In Utopia, $8/hour jobs are held by high school kids who are on their way to college and making a better living.

In America, the oligarchs buy government representation and lobby to pass laws that benefits themselves and their business interests, which has led to increasing disparity between rich and poor. The U.S. now has the largest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. They also cut spending on education, making it more difficult for people to get ahead. This leads to adult heads of households struggling to feed their families on minimum wage salaries. It's more difficult to be upwardly mobile in the U.S. than in many other comparable economies.

Yes, business owners take risks�but one of the challenges of starting a business is being able to make that business profitable while paying a living wage to your employees. Insurance, equipment and other associated costs have not been kept artificially low while inflation marches on. The minimum wage has remained stagnant for decades while businesses are making record profits. Paying your employees is a business expense, and it should be an expense that keeps up with the cost of living. If you can't operate a successful business paying what you need for the assets required to run that business, employees included, you deserve to have to declare bankruptcy.

Sorry. I'm not buying it. It is so easy in this country to get the education and skills needed to make more than minimum wage. There are grants and scholarships all over the place. You don't need a four year degree to have good job skills. In fact, technical school training can sometimes gain you a lot more than a philosophy degree. You can be an auto mechanic or a long haul truck drive and still make a good living.

The problem is people aren't willing to put in the time and effort it takes to make a living wage anymore. If the best you can do is stock shelves at Wal-Mart at age 40, you need to rethink your plan and go back to school.

And I'd hardly consider the owner of a pizza shop an "oligarch." Without people like him, willing to take risks and work hard to get their businesses off the ground, there'd be no jobs at all.

It's a carefully worded sentence. I'm not sure it means all our work is exposed to people with Premier accounts: "your content currently available to our Premier customers." To me that means some, all or none of our content is currently shown to Premier customers. Maybe Premier Select will be a separate thing, or a box you check to eliminate non-Select results when you search?

I interpret this as the Offset option for current contributors.

Maybe. I've gotten some high SODs on some weird ones that I wouldn't consider to be very good.

Quote from: sgoodwin4813 on March 14, 2015, 23:02

I don't think I'd make a choice of either city for stock options

If you had your choice which cities in the USA would you choose?

I would choose Orlando. Housing isn't really any more expensive than Charlotte. No state income tax. Better weather year round. Easy drive to most places in the state except the panhandle so you can see a lot of things and do a lot of travel stock photos that will sell. Three hours to Miami or Naples, one hour to Tampa, two hours to Jacksonville, one to two hours to all the stuff on the space coast.

With Charlotte, it's two hours to Asheville in the mountains  and about three hours to Myrtle Beach or Charleston. It's not bad, but it wouldn't be my first pick.

I live near Atlanta, but I've spent a lot of time in both areas.

...

Quote from: Semmick Photo on February 21, 2015, 10:15

Its great making 168$ today, but people seem to forget thats the only time they get paid. Once Google is done shopping, you wont see any more $$$ but your images are being used over and over and etc by anyone and everyone for a whole year and you wont get another cent.

 and the fact that these buyers would not have otherwise purchased my images anywhere else

The key part right there.

Quote from: robhainer on February 16, 2015, 16:52

Quote from: stockastic on February 15, 2015, 21:25

Quote from: Lizard on February 15, 2015, 21:07

Quote from: stockastic on February 15, 2015, 20:15

Before I waste a lot of time on this - could someone give me a quick bottom line on 500px?  Is it another exclusive club that accepts a chosen few, or can anyone come in?  Do all photos get exposure or is it another crazy 'curating' game like Crated?  What's the 'catch'?  Every new site has one :-)

There is some free option but generally you have to pay for the sweets 

Oh, so it's Pay To Play.  I think I remember that now.   Oh well.

I don't pay. Still get sales. More than on FAA.

+1, although I have nothing bad to say about FAA either

I also made more off those three sales with 60 images online than I have at Veer over 2 years with 1,000 images online.

I thought their licence was 250$ so you get 175$?

That's been my experience. I've sold three there since summer. Not a lot, but at $175 a pop, it's not so bad. I only have 60 or so images up. The sales potential is there. They have a new $50 web license, but I'm not sure what that does.

Quote from: rimglow on February 03, 2015, 18:22

Good news!

If you received a rejection (pertaining to quality, metadata, releases, etc) and you would like to resubmit a corrected version you are welcome to do that without contacting our support department prior to resubmission.

I don't like it.....The bit about metadata and releases is sensible and I like that you can now resubmit images with "quality" issues fixed, without contacting support for a case number -  but I would prefer that people still had to justify a resubmit in a comment field. Otherwise those with images where quality is blatantly irretrievable or who think everyone else apart from themselves is an amateur will continue to bang in their failed work until they get a positive review or a warning. Not good for the contributor community as a whole in my opinion.

We've always been able to submit a corrected file without contacting support. Contacting support was more for a file where you disagreed with the reviewer and you wanted a second look by someone else without making changes. So it's not really much of a change other than you no longer have the option of explaining your corrections in the comment field, which I stopped doing about a year ago anyway. Reviewers will still get the same number of submits, just fewer comments to wade through.

I would get the Fuji xt1 if I were starting again. Fuji's best lenses are top notch and not very expensive compared to Nikon or Canon.

I'm not opposed to a raise. But I don't think some of you give Shutterstock enough credit for the whole process. There's got to be a reason they're leading the market. They aren't the only ones with subscription plans. Almost all sites have them. Despite a number of them being cheaper, including their sister site, Bigstock, they still lead the pack.

I don't know exactly what it is. I think it's probably a combination of marketing, a professional library and a good search algorithm. Customers find what they're looking for more on Shutterstock than they do other sites so they keep coming back. 

Without Shutterstock, people don't see your images to license them. I doubt many people gave up contributing entirely to Shutterstock and other sites just to run their own personal stock site. You just can't compete with the variety and library over at Shutterstock.

Giving contributors a raise might a nice thing to do, and I would love one, but I can't see how it would be good business.  Contributors aren't going to take their images anywhere else because Shutterstock treats us better than any other microstock site already. They certainly pay me the most of any site, at least 10 times more than the next best earner. They've never cut pay or screwed with levels like Istock and 123RF. They pay on time every month unlike Fotolia. They are open to public criticism unlike Dreamstime. They've actually worked to get me more money with SOD sales that didn't exist before. That's a raise in my book.

At any rate, a raise in levels would be great. I think it would be a good incentive to get old hands contributing fresh content. But it would have to make business sense, and right now, Shutterstock isn't exactly short of fresh content.

The Nikon 70-200 F4 is also sharp wide open throughout its range, if that is an option. You could get that and the 85/1.8 together for the same price as the 70-200 2.8.

Deleted.

I always like to look at the IS portfolios of some of those who are stating 'fantastic month'. It does give some sort of sense of balance to see how their sales are there, purely because it's easy to see sellers stats on IS as opposed to other sites. It helps to show what someones definition of 'fantastic sales' actually means.
Here is a selection of sales data for some of those reporting their sales....
100 files sold in a year.
40 files in 2 years.
50 files in 3 years.
1400 in 8 years.
3600 in 7 years.

Unless their Shutterstock earnings are more than 10 times what the get on istock, like mine are. I have more than 50,000 lifetime sales on Shutterstock and fewer then 300 on istock.