And many people will write their Ph.D.ˋs about the self created destruction of Gettyimages.

It really depends how you look at it though, doesn't it? It has made a lot of people very wealthy - even whilst sometimes seemingly lurching from crisis to crisis over the past 30 or so years (which is true of almost all agencies - as a result of technology and the ever evolving markets). And it has earned lots of other people very good money - whether as investors or as contributors. Even insignificant plebs like me have done ok out of it.

So it's hardly been a disaster. Granted, today smaller privately owned companies which are closer to their customers and suppliers seem to have the advantage.

Even when RogerMexico (IIRC) was their spindoctor, he'd make announcements, then there would be loads of questions and explanations.

There was never a time when they communicated particularly well or seemed certain where the bus was going. I think that was understandable during the boom years. It was a completely new thing so there wasn't really an obvious route map.

--

It's not just about iStock. There are far too many people supplying stock images (and hoping to still get paid). Today most will struggle to earn back what they 'invest' in equipment. And most could probably earn more per hour at McDonalds.

I am going by the numbers, not by what I think has happened based on my interpretation of the market.

I am going by how much the content I use costs to use vs what it used to cost.

My earnings there have been halved since they introduced subs...hardly ever make a non-sub sale there any more.

My earning are down by something like $1000 per month since the market peak. I also stopped uploading which obviously also doesn't help.

But I don't blame iStock or Getty (or Shutterstock) for that. The price has collapsed because of the proliferation of content (and because we are no longer in a booming start-up economy or bloggers and new websites). Image is cheap because there is so much of it available. There is no shortage of people who want to be photographers and artists. And today everyone has a a camera in their pocket.

That said - as someone who uses content - it's really hard to find great stuff.

The simple fact that a client can pay so little (10c) for an image through subscriptions sickens me. 

I think that's the flipside of having to wade through so much content in order to find stuff to use. I'm not singling out iStock. The stock sites are bogged down with content. (My own legacy stuff included).

It's really hard to find good content which has been properly keyworded and properly curated. And the more images there are, the less they are worth.

I lost the 35% I had. Never to regain it, and certainly not now. I was so very nearly at 40%.
It was, and still is, extremely disappointing.

It would still have been 35% or 40% of ever lower prices and ever fewer sales in an increasingly saturated market. The old prices were not sustainable for a company of that size, owned by never satisfied investors in a free-for-all market. Only boutiques can charge more. Only by staying small and only by never competing with themselves.

I wonder how the big companies will retain their valuations unless they find something different to sell.

it looks like is going to be a competitor to creativemarket....I see fonts, watercolor brushes..yep...

Envato already is a competitor to creativemarket but its categories are split between different brands. Eg - ThemeForest is (arguably) the goto site for commercial WordPress themes and plugins.  The content for Elements is selected only from GraphicRiver (AFAIK).

The big stock-photo companies which are owned by stockholders and corporate investors were volume businesses of the boom era and are not going to rescue themselves by opening boutiques. Boutique sales are going to be too few to make up for the declining income from volume sales. The big stock-photo companies will instead have to compete for declining revenues on the entry price of subscriptions and the number of images included in an entry level package.

A smaller more focused business with relatively low overheads and no significant debt can do enough business to carry on sustainably by focusing on a higher than average price point - but that volume of boutique trade would never satisfy investors or the markets.

If the author of that piece is correct, there is a lot of money to be made in selling SSTK stock short.  Might be worth a gamble...

For the domestic investor, short selling is seldom/never a serious option because the risk is potentially almost unlimited and disastrous.

I will use it to make better products and more money.

People who don't feel right about that don't need to download NIK and they can sit in their dark gloomy world

Will it annoy you if a stock agency starts giving away for free RF licences for the use of high quality stock?

Why some people have to see the evil everywhere?

How do you feel about free high quality stock photos? It's the same.

Investors are increasingly tired of hearing about "crowdsourcing" && build-it-and-they-will-come cargo cult scenarios.

Actually I am surprised Adobe hasn�t bought pininterest yet.

Pinterest is never going to be about selling images. It's potentially about using images to sell actual stuff - but mostly it is about propagating brand awareness. And the margins, if they exist, are going to be incredibly thin. Adobe, by contrast, still has an actual business.

i don�t understand why they are not working on crowd based collection building.

The era when this might have had investor potential has long since passed.

The question is, how could someone hack your account

Typically the user's own security is the issue when accounts get hacked. Maybe they accessed their account via unencrypted shared public wifi, or using compromised proxies. Or a Windows  or Android device they used has malware.

PS after this incident i changed all my paswords on every stock site including mail.

Unless you know how the account was compromised this may not be adequate.