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Messages - jen
76
« on: April 25, 2011, 20:25 »
That's different than a plain photo sold under an editorial license. I read the court order and a big part of their complaint is that she was using their intellectual property to advertise her artwork (i.e. using the LV bag on advertisements for her art) and to sell merchandise, and that she was associating the LV brand with genocide.
But it's an interesting case!
77
« on: April 23, 2011, 10:45 »
Oh well since you "UNDERSTAND" the rules of editorial, no problem then, tell the guy to go ahead and use it. Any problems he can always refer to you.
What do you know that the iStock legal team doesn't? I'm not trying to be snarky, I really want to learn about this and I'm having trouble finding resources. Why is iStock specifically asking for product shots isolated on white if it's going to get everyone in trouble?
78
« on: April 21, 2011, 15:36 »
79
« on: April 21, 2011, 13:52 »
..I really wish they could dump the Getty imports (which I think is part of the reason they had to jack up Vetta and Agency prices so high) and go back to where Vetta was initially. Add Agency as a similarly priced collection (light and bright vs. edgy and dark) and keep the royalty rates across the board....
I agree with this. I'm so sick of seeing rubberball and other Getty factories at the top of all the search results.
80
« on: April 21, 2011, 13:50 »
Yes well hang on a minute! Louis Vuittone, is a REALLY copyrighted brandname, the lot in fact, the letters LV, stand for trouble, unless you check it out, editorial or not, check it out.
Some 10 years back I was very lucky not to get into trouble with a stupid Gucci bag, I did get into trouble but bailed my way out of it by offering a dozen free shots.
can be VERY costly. So find out about it.
I'm very confused now. Please check the photo (not full size)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23976648/IMG_5537-2drop.jpg
It's a simple bag photo but who knows i don't want to get in to trouble..
Thats NOT editorial!! thats a product shot and pure advertising. Gotswyck is right! no one is going to buy that. Dump it.
iStock has asked for product shots isolated on white. To be used for illustrative purposes, not advertising. And actually, so far sales on product/brand stuff have been pretty good.
81
« on: April 21, 2011, 13:45 »
Thursday turned out to be a brillant day! like in the old days. Is the search beginning to work or what? anybody else with same experience?
No. I only had 5 downloads yesterday and 4 so far today, which is very unusual. :\
82
« on: April 16, 2011, 12:02 »
No, the fraud money may not technically be owed us. I think you'll note that we didn't state it *was*.
You said: "...without touching on the myriad problems at present, I will simply highlight one - failure to pay contributors what they are owed."
83
« on: April 16, 2011, 10:36 »
It wasn't for everyone. I was maxing out my uploads while the bug was being reported and DeepMeta always stopped me at 60 until new slots opened up.
84
« on: April 16, 2011, 10:32 »
I am wondering if anyone knows if all the personal info fields in a member's personal profile are meant to be editable? For example, at the bottom of the edit profile page it says:
This is what you want other members to see. You can change any of this at any time.
For one, I noticed once a Business Name is entered that it doesn't seem like it can be edited again after that as the field turns solid gray.
I was about to enter my web site info as well, but I am concerned that if I do that it may not be editable either once I put it in, so I am refraining from doing that for the time being until I know what the actual permissions are.
Apparently, the statement at the bottom of the profile edit page does not seem to be 100% correct.
The Business Name can be changed by contacting support. Nothing else should be locked when you enter it.
85
« on: April 16, 2011, 10:30 »
Strange that you would think he should give his name when posting a letter like this, but have nothing to say when anonymous exclusives who do nothing but defend IStock at every turn, bash on people....well ok, if you can't see the distinction
Whatever.
Look, that letter is awfully wordy, and it took me a while to find what you actually were asking for. You want the money back that IS took back due to the fraud that occurred. Ain't gonna happen. Not only is it months gone by now and people have moved on, but contractually they don't owe it to us:
"In all cases, payment of fees to the Supplier will be net of: .... (ii) bad debts or other uncollectible sums; "
Not that I wouldn't like it or don't feel it would be justified - I lost over $9000 or so. I just don't see it happening. There won't be any audit - there's no facility in the agreement to ask for one, like there is on Getty. No one is going to make a class action lawsuit either.
So, you can print and mail the letter. I just think you have better things you could be addressing, with a better chance of success.
I agree with Sean. I also think you need to do more research. Your letter is obviously very angry, but a lot of it is also factually incorrect. (Like the part about iStock owing us the fraud money - as Sean pointed out, contractually they don't.) This letter would probably serve your interests better if you took a different approach (such as focusing on the "negligence" aspect of the fraud rather than the "iStock should give us the money as a gesture of goodwill" approach).
86
« on: April 13, 2011, 14:02 »
That's weird. Maybe ask support?
87
« on: April 11, 2011, 21:30 »
They said they will take "ongoing" issues and the events in the Middle East are certainly far from over. They just cannot accept breaking news, for the simple reason that it cannot be processed in time and maybe also to avoid a direct competition with Getty.
Its a very interesting newsletter and lightbox.
Good to see that editorial is beginning to sell.
I have to add something about the lightbox. it REALLY bothers me to see how they are populating the front page lightboxes. for months and months I have made comments in threads about the same contributors being added to all of the showcase lightboxes. I have opened support tickets and I have sitemailed the admins administering the specific lightboxes.
in the case of this EDITORIAL collection LB....there are many of us, NOT just me, who are heavy contributors to editorial who are NOT showcased at all in that LB. and some of the files in the LB do not belong in there as showcase images (one example is two nearly identical shots by an admin, both of which are in the LB).
if contributor confidence and community spirit is still of concern around iStock, one action that would help restore my confidence would be to see an even distribution of contributors represented in these showcase lightboxes.
in this particular case I have no problem admitting that I want at least some of my editorial files in that lightbox. editorial is very exciting to me. it was the photography I did well before I did stock. so far no response from admin after more than a week. sigh.
It kind of bums me out too. I have a couple in the "Gems" lightbox but I have a ton of editorial files and it sort of feels like not being invited to sit with the cool kids in high school.
88
« on: April 10, 2011, 10:44 »
I would like to believe that anyone who buys the company would do their research first. I hardly doubt any buyer is just going to say "this number is bigger than this number, I'll take it!!!"
Anyway, this is how rumors get started.
89
« on: April 10, 2011, 10:36 »
I spent hours the other day looking for an image and it was incredibly frustrating because most people didn't keyword their files thoroughly. I was looking for businessmen at night, and I tried a variety of combinations of keywords. Some files showed up for some searches but not others, some people keyworded "businessman" but not "man", some people used "man" but not "businessman" or "business". Some people didn't use "night" or anything relevant to the scene. I ended up finding the perfect file about 2 seconds before I was about to give up. The file only had 7 keywords and was missing a huge number of relevant KWs that would have really helped when I was trying to narrow down my search.
Sooo in my opinion, it's better to leave ALL relevant KWs rather than trying to game the system (which, as ShadySue pointed out, could change tomorrow anyway). You might have improved your best match ranking for raspberry, but there are still 9704 files before yours and you might have ruined your best match standing for "berry fruit" or something else.
90
« on: April 07, 2011, 10:37 »
I'm noticing this week that I'm getting a lot of 1st sales on older files that I uploaded thinking they could be decent sellers but they faded into oblivion instead. And less sales on my usual best sellers.
But it's hard to tell.
91
« on: April 06, 2011, 10:35 »
Well I normally have around 15-20 dls just in the first two hours in the morning (european) time, yesterday, 4 and this morning 2. yet, Im pretty favored in this present best match, most relevant searches in my categories will show plenty om my pics on first two pages, great! and yet hardly anything....
I'm on Pacific Time, so when I get up, Europe's day is nearly over. This morning there was just one sale overnight - like a weekend, not a Wednesday. Things are very erratic.
The big thing I still don't have in focus is what on earthy possessed them to start messing with this in the first place? This nonsense about local relevance? And to do this while they still have a huge pile of unfixed bugs just seems crazy (I'd want to test changes in small doses and on an otherwise working system, not just keep on randomly tweaking this and that hoping I'll get something that looks good).
I'm all for them constantly trying to improve the best match - and I think local relevancy could actually be a really cool feature if implemented correctly. But it really just seems like all of the departments are doing their own thing without communicating with each other. Like there's a dev team working on bug fixes while another team works on best match and another team works on rolling out editorial and they're all just working on their own stuff without a unified plan. They need to take a step back and fix everything and stop testing things on the live site. :\
92
« on: April 04, 2011, 18:05 »
There's no point in them secretly demoting critics. It doesn't stop criticism. Any demotion is unlikely to be personal, more that you happen to represent a segment of contributors that are not in favour for business reasons.
Yeah, there is no logical sense in demoting vocal critics. Let's make them publicly insult us less by giving them more to complain about?
93
« on: April 03, 2011, 12:38 »
March was my first full month with IS and I am completely disappointed. I had heard such raving reviews during the past year and was really looking forward to joining the team. I had my BME only because it was my first full month but I would not consider it worthy of a top tier agency. Dreamstime and Shutterstock both gave me very respectable earnings last month; Fotolia and IS should be dropped from the top tier.
Oh, the numbers; grand total of $13.94 for March for IS. Granted I have a limited port online at IS but I was still expecting better results.
At this rate, I will make diamond a couple hundred years after my death. My great great great grand children will be so proud of me; this is if my children have kids.
When I joined iStock it took 3 months to make 84 cents.  Patience!
94
« on: April 01, 2011, 12:22 »
It's my impression, from reading the monthly stats threads, that a lot of the BME's are Bronzes or below (what is that canister called, Ghost?). And more and more, the WME's are Diamonds. If this is true (and I realize that it's all anecdotal), it confirms what I've been thinking about a statement Kelly made about how the payouts to contributors keep increasing. He seemed to use that statement to justify that the RC targets were fair and that everybody was happy. But what he fails to understand, apparently, is that a statistic like that is cold comfort to the individual contributor whose income keeps dropping. It's just like when he said that we'd make 50% of our sales in the last quarter of the year. Again, that may be true for the company overall, but it doesn't take a math whiz to understand that it's not necessarily true for the individual.
You know what I'm saying? So do you think that the growth of the company is due to a lot of newbies, but at the expense of those of us near the top? There are a lot of ways to interpret that. I think it's pretty normal to have BMEs when you're just starting out. Almost every month for me is a BME because I don't have a lot of stats from the past to compare it to and I'm growing my portfolio. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the WME diamond contributors have developed their portfolios slowly over many years. These are the people being screwed by the new RC system while many of the newbies are benefiting. But of course the comment "we're paying out more money to contributors each week" doesn't mean anything without the context of how much the contributor base is growing. If payouts increase by 10% but the contributor base increases by 15% then yeah, they're paying more money but it's a smaller piece of the pie for everyone.
95
« on: March 31, 2011, 16:58 »
I highly doubt they're actually going to block anyone's content from being viewed. Why would they do that? It wouldn't benefit anyone.
96
« on: March 30, 2011, 15:10 »
well I know it happens because on several occasions when I've been interviewed for different stories the author sent me a copy prior to publishing to ensure things were stated correctly. granted, not always can/does this happen and evenso things can still get misrepresented, but it does happen. and back on point, this is one factoid where they quoted him and should have gotten it correct. how can a journalist possibly misinterpret 15 to 45 with 20 to 45?
I've worked in the music and film industries and we were never shown articles before they were published. You could usually make an entire drinking game out of the number of things the writer got wrong, or misquoted, or paraphrased creatively. Maybe someone should email the editor and ask them to correct it?
97
« on: March 30, 2011, 15:05 »
Sean: I very well might be one of those few. was expecting to get an upgrade to 30% in about 1.5 months according to the previous RC targets, now it is unknown for me.
I should be one of them as well. I'd like to know if they're going to pay out missed income if contributors hit their targets before the announcement. But after the EL bonuses / $0 sub sales I wouldn't count on it.
98
« on: March 29, 2011, 09:44 »
5.68% was from Getty. No PP sales.
99
« on: March 22, 2011, 15:17 »
I changed my vote, sales have been up up up since yesterday. During the day yesterday I made half of what I made all last week.
100
« on: March 18, 2011, 10:16 »
But it's honestly not that hard to get it right and complaining about things like "I put in the wrong date and they rejected it for having the wrong date! That's stupid!" is just silly IMHO.
Put that way, you make it sound like my complaint is trivial, but you are ignoring the context. I make a tiny mistake in the date that is not material to anything. The actual date from the exif is already there in another box. If the date being off in the caption bothers the examiner, why doesn't he just correct it instead of rejecting it. And they don't just let the submitter correct it. No, because there is one digit wrong in the date, I have to waste time uploading a 5mb file all over again, and filling in a bunch of other information that doesn't get carried over on resubmits. And then, if I have resubmitted the file with the caption corrected, there's at least a 50% chance they will reject it because of "a little more about compression." Their rejection messages make me want to puke. As I said, they treat contributors like dirt.
And yes, I do know how to submit successfully to Istock, as I have several hundred images on-line with them. However, they are getting worse and worse, and I would much rather submit to some of the other places like Dreamstime and Bigstock that are more reasonable, even if they don't have quite the marketing power of Getty Images.
You didn't include my previous statement where I agree that the process needs work. 
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