income (since I’m Diamond) and increase my dls alittle by the added exposure from being exclusive…….

Maybe it’s worth it?? What are your thoughts?

I know….all my eggs in one basket……..but I know a lot of you have thought about this too……………..

I do have a couple questions for those that have made this switch.
I have been checking on the procedures on deleting photos….I have over 3000 online. Which sites will delete the photos for you?

Any of them?? DS makes you wait 6 months…from the last upload, BS make you wait 3 months…..the rest don’t seem to have a time restriction. If I have to delete photos, One at a time from all the sites……………yikes………anybody want a part time job deleting my photos

iStockPhoto.com / It's nice to know I'm not alone...........

« on: September 27, 2008, 05:18 »

IS reviews can be soooooooo upsetting......I swear sometimes it seems like they are out to get......ME.......!! Lately I have been getting rejections for all sorts of things.......

Keywords not relevant.....ok...I can deal with this one...they are right...to a point...I need to cut down on the implied keywords...but if you look at Dreamstime and check out the keywords that find a photo……many many times …people look up things with very general keywords….yet IS does not want these….they want only specific keywords. I listed JAVA on a coffee bean picture and it was rejected for keywords not relevant……..come on…..it was JAVA coffee. I had another picture of coffee beans rejected for the word Cappuccino. True there was no Cappuccino there…..but coffee beans make cappuccino…to me that seems relevant. I see the point on this…..to a degree….but man sometimes I think they are way to picky

But here is a new one……… They rejected one with five model releases, because the witness signature looked different in a couple of the releases……then they noted to me that the “Model release is a legal document” so they are basically implying that I forged the signatures of the witness. The witness on all of these is my wife…….ya her signature is slightly different on some of the releases….but if you look at the handwriting closely you can tell that the letters are made the same way….. So now I guess we are responsible for how our models and witness’s sign their names. MAKE SURE YOU SIGN EXACTLY THE SAME…… give me a break…… I resend it in and sent a little nasty email with it…..I really upsets me that they insinuate that I am forging my model releases.
It makes me feel much better when I see other people complaining about IS’s reviews………at least I’m not alone.

Are there any Exclusives out there that are having this same problem?

?

One other note: Over the last 2 weeks….IS sales have really slowed down…..all other sites are fine…..anybody else notice this?

iStockPhoto.com / Message on Istock???

« on: October 03, 2007, 01:51 »

Has anybody else recieved a message in your email on Istock as follows?? Not sure what to make of it...........

Greetings,

we are looking for sources we can buy photos from. If you own the photos that you are legally able to sell please read the following.

1. We are not looking for exclusive or transfer of all rights.

2. We must be able to use purchased photos with the rights for any of our needs with the exceptions:
- we will not be re-selling actual photos as computer files in any way;
- we will not make these photos available for download or rights transfer.

3. We will be using these photos on our online sign-design engine. Photos will be shown and manipulated only within our web based sign shop. These photos will be also used to produce different kinds of signs, banners, and other visual advertising products.

4. Files must be high-resolution JPEGS, TIIF, EPS or AI with DPI - 150-300 dpi 1000px minimum

If you own any photos you may be interested in selling on these terms please find the way to show us these photos (maybe like a thumbnails or on your website, etc) so we could pick and choose the ones that we'll like.

We will make our best price offer depending on the quality, composition and the number of the pictures we may be interested in.

StockXpert.com / When is StockXpert going to get a better Model release procedure??? IStock as well...

« on: July 29, 2007, 09:15 »

After editing about 50 photos today from a shoot yesterday with 7 different kids.....I am sick and tired of the model release setup at SPX and also IS. Do you know how many combinations of kids you can get together with 7?

?...........alot. that means I have to put together a model release form for each combination!!!!!!!!!!! ........This is getting sooooooooooo difficult to track the releases and create them every time.......STEVE-OH.........help..............

I really like SPX, but I am gettting to the point where I am not uploading some of my photos with multiple releases just because it is to time consuming. For one shoot I could have 20 model release forms to upload and keep track of........

Please...please please ........can SPX set up a model release system like FT, DT, BS , LO or 123Rf

IStock...well.......they just do what they want to do.......heaven forbid they would do something for the photographer to make life easier...... $:-\$

Tom

LuckyOliver.com / Sales are picking up at Lucky "O"

« on: June 28, 2007, 23:24 »

I have to admit that there is no doubt that my sales are beginning to pickup at Lucky Oliver. I have had more sales in June than in all other months combined

.............and it looks like I will be at payout in a week or so

.

So...I think in the long run Lucky "O" will pay off for all those who commit to it. It will be VERY interesting to see what I am saying 12 months from now....hopefully I'll be complaining that I only make payout once a month...

Tom

iStockPhoto.com / IStock Drives me Nuts!!!

« on: June 26, 2007, 23:30 »

I need to vent a little..............I get so Pi##$## off at IS sometimes. They reject photos for the smallest if not non existent reasons. They always say "Can Resubmit"....well that doen't help much when I can only upload 30 a week and have a backlog of over 500 photos to put up. Here is the latest one.....

first they reject it saying that one of the model releases was wittnessed by me and that was not allowed....well the releases were just fine...it was just that one of them was the old style IS release and the wittness sig block is in a different corner of the paper...they must have just glanced at it and hit the reject botton....well this is a very popular photo on all the other sites...well over 200 DL already in 3 weeks.....so I resubmitted it....result............rejected copyright..........COME ON.... here is the 300% crop they sent me of the problem area.....Do you see any copyright issues...........I sure don't. This is so frustrating sometimes..... I guess I blur a couple things to change the file size and resubmit for the third time....auuugggggggg......

Tom

General - Top Sites / Wow!!! Best Day ever...........

« on: June 09, 2007, 02:13 »

I am really happy today.... I had an enquiry on some exclusive buyouts on Fotolia last week...so I told fotolia I was willing to change my listing with them to exclusive...for a week and if the person bought the photos I would delete the photos as soon as possible from the other sites....if they did not purchase within a week I would change the listings back to non exclusive....well they bought all 3 photos yesterday.

And to top it off I had two extended licence sales on IS. One for unlimited copies.

So....for one day.....just a couple dollars under $500

I could get used to this

Tom

General Stock Discussion / No Zero DL days....!!!!

« on: April 02, 2007, 03:36 »

I finally went a whole month without a 0 DL day on any of the top six sites. 123rf had me worried the other day, but I managed to squeak by with .30 cents. I almost made it last month but StockXpert and 123rf both had 0 dl’s days….StockXpert had one and 123rf two of them. This was also my best EL month so far with a total of 7 EL’s for the month, 4 on SS, 2 on DT and 1 on FT. It just keeps getting better and better......

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