What I don't understand is why RM and Midstock agencies aren't trying to be sure their images are at least technically sound.  Cover all the bases.  The standards have gotten * high in microstock; so why don't they also increase in the market that charges 10x the price?  Pay more and get less?  Oh yeah, that can be found in any market.  When you pay more for something, you're not necessarily getting more.

Many big RM agency collection images high-res have always looked noisy, OOF, or just outright laughable technically every time I've zoomed in.  Maybe it's time the technical bar was raised, across the board.  The smartphone and iphoneography stuff is now bringing the technical standards back down, perhaps.  A camera that's always in your pocket is better than no camera... but does that make the image worth hundreds of dollars, even if it was captured on a piece of crap?  I guess so.  Art is always subjective.  Feed me 3 bottles of sriracha sauce with a few beers and and bunch of old taco meat and let me vomit it on a canvas, and then I can sell it to the highest bidder as .:abstract art:.

That might just be the biggest reason they failed. On the other hand, micros should charge more, always should have.

http://www.success.com/blog/no-more-bad-stock-photos-how-a-great-image-helped-inspire-me-to-launch-stocksy

580% revenue growth is not failure to me

"580% revenue growth" - meaningless. From what, 2$? You might as well start calculating from 0, becasue if it's a new company, and say 50000000000% * infinte growth. When you see numbers like that in financial issues, you can be pretty sure they are taking you for a enormous fool. You ppl fall for anything. I am in stocksy, I see the stats they present with TV shop sentences "awesome, cool, etc...", problem is I'm quite decent with math, and some a back of the envelope calculations will tell you it's anything but spectacular. There are a few ppl who got layaway stuff accepted that almost nobody else got thru -because they were too ordinary stock-like. Those guys have quite large ports, had pretty big ones to start with, it probably works for them but hardly anybody else. Otherwise you have guys spending 2000$ on some fashion shoot to achieve that movie-still-with-stars feeling, only to get 3-4 of the  the weirdest most unusable pictures approved from it. Big nah.

They have the batch editor for ages now

Nope

I think this actually is a nice improvement for contributors, people just didn't take / have the time to discover how it works. You can batch edit dozens of files now, changing their description with a single click like on SS, so defaulting your X-price option or categories to previous file's setting is meaningless now. This makes submitting a lot faster.

Again: it now basically works like SS batch submission forms, editing, saving adn submitting multiple files at once.

Imho the whole interface is lot better, less clicks needed, almost everything on a single page, you just need rto figure it out an get used to it.

On the other hand I don't see much improvement in sales coming from the adobe deal. I have slowly increasing sales from my files "maturing" but nothing else really.

This is waaay below any standard you need for stock. Actually these would hardly qualify even for tourist snap shots.

also I don't really understand why ppl come to any forum asking what you need for stock photography. Go to shutterstock.com, type a few basic keywords / combinations, like "beautiful woman" "smiling woman" "beautiful brunette" "food" "fitness" "relaxed female" "female thinking" and see what comes in the first few rows - that's what you need to do, and large amounts of it... by the hundreds at least, but more like by the thousands.

If you can do it, go ahead. If not, don't bother.

Meanwhile SS is down.

Your subject is so LCV, they will just reject it for the slightest problem. If it was HCV, they probably wouldn't be this stringent.

Also they might just reject things like this for being LCV, they just dont wan't to use the LCV rejection message, because there has been so much turmoil about this subject in the forums.

Quote from: topol on February 05, 2015, 05:38

Quote from: KuriousKat on February 01, 2015, 19:12

Well my month improved slightly in earnings, due to a few late Els and a rather large SOD, so I ended about $100 down on last January, which was not so harsh as I thought it was going to be.

However, my downloads were down 25% on January 2014, despite increasing my portfolio by approx 15% over the last year.

Maybe this could have something to do with it?

'408,315 new stock images added this week'

That's an insane number

...and it's pointless too. Just type some basic keyword combo and arrange by date, it's almost all very amateurish junk, awkward shots, inept, unattractive models, etc, that never-ever-never gonna be downloaded. I don't know why people bother, also why SS bothers to let them thru.

The good news is that those simply won't bother your downloads, if you do somewhat more pro stuff. (yes there is definitely pro stuff too among that 400 000, just extremely small percentage. I wouldn't be surprised that if we cut the numbers down to stuff that actually makes a difference because it sells, that weekly upload number for that wouldn't even hit 15 000. Still not a diminutive number tho.

If the higher quality images never see the light of day in the search, buyers will never see or have access to those images.

Shutterstock makes more money on the new LCV images and that is why they accept them and also recruit the new photographers who produce them. Have you noticed how many new contributors are showing up here lately?

If that was true buyers would have been leaving SS in droves because of a severely dysfunctional search for years now, which is obviously not true, since the company is doing well.

SS doesn't make anything on LCV images since they hardly ever get downloaded. That's why they are called LCV. Actually there should be a category called NCV. No Commercial Value - at least 60% of SS stock.


SS lets thru junk because the storage cost is so low it's a non-issue, and boasting about the numbers is usually effective marketing.

Well my month improved slightly in earnings, due to a few late Els and a rather large SOD, so I ended about $100 down on last January, which was not so harsh as I thought it was going to be.

However, my downloads were down 25% on January 2014, despite increasing my portfolio by approx 15% over the last year.

Maybe this could have something to do with it?

'408,315 new stock images added this week'

That's an insane number

...and it's pointless too. Just type some basic keyword combo and arrange by date, it's almost all very amateurish junk, awkward shots, inept, unattractive models, etc, that never-ever-never gonna be downloaded. I don't know why people bother, also why SS bothers to let them thru.

The good news is that those simply won't bother your downloads, if you do somewhat more pro stuff. (yes there is definitely pro stuff too among that 400 000, just extremely small percentage. I wouldn't be surprised that if we cut the numbers down to stuff that actually makes a difference because it sells, that weekly upload number for that wouldn't even hit 15 000. Still not a diminutive number tho.

Quote from: Mantis on January 24, 2015, 10:41

http://www.insightpartners.com/about/

...Remember the Getty deal where the venture capitalists wanted their $500M and Getty went into deep debt to do it? This is the same thing. ...

Just a point of order Venture Capitalists and Private Equity companies are both sources of financing, but are very, very different beasts IMO.

Generally, venture capitalists help get a business started (cash in return for an equity stake in the company) and "get out" once it has gone public by selling their stock - so they can go invest in some other startups.

Private Equity firms buy up businesses in some sort of fiscal weak state (in Getty's case it was a falling stock price) and then split them up, or try somehow to spiffy them up so they can sell in 3-5 years. They are more like vultures than any sort of helper. Hellman & Friedman couldn't get out of Getty and so did this awful thing called dividend recapitalization where they saddled Getty with masses of debt so they could get their "dividend". They did that twice, I think.

I don't see anything amiss about the VCs who invested in SS before it went public selling to move on to other things. SS isn't a startup any more.

My original question above, which apparently offended the OP, was only seeking some wisdom (I'm largely ignorant of the ins and outs of this stuff) as to whether this was something special or unexpected. Ron wanted to know the same thing. Seems a reasonable question.

private equity is just the fancy new name made up for leveraged buyout companies, after those managed to be hated by everyone who actually works for a living.

Sorry, I don't buy it, Alex.

1. You claim Inmagine to be an API Partner Reseller, but offer the 123rf images even if the "API Partners" have been disabled.

2. Even when I found out, you offered to remove the images from the Inmagine search results, but NOT from the site.

3. You claim that it can happen very often that an Inmagine customer doesn't pay. When we did our research, the only payment options have been Paypal and credit card. Paypal offers upfront payment and same goes for most credit cards (if it is not a stolen one).

4. Given that it's true that many of your customers don't seem to pay, should photographers be worried who send their images to Inmagine directly?

5. If you need more manpower and two different bookkeeping systems and back offices, even though 123rf and Inmagine belong to the same company, that's your "problem", not one of yours.

Yep, and that's fraud, time to bring forth the suited men. Also whoever is the alex123 nick, was the one who did the lying, and is personally responsible, and will be held responsible. It is recorded here. "I was told to this and that by my boss" won't cut it.

I'v had 9 cent downloads there, so I think you got a decent deal by Istuck standards Be thankful.