emailed istock support and got a similar answer.....

"Thank you very much for your email.

We encountered a major technical problem while adding the November Royalties to the StockXpert accounts. We are working on correcting the problem and the November as well as December royalties will be posted soon, our hope is within the next fee days.

I apologize for the delay and any inconvenience this may cause.

Please let us know if you require further assistance.

Regards,


Darek Z
iStockphoto
Client Relations
Toll-free 1-866-478-6251
Ph: 403-265-3062

I like Canstock - the upload is easy, the rejections are fair and not very severe, they are quick to review new uploads, and, with about 1000 images on the site, I have earned $144 in 2010 - helped with a couple of full priced downloads from some of the partners. Last month was $9, which is fine for a very low maintenance site.

Steve

http://www.canstockphoto.com?r=32663

uh...$144 a year with 1000 images....you are earning $ .012 per image per month...you are earning one penny a month per image....I am doing slightly better with RPI of 2 cents per month.  worst RPI for any site.  Yes, 25 cents with no chance of raise after some sales does make it the lowest in the industry. Really about time to raise that number to 30-35 cents to be more in line with industry standard.  At least offer a higher tier for better sellers like dreamstime and shutterstock do.

Like everyone else I love the ease of upload so I do hope they succeed.  The 50% split is getting closer to what I consider fair.  Alamy still only takes 40% of sales which I feel is truly a much more ethical split. I wish more micros would follow the lead of Alamy who has now entered the micro market.

Great to see that you are actually seeking out individuals so that you can pay them what they are owed! Very good business ethics on your part. Refreshing in an industry that seems to be leaning in the opposite direction. 

Quote from: Lee Torrens on January 04, 2011, 14:55

There's lots of sharks in this industry but Vita (zager) is not one of them. I've spent time with him in person and had many long email discussions over the past two years. It's understandable given what's happened recently, but it's also unfortunate that someone with honorable intentions is treated with such suspicion, especially when there are others in this industry that deserve more suspicion than they get.

Pixmac may not be a good fit for you. I wrote a review that concluded that it's probably not in the best interests of most contributors to submit there (although that was before the recent commission changes). But if it carries any weight for you, I vouch for Vita.

And just for the record, I think this "fair" stuff is pure BS, and Vita knows that, but he seems to have more empathy for us contributors than I do.

And I can appreciate that you might know zager personally, and someone else out there might know you personally. I know neither of you personally. I am certain you can understand why folks are suspicious when NONE of these sites, not just pixmac, want to put specifics in writing. Everything is smoke and mirrors. We are told we get 30% of something, but in many cases, we never really know what that is.

Too many people are relying on their stock commissions to help them pay their electric bills, let alone pay for trips around the world and million dollar condos (I am referencing KT from IS). To be fair, all anyone is asking is that specifics are in writing, and that just doesn't seem to happen. I am pretty sure you as a business person makes certain that everything you do is in a written contract, yet we are constantly asked to "just believe". We aren't children. And just because you vouch for him, doesn't mean I believe you. You know the old saying...trust but verify. We just want to be able to verify.

I completely agree. And yes I agree Pixmacs concept of "fair" is BS.  It used to be the industry "fair" practice to present the contributer with a balance sheet for each sale that included the actual price the image was purchased for with a simple subtraction of the agencies commission percentage subtracted, sites were still allowed to negotiate prices with buyers as long as the purchase price was clearly shown on the balance sheet.

If Pixmac actually wants to be transparent, why not simply present photographers with their sales reports similar to the way agencies like Alamy currently do.  Every single time a sale occurs for me on Alamy it lists sale price minus 40% commission. 

That is what I consider a fair contract.  I pay Alamy 40% commission for representing me (I keep 60% of my sales).   Along with fair commissions they clearly and transparently let me know how much my images are selling for.  Before you go jumping in saying they are a macro agency.  They really are not since they have been selling $5 images now, but somehow still manage to be transparent.

Promising that I get to keep 25 cents an image and also promising that you will "only" take 70% of the sale of my work is hardly making any attempt at being "Fair"...in fact it is like stealing all of the money out of my wallet and then saying "thanks for letting me rob you here is a shiny quarter for your troubles"

Sorry for my skepticism I am jaded by too many kind words from CEOs, rather than saying you want to be more transparent...how about you actually just be more transparent, this nonsense has got to end in this industry. We are getting slaughtered here left and right, commissions being cut so low that 25 cents is supposed to sound like fair wages.

I would love to find a new outlet for my images, if you really want to listen and this isn't some PR stunt to keep everyone from jumping ship after your last copyright theft debacle, than I would urge you to please take a look at how Alamy reports its numbers.  If you are truly flexible and willing to make changes please put in your contract that for all sales the purchase price as well as the commission you take will clearly be stated for each sale.  Stock photography has always worked like this, it is only recently that micro sites try to be sneaky.  There is no need to plea for our trust simply share the numbers and you will have created the first transparent microstock agency, and if you do that you will have every single microstock photographer flocking to your site myself included. In no time you will be larger than any other agency.  Think about it...seriously think about it.   

Good riddance Kodachrome!...It took you long enough to finally die!  Ugh I remember those unforgiving days in college...our professors always made us shoot slide film...the most unforgiving of all films, so that we would learn to get perfect exposures the first time, only a half of a stop off and you were pretty much screwed, nowadays you can be off by 3 whole stops and still manage to pull a sellable photo out of your raw file. While Kodachrome did teach me to tediously meter the differences between my shadow and highlights I must say shooting raw makes me much less anxious about my exposures after a big shoot, and I will not miss the whole praying that the labs machines did not have a tiny grain of grit in their machines. I have many rolls of film with that single little scratch from a dirty roller running down the entire length of film rendering slides useless with out serious touch up time...remember that?. I do however miss popping those juicy little gems into the slide projector...slide shows projected on the biggest wall in the house were always the most fun way to review images from a trip.  Photography is seriously much more laid back since digital.  I think of digital as the equivalent of cooking in a microwave as opposed to slide film which is like cooking on a woodstove, pain in the ass not to mention the expense of buying film and having it processed, an 8 gig card is like the equivalent of buying 40 rolls of film....and OMG flash cards are reusable. Microstock would never have existed without the demise of the expense of film and processing.

Not sure why you only want to focus on the big pro indies? Would be interested in seeing your rpi on these sites,  not just big-time numbers, having only large-scale pro info would kind of skew the data towards bigger folks with the money and means to hire models and have a bigger studio setup.  Would be nice to get a polling of average rpi of average stockers. 

If you are interested in my small-time numbers I'm happy to share, I have between 300-400 images on all sites mostly landscape, no people.

In order of RPI (assuming you are looking for monthly RPI)

Istock             .50
Shutterstock   .28
Dreamstime    .17
Alamy             .13
123RF             .04
BigStock          .04
Canstock         .02

Hope more people share.

The keywords for the image that I most recently uploaded with MicrostockSubmitter to veer were applied to the previous image in the pending queue! Does it not work correctly with Veer yet, guess I will have to go back and manually redo all the keywords for the other image. I'll have to go back and check all my other images and make sure keywords aren't being switched on other images as well.

FWIW they have a pretty extensive plan in place to increase traffic, so to those who are quitting, it might be worth hanging in there a bit longer.  I have noticed some increase in sales the last couple of weeks.

Do tell more about this extensive plan to increase traffic...as I am considering dumping canstock as well. it makes only 1-2% of my stock income and has the most files on it of any site for me so not sure how it is ranked a 3 on this site, (sometimes I wonder about the rankings on this site) but that is another topic. Do You have any real details as to specifics, are are you talking about more advertising? if so where and when? Every site makes promises to increase traffic bu tno one gives specifics, I would like to here from Duncan or someone who knows more about this. Talk is cheap I have only seen my sales go down over the past three months there. I guess it doesn't take any effort for me to stick around but I wonder if it is worth adding more when my Return Per Image is only 4 cents per image/mth currently as opposed to 50 cents/month with Istock. So a few details would go a long way in increasing submitter confidence for this site. Thanks

I finally got an email in response to the bug report I sent.  They're talking end of the month for reporting November's sales.  They might beat that, but I won't be surprised if they don't.  In any event, I'm assuming that my numbers will match one iteration of the repeated sales I saw before the shutdown.  Not nearly enough for a payout, so it doesn't much matter when they get it working.

Thanks for posting this but it is really unprofessional that we have to find out this info from someone on some forum...I'm sure most people don't read forums everyday...how about some direct communication . . . an email or a post from someone from one of these companies-inside-a-company-inside-a-company who actually knows what . is going on with all our money... a post here or somewhere...WHERE DID MY MONEY GO!!!!!!!!!! I AM FURIOUS!!! I love that someone is earning interest on thousands of contributers sales, the longer they wait to pay the more interest on this unpaid money they can earn, when you are talking thousands of sales that interest becomes a significant boost in income for these companies....there is no reason that it should take an entire month to report earnings from previous month when every other site reports earnings within a few hours of sales!   

Is there any way to selectively pull out of thinkstock through istock while keeping the other partners or is it an all or nothing thing?

SHHHHHH.........cash out, keep your mouth shut....this inflated sales doesn't even come close to what we lost when they dumped our images on TS.  It is very possible these are sales that probably were never reported before and they are just clearing the back log. no need to start sending emails to IS they have too much to worry about for us to bother them such a tiny bug like this. 

Can't seem to get above 18kb/s with multiple files being uploaded, If I upload only one photo to one single site as a test it goes up to 40kb, (with thread count set to 1) still not as fast as if I upload with filezilla, My internet connection is technically capable of getting 90kb/s, but realistically I get 80kb/s with filezilla.   What is the optimal thread count I should be set at.  should it be the number of sites I am uploading to or does it not matter?  So far I am figuring the software out fine and enjoy using it...but the only hangup is the crazy slow speed, what do you have your thread count set to when you get high speeds?  Can others please report your upload speeds as well so I know if it is everyone or just some of us?

Okay, downloaded program. First thing that I encounter is that the "learning initial course" keeps closing on me and when I reopen it it starts from beginning, perhaps a "next" and "back" button on the tutorial dialog box would help to skip to where I left off.

Also how does it handle the keyword weighting/ordering issue with fotolia, when I upload to Fotolia normally it has me order the keywords by importance. Is StockSubmitter only taking the first ten in alphabetical order? From what I understand the keyword importance function is crucial to having your images show up in searches on fotolia.

I do not understand what the "Buffer" information box is used for? Is like a copy/paste clipboard type thing. Forgive my ignorance but it appears that the software was not laid out by a designer but by a programmer, don't get me wrong it is a great idea but could use a little beautification to help it appear simpler to use.  I understand functionality is your main goal at this point but the wording and design looks as though it was programmed for another programmer to use.  Wording like "submit parameters" and "buffer" are a bit programmer-ish and the really busy background art could be toned down, it only adds to the confusion factor of learning a new program, especially for the visually sensitive folks who are going to be using it.  I know a lot of work has gone into it but would recommend at some point having a graphic designer to help overhaul the sightly clunky feel.  Overall I like it and will most likely continue to use the free version, until things are smoothed out some, you appear very dedicated to making improvements which is great to see.

Also Under help the "contents" is all in Russian.

Thanks for the input, I really enjoy the thoughtful advice many of you offer in this forum. These are good things to think about before I ask this photog friend to join forces. As for the inevitable break up issue, I have no illusions we will work together forever, actually I have a very clear three year goal in mind where we work our as*es off and when the portfolio reaches a certain number (or three years) we split up and continue to earn our passive income from this portfolio for as long as microstock survives. (I am aware that earnings slowly drop on some sites over time if not kept up with like shutterstock), I feel all images created while working together despite whom actually clicked the shutter would simply stay in the communal port and earnings be split 50/50 on a monthly basis.  Am I being naive to think this model could really work smoothly.  Rather than the usual batches of ten I am working with now, perhaps we can be pushed to work in batches of 50 or more if there is someone to trade off duties with, everyone gets keyword fatigue..am I right? I just feel so bogged down and get de-motivated when working alone.  If another persons income were tied to mine we may help motivate each other to keep producing.   I am not looking to do this forever I want to live a content life on 50k a year passive income that is my magic number.   So my simple math (maybe too simple) is that a portfolio of 4167 images will earn me that 50k/year assuming I earn a dollar an image a month across all sites (I really earn a little more than $1 currently and I am not that focused yet).  I realize working with a partner would double that figure to 8334. So that means producing 231 images/month split between two people so we would each effectively be responsible for the energy to create 115 images/month each.  So the real math is if a team of two people can produce 5.2 images per person a day (not counting weekends) straight for three years, you will both secure yourself a minimum 50k income, assuming RPI stays around $1/mth.

Do I have delusions of grandeur or is this really possible, 5 images a day sounds exactly like the workload I want.