Is there any other product or service that people so willingly give their work away?

we should just ask money straight away on crowdfunding sites and give nothing back, not even a print or a book, actually there are even sites where people donate to strangers so they can make a round-the-world trip and write a blog !

however ! yeah there's more and more images given away for free but this because the bar has been lowered so much that now cr-ap shot with an iPhone seems to be "good enough" for publishers, which was unthinkable not long ago.

they will indeed get their free images but the quality is still low, if it works for them, good, but it won't work for Stock or for serious buyers.

and if the sh-it hits the fan these guys will learn a thing or two about copyright when they get sued by a random iphone snapper, the CC licence is well clear about commercial use, many limitations, not at all a poorman's public-domain as many people tend to believe.

finally, if your company can't even pay for licenced images your just a fly by night operation, no excuses.
they're risking a lot using the cheapest imagery on the market, it takes nothing to ruin a brand.

nobody forced you to agree to those terms.

sure but SS is now the dominant and monopolistic force in the microstock industry.
leaving SS means pretty much leaving microstock altogether, and the other agencies dont pay any better.

as much as my portfolio is better suited for RM editorial i can't deny i've lots of stuff that is selling decently on micros and never sold once on RM, so what can i do ? what are my options ?

of course we should all leave SS in droves but there are no longer "greener pastures" around.

Very true... plus customers have no idea who is getting how much from this game, and they clearly don't care as long as they get good product or service.

the game is rigged, even if we start a boycott campaign it would be met with scorn and we would told we're stupid to sell for low prices and that we're the ones digging our own grave ... it's the same in any other digital markets, authors and creatives are blamed if they do and damned if they dont and they're also accused of being greedy and lazy on top of all the other sh-it buyers will find any possible excuse to rationalize and justify impossibly low prices just as they do when buying clothes made for 1$ in the third world .. ask anyone what they think about kids earning 80$ in textile factories in south east asia and people will say it's their fault and they should buy more condoms and stop breeding like rabbits, that's the buyers' logic and it won't change anytime soon and good luck telling them otherwise.

if anything is ever going to change it must start from us, the suppliers.

in any case the market reality will bring down SS where it belongs sooner or later, once investors will realize SS has no way to keep growing fast as they expect and that it peaked already long time ago, look at Twitter losing 25% a few days ago and that's just the start ... FB being next hopefully.

i'm so totally sick of this Ponzi scheme called the Digital Economy and its destructive consequences for creatives and for society as a whole.

the endpoint of this whole rigged game is entire cities revolting and protesting due to lack of jobs and security just like it's happening now in Baltimore, and stockers and anyone into digital products is next on the list if we're no longer in the position to earn a living.

we're reaching the point a portfolio of 10K images is barely the minimum requirement to stay afloat living in a cheap country, let alone living in London or Tokyo.

are they planning to kill Stock altogether ? because if that;s their plan it's working like a charm, even if you're on Getty or Corbis.

guess why here it's full of Filipino bands playing cover songs of the Beatles and other hits from the 70s, as good music is just not produced anymore and they're condemned to play the golden oldies over and over ... same fate for photography once the money dries up, look at photojournalism good luck finding a single decent reportage from the earthquake in Kathmandu, just the usual Reuters-style shots here and there, even the fall of the temples in Durbar Square has been taken with a phone by a random tourist and shown worldwide on the medias giving him nothing back not even a credit probably .. so long and thanks for all the fish eh ?

it's a mercyless and self destructing market at this point, especially fueled by buyers who consume and consume content like it was candies without stopping for a second to think how much it takes to make a decent shot and what's the amount of work and skills involved.

sorry for ranting again but crooks like Oringer are a textbook case of the actual Cabal running the stock industry.

not worthy as these POD guys expect YOU to find buyers and not viceversa, good luck with that business model ...

for anything else they're not bad as a platform but terrible for batch uploading a big portfolio.
this wouldn't be an issue if sales were steady but that's not the case in my experience.

They've abused their position about as far as they can and a reckoning is coming - not for Jon Oringer, but for the investors.

unfortunately greed and arrogance are the way marketers operate in pretty much any industry i've seen first hand.

there's nothing, nothing we can do about it.
these guys would sell their own mother, let alone our photos.

they've also no respect for suppliers or buyers or products whatsoever and they think to be smarter than us since it's so easy for them to make money while staying at the top of the pyramid scheme and yeah they don't make good friends too, i've many friends in sales and they're all full of sh-it from top to bottom, once they open their mouth about pretty much any topic you start smelling a tu-rd .. this is the world we're living in unfortunately and it's going to get worse ...

Jon was making millions more each year using assets we produced and funded.

one thing is sure, things are not going like this forever !

i'm always keeping an eye on what's going on the other digital markets and they changed big time since a few years.

musicians are now making money with live gigs for instance, writers and journalists are trying any possible way to monetize their work in alternative ways, magazines and newspapers are getting more serious about their online business and it's becoming more common to switch to subscription models.

either that, or their trade will just die, as it happened with photojournalism and the major photojournalist agencies who are now desperate to find a way out.

so, what's in store for stock ? many stockers will leave the industry as it's no longer profitable for them, this will take some time but ultimately the agencies will be impacted where it hurts, in their wallets, and they'll have to find a solution one way or another as there can't be a stock industry if stock photographers can't make a profit.

the "buyers market" time lasted too long already, it's the offspring of the internet and digital  revolution but it's still an anomaly and now it reached its apex already as the market is very stable and monopolized by a small bunch of players.

Dilution in microstock will kill the game for most contributors in the next few years.

i see the same issue pretty much in any other digital market.

no solution at the horizon as there's no way for a product to keep its high rank in the search results for too long, sooner or later it's kicked down in the sandbox and forgotten.

so, to answer the obvious question "how to stay afloat in stock ?" i'm more and more convinced there's only one way, to keep shooting and having a big portfolio and to sell on several decent agencies.

exclusivity and small portfolio can potentially do wonders for a while, but it's a risky strategy in the long run.

unfortunately, Oringer is just a symptom, not THE problem.

He and SS are the final result of the whole boom/bust cycle of the post-internet stock industry, if it wasn't Oringer it would be the other 2-3 top agencies, nothing would change much, even Alamy slashed our fees, we're alone against all of the odds and totally at the mercy of greedy agencies that don't even treat us as respectable and loyal suppliers, we're all taken for granted, we'll never see our buyers face to face, we'll never set foot in a stock agency or shake their hands and have a chat together unless we pay ourself a trip to the biggest stock industry fairs and even so what do you expect ? the top sellers are maybe contributing for 0.1% of SS's archive, you won't be missed if you leave for greener pastures, just as nobody noticed Yuri's departure for Getty.

it's not just iStock forum going down, i'm seeing the same pattern for many other forums in general since the last 2-3 yrs, and also for blogs.

the reason is so many people now stick with mobile apps and FB in particular, with FB groups totally skipping the whole forum mumbo jumbo in favor or quick messages without too much BS going on.

in many ways i feel it's a huge downgrade but users seem to like it and there's nothing we can do.

in a couple minutes they can join dozens of different groups without having to sign up and pass captchas and being forced to waste time with all the usual forum rules and oddities, this is perfectly understandable as many forums definitely went overboard regarding rules and modding and banning.

for instance living abroad i can tell you that nowadays most of the expats write on FB and the expat forums are becoming a thing of the past, and many are also on Twitter and Instagram providing fresh infos in real time, while not too long ago they would have used their own blogs and cross posted on expat forums, now it's all gone and in forums when there's some big news going on you only find links to content posted on twitter etc ...  this is also the new trend for Real Estate ads run by expats and also for generic buy/sell stuff as it's so easy to post a photo with price and description.

in conclusion, forums are here to stay but their importance will no longer be the same as in the past but they will still be the place to go for us desktop users and for whatever discussion needing a long text and a large screen, to each his own and i see nothing wrong with that honestly, leave the guys writing one-liners and smilies move to mobile it won't be a big loss !

Even then, you can cut lens costs by going with fixed lenses if your budget is tight.

indeed.
a Pro body with a Pro prime lens is a top notch combination, if your images still su-ck maybe the problem is YOU and not your gear.

this DAM company claims to have Getty among their clients :

http://www.syroxemedia.co.uk/web-services/dam-digital-asset-management-systems.aspx

Mobile phones always had the possbiltly to send texts, now we use Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. I see no issue with that. It made my life easier. I am talking to a lot more people, from a lot farther away, at no extra cost. And I can send them a photo of me smiling. Friends and family love it.

sure it's OK for random users but for power users it's quite another story.
browsing, writing, reading, everything is so limited on a small touch screen, i just can't work on that and i was on a desktop i would need 2 or 3 monitors, go figure.

friends and family love it for the portability and the "always-on" factor, i understand, but good luck doing anything productive like using Excel or browsing with 30-40 web pages open, i tried and tried, and went crazy, even on tablets it's so bad.

PDA were a bad idea already when Apple launched the Darwin and i if you think i'm a "luddist" i had even one of the early Palm Pilots, quickly sold to a colleague of mine and never looked back.

let's face it, mobiles are more a fashion item than a productive tool nowadays.

Hobostocker, I like you, I love your direct way of putting things, I really do, but you never came across as a positive character 

but don't blame me, i'll be very very positive if we talk about Ultrabooks or Win 10.
my problem with smartphone is its undeniable negative social impact on society as a whole, the first PDAs  were originally designed for useful things actually, like email and business apps, not for random chatting etc., anyone remember the prehistoric Apple Darwin, the Palm Pilot, the Psion .. ? they had a reason to exist unlike actual smartphones.