Cheers!  yes editorial sports are great sellers in any agency. Used to be an agency called Allsports and they had some great sports action shots. Not sure but I think Getty owns them nowadays.

Much the same here. Been doing micro since 2008 and this is without doubt the worst January. Lots of people with bigger portfolios seem to be way down at SS. They tend to experiment, probably looking for the perfect search formula, keeping everyone happy but instead it seems to backfire. I dont know.
For me DT and FT are way up so in the long run it evens out.
I supply lots of Rights managed content, have done so since 1998 with the Getty House corp and here is where I will lay my concentration during 2014.
Personally I think Micro is becoming too edgy, unstable. Too muck work really for too little in return.

Ha, ha!  hilarious!  whenever they announce a re-shuffle. Some will be poor, some will bust and some will get rich. What a joke to announce in a public forum. They should have known better.

Same here. Very good so far.

You do have some points there Laurin. I think maybe one must have been involved in Microstock for say five, six years in order to really notice the difference in earnings and so on. many who has only been at it for a couple of years have nothing to compare with.

I think you are right. Many people keep uploading the same old concepts but in other variations. Now if you take life-styles as an example. Stereotyped models, golden handshakes, business people talking in phones and so on. Not to speak of isolations.
Its an overkill. Yet agencies keep accepting them all over the place. The quantity factor is in fact destroying quality as well as any special work.
SS unfortunately are masters of filling up with identical and similar content, of course being mainly a subscription site.
I am down myself about 30% every single month but its well made up by Rights-managed material.
Micro is somewhat getting out of hand and in a couple of years time...... who knows.

Unless it's a worldwide exclusive use, you don't have to take a photo down after an RM license, and even then it will be time limited, so you'd restrict the use until it's available again. You do need to keep careful track of how it's used so that there are no conflicts. I often license RM photos on my own, and to date all the licensees have requested a non-exclusive right to use photos in whatever country they are in or worldwide, during a fixed period of time, from one month to 18 months, at a set size, for a certain use, calendar, magazine, newspaper, sometimes limited/ sometimes unlimited print run. I have a calculator built into my site, which is hosted by Photoshelter and I have also negotiated pricing directly with clients.

To be clear, I don't have a symbio site (am thinking about it for micro RF). However, from the experience I do have, it's been easy to license RM images on my own, but I can see that if the volume grew substantially and you didn't stay on top of it, you would potentially need some sort of software in place to prevent duplicate licenses in the event of a request for exclusivity.

I would imagine, however, that when a licensee is seeking an exclusive license, they are going to check first to be sure it's available and negotiate with you directly.

I have RM many of the same images with agencies in Germany and Wales as well as with Alamy, all on a non-exclusive basis, so they need to clear exclusive deals with me before agreeing to them. Bottom line, I don't think it's a click and download kind of thing. At least not in my experience. Sending them to Alamy or another site to license RM kind of defeats the purpose of having your own site so an agency isn't cutting into your profit.

You can always note that for an exclusive license they need to contact you directly.

Correct!  one can easily manage and license Rm images. There are special programs for rights and everything involving Rm, not as elaborate maybe but they work fine.

It's a thoroughly distorted market where the middleman has gained total control.  When a middleman is adding little value while charging excessive markup, 'disintermediation' should occur.  But the physical nature of this market (i.e. the internet) has so far prevented buyers and suppliers from making direct contact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation

What a good post! and how true. I can not even think of any other business with the exception of the automotive industry where the middleman has gained so much power.
One could ofcourse argue that without them there would not be any micro industry.

Quote from: grey1 on January 25, 2014, 07:42

I have a few friends here in England who signed up with AGE and they tell me its the biggest waste of time ever. No sales at all, nothing.

Probably they are not good photographers or they uploaded few dozens of photos so far and pretend to sale them after 2 minutes!
If you carefully see what a photographic agency wants and sells before complaining, you will discover that selling pics is not the most difficult job in the world!

No. One of these photographers have over 1900 images in files and he is in the process of leaving right now. Not one sale in over a year and he has also a very special portfolio. AGE can not sell, they have no self-promotion and they are stuck back in the 1980s.

Seen it before and its truly stunning work.

How about turning it around and ask. Do the buyers really know and understand the value of a picture? paying cents for it.

I think I know what is happening. They seem to prioritising the search by matching the region the searcher is in to the region the supplier is from. As I upload from the Middle East I get Asian and European sales but I no longer seem to get them from the Americas (I'm not sure about Australia/New Zealand). In the last 24 hours I have had one customer from the Americas, who picked up four similar, very specialised files which might well have been on a search with all the results on a single page.
I hope this is just experimental as it is a heavy blow to me. As with all these swings and roundabouts changes there will be others doing very nicely, if they happen to be zoned in the main selling regions.

I am not too familiar with all this but if what you are saying is true? I live in the UK so that would mean that only buyers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland would be relevant to my portfolio? just as an example you understand.
In my case this would be a portfolio-suicide mission when most of my buyers are from the far east, Germany and the US. I have close to 4000 files there and have already during the last six months experienced a 30% drop. Not sure I can stomach much more.
In what ways would this benefit their sales? or am I missing something?

You couldnt be more further from the truth. There is a summary I wrote about a meeting I had with a few people from Shutterstock, including the vice president of communications. It is nothing as you make it out to be.

With due respect!  so you met the vice president of communications! do you know what that title means? president is the American way of describing a job title. In Europe its called the assistant to the communications manager, often a girl of 25-30 years old. Thats all I am afraid.
Another angle of course is their knowledge of your involvements in the forum and what better way to go, then through you? thats what I meant with seeing the forest for the trees.

I mean no harm you understand, just basic business orientation/strategy.