I'm not saying I think everyone will download the maximum now and it will be a disaster for SS.  I'm saying their margins will be slimmer because there will be more downloads per user.

There is no particular reason to believe that subscribers will on average download more images per account because they can. The amount of work which professional people can do is not going to increase because theoretical download limits have been upped.

It's a service, like say broadband. We don't fit more hours in the day because our network got fatter.

if people are tweeting about it, the cat's halfway out of the bag.

1 person seems to have Tweeted about it from what I can see.

without the 25/day restriction and instead doing 750/month.  This should mean more downloads for contributors and lower margins for SS

I doubt it will make much difference. Except that it sounds like a much better offer. AFAIK the whole point of all you can eat is that most people tend not to pig-out.

Like I said they are probably showing different things to different people.  For me, right now, they are saying 750 images per month with no mention of 25 a day.  I would be willing to bet I'm not the only one seeing this.

Mine shows daily limits as others are saying.

Much better than the iStock pricing page which delivers a server error for me these days because iStock fails to geo locate my IP address. The only way I can get to the pricing page is via a VPN in a different country. It's been like this for weeks at least. I raised this on their bug thread and was told to open a support ticket. As if !

a quick look at sites like kickstarter show many people are finding ways to make money on the internet

South Park - Go Fund Yourself

Quote

the words are being broken up on the front end (screen) but this does not effect the search engine (back end).

That's useful to know. Thanks very much.

In your post above you said that "Notre-Dame de l'Immacul�e-Conception" as a phrase gets turned into separate constituent keywords. Including de and l (but with the apostrophe stripped). When you submit your image for review do you leave in the de and l keywords ?

Background:

As part of a project I am working on, I have been writing functionality which parses embedded IPTC image metadata.

With respect to this I am currently specifically focused on the different ways in which multi-word phrases or �unique phrases� are used.

This question relates specifically to Shutterstock. Item 6 of this article at Shutterstock talks about unique phrases.

6) For multiple words where you would like to create a unique phrase, consider using quotation marks. Example: clay pot. Depending on whether quotation marks are used, this phrase can be understood as two separate keywords or one keyword. In response to clay pot our search engine would only return an image if both clay and pot are separate keywords associated with the image. Now, if someone wanted to treat this keyword as a phrase, they would place it in quotations, "clay pot.� The search engine would then return all images where the phrase "clay pot" was used as the keyword. It does not return images which only used the individual keywords clay and pot.

Question:

What I am seeing when I search for �clay pot� using quotes seems to be images which seem to have clay and pot as keywords - but seemingly no images including the exact unique phrase. As if the search quotes were being ignored.

Can anyone explain what it going on or help me understand this better ? Perhaps someone who has specifically used a unique phrase in quotes at Shutterstock. Is it that the unique phrase "clay pot" is there but is not listed in the visible customer facing keywords ?

If the internet actually recognized the value of work with some reasonable prices for things like stock, ad rates, music, etc., that would give a real boost to the economy.

The end user price for most images will inevitably get ever closer to zero as supply increases. Supply is unlimited. The inevitable outcome is that many users will, at best, only pay for the curation and delivery of those images as a service. And most likely even these services will come bundled - eg with hosting etc. Bespoke images and niches would be an exception.

The growth of microstock was facilitated by the availability of affordable DSLRs and ubiquitous broadband. Affordable DSLRs made it feasible to relatively easily learn how to produce content which was as good or nearly as good as that from existing much higher priced stock collections. Simultaneously - suddenly lots of little businesses, even churches, clubs etc thought that they needed a website - mostly because in those days lots of people said that they needed a website. And in those days there was a lot of money in making websites which fuelled a demand for relatively inexpensive stock.

Increasingly today those small businesses and organizations have often found that they really only need to keep the website as a placeholder, like a business card. Even many quite large organizations have switched their meaningful interactions with the customers to Facebook and Twitter - and the fresh content they are using is shot with an iPhone or shared by their 'friends'. Most people who upload an iPhone photo to Facebook are not expecting to be paid - they�ll be happy to get a thumbs-up or lots of �likes�. This sort of use is inevitably going to account for the majority of image use. And, as microstock gradually ate into previous pricing models, so free and almost is inevitably  going to eat into even microstock pricing.

Microstock (from a contributor perspective) probably peaked and then quickly began to decline about the time of the financial crisis - which was, significantly, also soon after the iPhone launched and Facebook introduced business pages. This was also the period when the biggest collections began to grow almost exponentially - with ever more people supplying ever more images. And no evidence that the total market is growing.

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Meanwhile ad rates seem likely to decline if anything.

A Crisis in Online Ads: One-Third of Traffic Is Bogus - Wall St Journal

Study Puts a Price Tag on Fake Ad Clicks - New York Times

Nearly 25% of 'people' viewing online video ads are robots used by fraudsters - The Guardian

StockUnlimited Brings The Netflix Model To Stock Imagery, Starting With Vector Graphics

Instead of limiting users to a set monthly allowance, StockUnlimited charges a $9.99 flat fee ...

... If it wasn�t for the team behind it, I�d likely have serious doubts about the company�s plan, which flies in the face of the established (and highly profitable) business model in the stock imagery world. The company�s chairman and lead investor is Andy Sitt, who also founded the successful stock imagery service 123RF. StockUnlimited�s CEO is Christian Toksvig, the former head of business development at Getty Images. These two clearly know how this market works.

Currently, StockUnlimited only features vector images, but the plan is to expand to photos and videos in the third or fourth quarter of this year.

 

Weren't they supposed to have already taken out the Feb balance by now?  My total still has Feb and March money.  This got me worried we won't get paid by the 25th.

Detailed in their March 3rd email and also noted here and here at their site:

If your balance is $100 or more on February 28, 2015, you will be eligible to receive a payment. When invoices are generated, typically on or around the 5th of the following month, your payment amount will be moved from your account balance to our financial system.

Please note that for this first payment by Getty Images (US), Inc. we anticipate this process to occur later than the 5th, but be completed by the 15th.

I see, but you said "just the same as today".
How do you compensate a color cast today, digitally?

Just-the-same - as in, it was do-able just the same as it is do-able today. Not meaning to imply exactly the same technical process. Just the same is a turn of phrase in English.

Today it's much easier. - especially with accurate color targets.  But also because you can fine tune it visually in real time. And  - also because you can adjust the color across different parts of the image differently - which was not typically practical pre digital and certainly never exact.