You'd think with Yuri's reports of falling profits that he wouldn't be out trying to actively drum up even more competition...  Ah well.  I'd love to visit Dublin.  Someday, when I can visit pubs without the kids .

Maybe that's the point - his reports of falling profits will deter competition.

I found this on the site:

http://www.cepic.info/congress/2010/programme

but to be honest apart from the golf tournament on the first day I haven't seen much listed that is of benefit to photographers as contributors, it appears to me to be aimed at agencies, have I missed something because I don't normally need much of an excuse to get over to Dublin.

Edit: I also found this:

http://www.cepic.info/sites/cepic/assets/CEPIC_Participant_Fees_11.pdf

Which suggests the fee is 790euros per delegate, and that doesn't include the golf!

Yes Richard, you missed something.  Read the second-last paragraph in the original posting.  The info you found is about the "Congress" not the "Conference", which is aimed only at agencies and much more expensive.  Take another look and let me know if the conference suffices as an excuse to get over to Dublin. 

No, it's not legal.  If you find one of your images, send Flickr a take-down notice and they'll remove the offending images.  If they get enough notices for a particular account they'll just delete the entire account. I found a couple of my images there so I'm doing that now. Here's what they sent me after I emailed them the first time:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Inc. ("Yahoo!").  Yahoo! respects the
intellectual property rights of others and we ask that our users do the
same.  Yahoo! has established a policy for receiving and processing
notifications of infringement in accordance with the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act ("DMCA"), other applicable laws and/or Yahoo! policies. 

Your recent correspondence was insufficient to constitute an effective
Notification of Infringement ("NOI") within the meaning of the DMCA
and/or as required by Yahoo! policy.  The elements required for an
effective NOI, and the contact information for submitting a NOI to
Yahoo!, are included below and at http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/details.html.

If you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on behalf of the
copyright owner and you would like to submit a NOI in response to this
email, please include the following:

1.   A description of the copyrighted work or other intellectual property
that you claim has been infringed;

2.   A description of the location where the material that you claim is
infringing is located;

3.   A statement by you that you have a *good faith belief* that the
reported use is not authorized by the copyright or intellectual property
owner, its agent, or the law;

4.   A statement by you, *made under penalty of perjury,* that the above
information is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual
property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual
property owner's behalf; and

5.   Your address, telephone number, and email address;

6.   Your electronic or physical signature. If the submission is made
electronically, please designate your electronic signature by typing a
forward slash ("/") before and after your name and follow this
electronic signature by again typing your name.  For example:

/Jane Doe/
Jane Doe 

Please note that attachments cannot be accepted due to security
concerns.

Once Yahoo! has received a NOI containing each of the required elements
detailed above, Yahoo! will process your request. 

We wish to thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this
matter.  Please contact us if you have any questions or we can further
assist you in this matter.

Regards,

Copyright/IP Agent, Yahoo! Inc.
[email protected]
****************************
c/o Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

The CEPIC New Media Conference has been announced today. Our fearless leader, Tyler Olson (leaf), is on the program, along with Yuri and Andres and plenty of other microstock representatives. The big difference with this conference is that it's in Europe!

Here's the details:

Location: Dublin, Ireland (Aviva Stadium - www.avivastadium.ie )
Date:  June 9, 9am - 6pm
Price:  �190

So far there's five MSG members confirmed on the program: Tyler, Yuri, Andres, Jonathan Ross and myself.

A quick background on CEPIC - they're the European association of picture agencies. It's primarily macrostock agencies, though Dreamstime is a member and other microstock agencies have attended their events in the past. Bruce Livingstone spoke at the last one. Their website is www.cepic.org

Don't get confused by the Congress. Each year CEPIC runs a member "Congress" with around 1000 attendees from member agencies and visitors. This 'New Media Conference' runs adjacent to the 'Congress'.  The Conference is June 9 and the Congress is June 10 - 13.  They're also in the same venue.  The cost of the 'Congress' is much higher, starting at �490 if you booked early.

Just to be transparent about my involvement, I'm working with CEPIC to program the speaker roster and help promote the event, but I'm NOT on commission for ticket sales.  I'm more interested in seeing as many of our group there as possible, having really enjoyed similar gatherings in the past. I hope this time we can get a similar MSG crowd together at this one too.

Tyler, the rank pages are very cool.  Thankyou! 

One little bug - on the iStock page the usernames are linked to Dreamstime searches.

There's no payment for referred contributors who sell by credits, only subscription. Doesn't that seem weird to anyone else?

Looking through the site, there's a few other issues which concern me.

The commission for a LARGE download via their SMS program is 24 cents. Yet on the Seller Price page (http://depositphotos.com/pages/seller-price) "DepositPhotos is the internet�s highest-paying stock image website you�ll find!"

Also, exclusivity is for "selling photos", not just selling RF like other agencies. If you go exclusive there, you cannot sell any photos anywhere else.

And I'm still put off by the complete absence of any person's name on the site and in their email messages. The people behind it might be the nicest people in the world with only the purest of intentions, but they're not making it seem that way. I'm still very nervous about this one.

Question to iSyndica users: what do you see as benefits of the site over PicNiche or StockMon + FileZilla?

In addition to the convenience of bandwidth saving and automated distribution, I'm using iSyndica to tidy up my portfolio. I've uploaded my 40 best selling photos (as identified by LookStat, ironically) to iSyndica and have gone through manually marking each one as accepted or rejected, and submitted ("syndicated") photos that were missing on some agencies.  Now, 40 is very little, but applying the 80/20 rule or long tail theory, these 40 photos make more than 80% of my income.  I've also used the convenience of iSyndica to join new sites Veer Marketplace and Vivozoom, and to get my best sellers on to sites where they were missing, namely Cutcaster and YAYmicro.

I don't see iSyndica as direct competition to picNiche or an FTP program yet.  I use them all. I upload to iSyndica using an FTP program (in theory, I haven't actually done this yet), use iSyndica to distribute the files, and then use the picNiche toolbar submission assistance. All are welcome improvements to workflow.

I'm extremely happy with Wordpress.

Alexa now gets it's data from more places than just the toolbar, so it's actually much more accurate than it used to be.  The drop in iStock's ranking was when they added the extra data sources.

Quote from: holgs on October 21, 2009, 20:40

I meant in the context of signing up Istock exclusives - it would be quite ironic if the result was a whole lot of independents did exactly the opposite. IS is actually growing quite strongly in terms of and is dangling a lot of quite attractive carrots like the Getty contracts.

Unlike 6-12 months ago I just don't get the sense that there is much of a push from many people to drop IS exclusivity - more the opposite, that the ship has steadied and is steaming ahead.

... is the right answer. IS are looking frighteningly secure and now, with the guarantee bit too, look poised to grab most of the important corporate accounts (if they haven't got them already). IS exclusivity has never looked more attractive or affordable and maybe FT have just delivered the final push we needed.

Yeah, with *this* I agree. With both of you. I see it backfiring in terms of pushing more contributors away from Fotolia than it attracts, but the issue is - as Chris says - they'll attract the professional stock shooters and drive away the hobbyists. Not really much of a backfire in terms of their bottom line.

I also agree with the other comments that Fotolia has always been more 'business' than 'community'.  That strategy has a LOT of advantages. But, don't forget to compare their commission rates to iStock. Fotolia's subscription sales pay poorly - there's no competition there - but non-exclusive commissions at Fotolia reach higher than the exclusive commissions at iStock, and for those just starting out, are much higher. Granted, iStock sells many times the volume of licenses and their subscription commissions are great, but it's not totally one-sided.

Edit to correct statements on commission comparisons that were completely wrong! Was looking at the wrong table.

Quote from: Lee Torrens on October 21, 2009, 17:31

It won't backfire on them. If there's one thing that Fotolia have proven time and time again, it's that a solid buyer base is more powerful than contributor goodwill.

Oh yes it could. IS's buyer base is far more powerful than FT's __ probably 3-4x more in terms of spending. If IS themselves took the gloves off, say by increasing exclusive commission to 50%, which of course they could easily afford to do, they could decimate FT and all the rest of the competition in a matter of months. As it happens IS most likely will need to do nothing as FT will do the damage to themselves.

There is only so many times that FT can treat their contributors with worthless disdain, forever moving the goalposts, continually reducing their benefits and unfairly favouring the few over the majority __ whilst all the time refusing to engage in or even allow any discussion of such issues on their forum.

Only so many times until what?  Why hasn't it happened yet?

Ooh, great question Benis.  Guerrilla Marketing borrowed the word from the term Guerrilla Warfare, which was all about strategies for fighting a bigger and better equipped army. So Guerrilla Marketing was all about how to achieve lots of publicity on a small marketing budget, which the Blair Witch Project obviously did very successfully. Applying the same idea to our industry, you'd probably be selling lots of stock without the help if big agencies or big budget technology or marketing.

The person who I believe fits the description of Guerrilla Stock 'marketer' best - and I'm sure he'd wear the badge very proudly - is Dan Heller. 

In addition to being the maverick of stock photo business thinking, he sells a lot of stock photos via his own website.  For these photos at least, he doesn't use any agencies, and doesn't do any marketing beyond lots of very strategic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). He has installed a shopping cart software on his website to manage the sales, so he's not paying commission or monthly fees to a technology provider like PhotoShelter or ImageSpan, and keeps 100% of the sale price, less fees from the transaction provider (PayPal or Credit Card) and his fixed hosting and domain name costs. While he knows how to take great photos, not all of the photos he sells on his website are high quality.

At a PhotoPlus Expo presentation in 2008 he gave some examples of his sales, including a photo he licensed for US$4,000 which was taken with a disposable camera!  After he made the sale, he had to go through his *physical* archives, find the photo, scan it, clean in up, and then deliver it to the buyer - who was not unsatisfied with the result. His point is that he's marketing his photos to "the consumer" and not the typical stock photo buyers: designers.

Based on his research (comparing search volumes on agencies versus at Flickr and Google Image Search) the consumer is a market for photos many MANY times bigger than what the macrostock and microstock markets currently serve.

In terms of the "guerrilla" terminology, his situation fits. He's using little resources to achieve a lot against others who have a lot of resources. I suspect there's a lot more of that going on in our industry than most of us realize. If not, it's certainly going that way with the technology becoming easier and cheaper.

Perhaps soon we'll start seeing people referring to themselves as traditional stock photographers, microstock photographers, or guerrilla stock photographers.  And you'll get credit for coining the term, Benis! 

No, Daryl is not attending. I guess managing the world's largest photography expo doesn't leave him with much free time, especially the night before.