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Messages - TheDman
51
« on: January 04, 2012, 17:36 »
Silly Shutterstock. They will soon learn like Istock did that this business model is unsustainable.
not following.. what are you talking about? increase in prices?
SS is keeping the subscription model and will never drop (I guess), many and myself report higher sales on OD and SOD, so I believe if they can bring more clients into paying a little more why not? we are also talking about different clients/needs
Graduated increase in royalties based on sales. Soon everyone will be at the 30% mark, which will be unsustainable. It was a joke.
52
« on: January 04, 2012, 15:08 »
Silly Shutterstock. They will soon learn like Istock did that this business model is unsustainable.
53
« on: December 30, 2011, 17:22 »
The demostration is to show that IS is comparable to SS.
It is comparable, except for the drama. But the whole comparison thing is pointless, because so many on both sides , independent and exclusive, have made decisions that they are now stuck with, so it's natural to defend your choice. I think the time when an exclusive could realistically become an independent is over. At most, a small percentage of files would be accepted at SS, given how stringent the reviewers are there now, so a portfolio at IS built up over years is pretty much the only game in town now for exclusives. So you better hope for that coming world domination of Thinkstock.
Nah. Depends on your situation. With istock's continued plummet the risk/reward scenario for exclusives is constantly changing. I'm exclusive, and last year at this time there was no way I would have considered dropping the crown. But after seeing my steep sales decline this year I'm simply not risking as much anymore, and what little I do risk I could easily see making back and then some at the other sites. Before the RC targets were lowered I was almost certainly going to drop the crown on Jan 1, considering I was going to miss the 30% cutoff by a hundred or so. Now that they've lowered I'm reconsidering just a bit... might hang around until March or April just to see if the decline continues, since those months were my best of 2011. And I'm sure more than "a small percentage at most" of my port would get into SS, at least among the sellers. Call me confident. ;-)
54
« on: December 30, 2011, 12:03 »
I am not denying there is a price differential between independent files on Istock and other sites, nor that some buyers would be looking for the best price. What I am saying is that the price differential is not the reason for the RECENT (past year) exodus of buyers. How do I know this? There has been a price differential for several years, and Istock was selling very, very well for independents, and was the top or second place earner for pretty much every independent supplier until this year. If it was only price that was the issue, then sales would have shown it all along.
I frankly think it has a lot to do with the crazy price differences on istock's site alone. Where I work we develop and implement thousands of websites, and we very often send customers out to stock sites to select some stock they want to use. Istock used to be our go-to recommendation, but we're starting to shy away from recommending them because too many times the customers will come back wanting to use a Vetta/Agency image that will be out of the price range we led them to believe. I'm sure there's a market for Vetta. However, it should have been broken off as a separate site entirely, or just simply added to Getty. The collections needed to be much more clearly delineated. And now with Agency, Exclusive+, etc there are just way too many price points, all heaped into the same search results. Buyers don't know what to expect. Many of them are infrequent buyers who don't keep up on the latest istock pricing craziness; all they know is they used to search for stuff and find low-priced photos, and now the same searching produces vastly higher priced stuff. So they look elsewhere.
55
« on: December 11, 2011, 15:44 »
You have no way to verify your RC numbers, especially when credits change at some point during the year (as they did this year for certain sizes of certain types of files - 20 credit vectors to 18 for example).
Flogging a dead horse, I know, as I believe iStock is well aware it is in its own best interests to avoid giving a full accounting to contributors, but it is imperative that we have detailed, downloadable stats for our accounts.
I completely agree, but aren't # of credits and redeemed credits the same thing? And aren't all of those stats already given to us on the normal download details page of each image (when the site is working correctly, that is)?
56
« on: December 06, 2011, 14:18 »
I would be much more interested in lower noise than higher MPs. If it went up to 22 or 24 that would be negligible, as long as noise is reduced. Plus, the focusing system needs a major upgrade. Not sure if all of these things will convince me to trade in my MkII though.
58
« on: November 29, 2011, 15:24 »
Last year I had double the RCs needed to hit the 30% level. This year I'll probably miss it by a few hundred credits. In every year prior to this one (I've been on since 2005), my bar charts have gone up in Oct, Nov and Dec. This year they're going down with each successive month.
59
« on: November 29, 2011, 15:12 »
ETA: and sales yesterday and today suck. could it be that every second page load produces a white screen?
I noticed this going on too. I was hoping it was just me.
60
« on: November 15, 2011, 10:24 »
This November on IS might be my worst month of the year, and the first time since I started selling here in 2005 that I went down in November instead of up. I have several Christmas/New Year's images that usually do well this time of year that are barely selling at all. Shots that usually sell multiple times per day are now lucky to get one sale a month. Looks like Nov 2011 will be at 33% of Nov 2010.
Istock's fall has been incredible. At the beginning of the year I thought it was going to be no problem to hit my royalty target to stay at my current level, but now it appears I'll miss it. I had been contemplating ditching my crown, and this may well be the last straw. It amazes me that a company can so shoot themselves in the foot, have thousands of people screaming at them that they are doing just that, yet ignore them all and continue their path of self-destruction.
you have just 550 files after seven years of being on iStock. I think contributors being hit particularly hard are those that have gotten used to making sales off best sellers, who began early when growth was truly exponential from year to year. the landscape has changed, the collection has grown and it's far too competitive today to be riding on the success of so few files. no matter how good they may be, there are a lot of very good files these days.
True, however the particular files I'm thinking of are only a year or two or three old. I'm not concerned with files from 2005. There just shouldn't be such a precipitous drop after one year. Plus, new files don't sell at all. I get the feeling that if I uploaded 1000 files in the next month, the old 500 would still outsell them by a wide margin.
61
« on: November 14, 2011, 11:10 »
This November on IS might be my worst month of the year, and the first time since I started selling here in 2005 that I went down in November instead of up. I have several Christmas/New Year's images that usually do well this time of year that are barely selling at all. Shots that usually sell multiple times per day are now lucky to get one sale a month. Looks like Nov 2011 will be at 33% of Nov 2010.
Istock's fall has been incredible. At the beginning of the year I thought it was going to be no problem to hit my royalty target to stay at my current level, but now it appears I'll miss it. I had been contemplating ditching my crown, and this may well be the last straw. It amazes me that a company can so shoot themselves in the foot, have thousands of people screaming at them that they are doing just that, yet ignore them all and continue their path of self-destruction.
62
« on: September 23, 2011, 14:03 »
Just now found my black bear photo on istock:  has been modified and is being resold on zoonar:  Already alerted istock support. Looks like Zoonar doesn't do a very good job of policing.
63
« on: September 16, 2010, 20:59 »
So belittle all you want to but at your peril or maybe at least loss of opportunity.
This is ironically enough the exact advice that macros needed to heed before micros started destroying them.
Touche, What goes around, comes around.
It's never going to come around if they're charging 20x the price for it.
64
« on: September 16, 2010, 18:03 »
So belittle all you want to but at your peril or maybe at least loss of opportunity.
This is ironically enough the exact advice that macros needed to heed before micros started destroying them.
66
« on: September 15, 2010, 00:32 »
I've actually been kicking butt since this whole deal went down, including 2 ELs yesterday. Thank goodness those rolled in now as opposed to next month.
67
« on: September 08, 2010, 02:17 »
It's all about the designers, and if you guys really want to make a statement, it's going to have to be with buyers. Frankly, istock probably doesn't care if a few people delete their portfolios or stop uploading. If they are going to feel any impact from this, it'll have to come from buyers. If you're a designer and purchase stock images, look elsewhere from now on. If you know people who buy from istock, let them know what's going on and that they could actually save money AND support artists by taking their business elsewhere.
Already done! I'm not just a contributor but as of this year a rather large subscription buyer (240 credits/day!) and I'm sure I'll look elsewhere now to make my next large purchases.
68
« on: August 12, 2010, 16:04 »
But I still don't understand why a number of people have noticed a sharp sales drop since F5 - if there is no search change, then is there something that buyers are finding confusing or offputting about the new site?
I don't think the few people commenting here has any statistical relevance. I've been fine since F5 (well, as fine as I was before it), and lisafx is saying the same. So we certainly can't come to any conclusions yet about the effect it has had.
69
« on: August 12, 2010, 15:47 »
No, gostwyck is totally right. The only people who call it a pyramid scheme are those who are unsuccessful due to their own failings and it is just sour grapes. There are plenty of new contributors who have come in only to become successful.
You are correct, however I will be curious to see if it happens this year on istock due to the issue with new files not selling. I'd like to know if anyone has joined since February and had a lot of success. As for the market oversaturation claim, sure it gets more saturated all the time, but I don't think we've reached the point yet where certain categories are 'filled up'. My best seller right now is a butterfly. There were already thousands of butterfly shots on istock when I uploaded that one, but darn if there wasn't room for one more. You just never know what's going to catch.
70
« on: August 11, 2010, 23:48 »
may i know how to tell a white balance of a photo is wrong?
If the image overall looks too brown or too blue then the WB is probably off. It's a bit subjective, since it is perfectly legitimate to shift the WB so far that a daytime scene turns blue, giving the impression that it is evening, or you might have a scene composed largely of shadows where you choose to set WB for sunlight, creating a cold light on the main subject. However, those are artistic decisions, this looks as if the WB simply wasn't nailed properly to create an accurate impression of the scene. But with 19,000 sales, who would care?
I think the 19,000 sales proves she got the white balance exactly correct. Dead-true whites and skin tones are not necessarily what every single photo needs. A lot of shots with skin tones tend to lean towards the yellow/red to give them warmth. The correct white balance is the one that will produce the most sales, not the one that will even out the numbers in the curves dialog box.
71
« on: August 08, 2010, 09:36 »
It's not a subscription sale, it's a bug. I've noticed this for years. None of the download numbers on the "My Uploads" page ever match the ones on the detail page. Somtimes they're off by as much as 5 sales.
72
« on: August 06, 2010, 00:13 »
For me it is good snapshot with lets say good composition but wrong white balance at all, and if I am inspector I will refuse it.
...and that's why you're not an inspector.
73
« on: August 04, 2010, 17:52 »
In my case I know for a fact that since August 2005 I averaged .93 per download as a non-exclusive. You could almost double that as an exclusive, if this member has been exclusive the all time which is 1.86 x 19000 =$35340. And then you would still need to figure the various cannister levels that this member went through as an exclusive, so 20-30K seems a good target. I would say this is max. Certainly not 100K. Denis
This logic is flawed. I've been averaging well over $3 per download for a while no- assuming that someone is averaging the same and that the downloads are spread evenly for 4 years, you get 5,000 downloads in the past 365...thats 5000 x 3 (and they have a better cannister level) - that alone is $15,000. I'm pretty sure that the photographer gets more than $3 per download because I'm not even gold yet.
So you're telling me that 14,000 downloads = $10,000?
No chance. At all.
You mustn't have been around back in the days when the earnings were: Small - $.10 Medium - $.20 Large - $.30
74
« on: July 26, 2010, 22:17 »
I don't work there or anything, I can just tell how they're going to lay it out. 
75
« on: July 26, 2010, 19:08 »
My question is - where is the link to 'My Account' going to be located? At the very bottom of the page? Yep. Will we (contributors and buyers) have to scroll all the way down to be able to access it?
It will be at the bottom of the page. No scrolling necessary.
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