MicrostockGroup Sponsors


Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - somethingpretentious

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7
51
Yuri, thanks for checking back in despite the hostility surrounding this place.

The RPI (return pr image), including fresh content, has probably been dropping for most top contributors for quite a while now. We are seeing a stable flat decline - how did you experience it, and more interestingly: How do you predict the RPI for independents to behave in the coming years. Do you see the flat decline continue or will there be some dramatic drops coming up.  Any insights would be appreciated!

52
General Stock Discussion / Re: July Earnings
« on: August 04, 2013, 15:03 »
Finally got around to doing my totals.  Even worse than I had imagined.  Assuming average PP sales, I am down 12% on last month, and 21% on last year.  Continuing my trend of being 20% down on the same month the prior year, that has been going on for over a year now. 

Dollars are way worse than last December after all.  Haven't made so little in any month since 2006.  Un-F#@%king believable. 

Best of all, on most of the major sites, my downloads are actually up significantly.  Only $ are down.  Really shows how their policies are F#@%king us. 

I just spent three days doing a huge photo shoot covering a wide variety of concepts.  Biggest I have ever undertaken.  I just can't see throwing the best of them into the microstock void.  Looks like I'm going to finally be uploading to Stocksy.

I am also seeing very significant decreases in RPD (return pr download). RPD decrease of around 15% over the last few months. I am also selling more, but making less.  And it is not just due to iStock lowering prices. It has fallen on all sites including SS. It is due to subscription downloads going up compared to on demand going down.

Are you also seeing this trend?

53
best search in the industry

54
Hi Yuri

I have a very hard time seeing scoopshot as a place where photographers can make any substantial amount of money. Do you agree that scoopshot is not the place for photographers trying to make a living?

You are taking some heat from your comment about professionalism, but you do not need to have been present in any meetings to see that there are at least some truth to that. Just compare the front page of Dreamstime to that of Peopleimages... Are there any plans of making Peopleimages open to outside photographers?

55
Hi Yuri

How do you see the future of subscription sites like Shutterstock? Will they loose more quality producers?
What direction will the micro agencies go? Will they lower commissions further for short term profits? Or do you think major agencies like Shutterstock is finally going to wake up and realize that they need to pay their top photographers more, if they want them to stick around?

56
Off Topic / Re: Time to say Nay to Yay
« on: July 22, 2013, 05:14 »
They used to be one of the small sites worth supporting, but when that ended when they started selling our images for 15 euro cents.

57
I can see a concept like this being very useful for people who need pictures of a certain thing, like the telephone directory.  There is an army of photographers that are spread out literally everywhere around the world so if it became as popular as instagram, someone is probably only a few hundred meters away from the location you need.  So, if a message could pop-up ... you are within 100m of a needed photo shoot.. it might be worth your trouble to snap the pic.  Making an effort and going out of my way to create an image that will probably only be purchased one time for $2.50 is certainly not worth my while.

It will probably not even get purchased one time. There will be competing images.

58
manually.

it would really be a helpful feature

59
Pond5 / Re: Pond5: What should we improve?
« on: July 12, 2013, 11:01 »
Pond5 need image buyers, so:

1) marketing
2) better search

60
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Changes to Main Collection pricing
« on: June 30, 2013, 16:54 »
Reducing prices now won't be enough to save the business. The tiny royalties currently on offer won't be enough to tempt independent contributors to upload new content. For independent contributors Istock are now just another mid-tier agency. If they want new content they'll need to be offering royalties of 30%+ to to make it worthwhile.

exactly

It will take a lot more than 30% to win many independents back. At that rate they will still have of the worst RPDs in the market. Also, the preferential treatment of exclusives, the google drive give-away, the tedious uploading process, the forced migration to Thinkstock and Photos.com, and their general lack of respect for contributors, will all remain major obstacles for many independents.

But they will never give independents 30%. Instead they give 15% if any independent content is sold through Getty...

61
Yaymicro / Re: YAY, no view(s) no download(s)
« on: June 29, 2013, 08:11 »
I get sales there every month, not usually for a lot of money but they occasionally have a good month.  I think they're worth using but you might need 1,000 images to start seeing regular sales.

Will you still think that when you start to see the 0.13-0.15 euro sales from their images packages?

62
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Changes to Main Collection pricing
« on: June 27, 2013, 19:59 »

iStock

1) now pays independents some of the lowest commissions in the industry, both in dollars and percentage.
2) give contributors images away for free to the world without their consent (google drive).
3) forces independents images to be sold on the lowest paying of all major subscription sites (thinkstock).
4) has the the most time consuming uploading process.
5) is heavily favoring exclusive content

etc..

Do they really expect independents will keep uploading? 

63
DepositPhotos / Re: Depositphotos now pays with Payoneer
« on: June 22, 2013, 15:02 »
Payoneer have even worse fees than Paypal. But they are less transparent and mislead you to think otherwise.

64
stock submitter for me.  It doesn't work equally well for all sites but for fotolia, canstock, 123rf and depositphotos I couldn't do without it.

Can stock submitter arrange keywords in order of importance, which is requested by Fotolia?

65
Adobe Stock / Re: New relevancy search at Fotolia
« on: May 01, 2013, 17:54 »
@JPSDK and @somethingpretentious:

What language do you keyword in?

english

66
Adobe Stock / Re: New relevancy search at Fotolia
« on: April 29, 2013, 13:24 »
big decrease, around 50%. Furthermore, the search seems really more random now with many less good images very high...

67
I am bumping this one in the hope of getting more than just 19 votes...

68
 YAY is completely undercutting the market and are now giving some the worst commissions ever for small images, 13 cents. I am wondering if they can get away with this one.

69
iStockPhoto.com / Re: Uploaded limits raised to 999
« on: April 22, 2013, 17:32 »
Is this a sign of the upload veto many people are enforcing is working? I know I haven't uploaded anything since D-day and the whole google mess.

I would like to thing so...It might be interesting with a poll to find out how many contributors are still not uploading to iS after the google drive deal. Maybe divided into contributors making over/under a certain amount in microstock, Let's say 1000$ a month.

70
Yaymicro / Re: YAY Newsletter: Information About New Product
« on: April 18, 2013, 14:00 »

"While Getty has chosen not to pursue the private market, neither to stop them from using image or by tempting them to license images, we at YAY hope to change this"

- Fine, if that is your real goal, then licences should not be offered to incorporated entities and be limited to non-commercial use. Will you do that?

"Nobody has complained on our commission on high-res images, but if we want to be fair and focus on a percentage cut its obvious we needed to raise this as well"

- That because we were not aware that we were not giving 50%

71
Yaymicro / Re: YAY Newsletter: Information About New Product
« on: April 16, 2013, 05:44 »
YAY advertise 50% commission and have reasonable on-demand prices.

So why 35% and not 50%?
Are there other "deals" or "packages" where commission is less than 50%? (besides the partner program)

0.13 $ pr download? Maybe we sucked that up for a little while at iStock, but that was because they provided us with about 50-100 times more income than YAY. I am not sure YAY is big enough to get away with this.

YAY is also shooting themselves in the foot with regards to all the great iStock exclusives leaving and looking for new venues. One of the biggest microstockers Sean Locke, who has many followers, are right now looking for new venues. Why not take an opportunity like this, to win over photographers of his caliber, instead of alienating them, as well as many of your current contributors?

This can take YAY from one of the most fair and liked agencies to one of the worst. Very disappointing.

Let us indeed hope for YAY that nothing is set in stone.

72
I thought Sean's images could be found via "tailgate" which produces no results now.

Yes, they are gone.  I can not find any of my images - the pharmacy one, the student one, or the tailgate ones.

I wish they would keep us up to date on what the deal is.

Perhaps they must remove any images that are no longer on istock since their original agreement was with istock (or their partners)? No one has seen the actual, original agreement between google and istock that started this fiasco. Just speculating...
Allegedly the agreement was between Getty and Google - allegedly iStock admins didn't know anything about it until Sean pointed it out.
It would be a very unusual agreement that required images to be pulled if the person pulled their port. iStock's IT dept could never cope would be 'extremely challenged' to cope with that!

(my bold above)
On the contrary. This is standard for all redistribution agreements, and the google/getty deal is a exactly that! Even though they call it something else.

73
Off Topic / Re: Monitor Purchase Help
« on: March 11, 2013, 22:45 »
Dell Ultrasharp PremierColor

74
Pixmac / Re: Pixmac merges with Pond5
« on: March 05, 2013, 13:34 »
Wouldn't it have been great if Pond5 had done like Veer and just payed contributors to upload instead of "buying" a collection at another agency?

The owner of Pixmac now cashes out so Pond5 can sell YOUR pictures from Pixmac on Pond5 and you, the content providers, gets nothing. This is business and I can understand the owner of Pixmac.

I also realize that many other factors are involved in the purchase from Pond5, but clearly expanding the collection must have been a major one. Or maybe I am wrong?

With 50% to contributors we better hope they make it big together! Good luck!







75
DepositPhotos / Re: Is this a record for an EL?
« on: February 27, 2013, 18:33 »
Have just emailed them to express my disgust and to request opt-out details.

good! let us know if you are able to opt out.

You are able to opt out, but only by emailing them.

Thanks!

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7

Sponsors

Mega Bundle of 5,900+ Professional Lightroom Presets

Microstock Poll Results

Sponsors