I also get hit with subscription sales. The royalty is low but it is only for medium sized files, you will from time to time get the odd HD subscription sale but i believe that is for customers using older credits bought before the change came into effect, these will run out in time.

In order to entice you to opt-in to subscription sales they put your portfolio nearer the beginning of the search so that both subscription and non-subscription customers will see your port, and it works. Once i opted out and my sales dropped dramatically. It's not a nice tactic on their behalf, it's either opt in or tough crap.

Fotolia buyers generally are cheapskates, they hardly ever purchase full HD videos, its either non-sub small or medium sized video or sub medium sized video with the odd full priced HD but that's quite rare.

There are things you can do though for damage limitation. For example, only upload your worst clips and then cut them to half the size and encode them down so that they are just passable, i usually have to really compress my videos anyway to get them under the ridiculous 300MB limit. That way people get what they pay for, sounds fair if you ask me.

I would like to upload my best work and make my customers happy but they don't really leave me with a lot of choice.

I knew that would be the case. Owner uses friend or agency to create a logo, friend then goes on a stock site to search for artwork as a basis to create logo. Friend hands over design with invoice and owner is none the wiser.

This is why it is always necessary to be polite and professional when contacting people regarding these matters and I'm glad you managed to sort it out.

Nice logo btw. daveh900

Quote from: Zeus on March 01, 2013, 10:11

Quote from: sharpshot on March 01, 2013, 04:41

Quote from: Zeus on February 28, 2013, 18:43

Quote from: sharpshot on February 28, 2013, 17:31

Pond5 is the best by far for me.  Some clips take a year or two to sell.  I think to see regular sales, you probably need 500 clips now.  It used to be easier but lots more people are doing video now.

If I had a highly commercial portfolio, I'd price them higher but I don't think my clips are in high demand.  As Pond5 pay 50% commission, they don't need to be priced as high as the sites that pay 15 to 30%.

It doesn't need to be highly commercial to ask a decent price for your work. Early on I put some of my "simple and not too commercial clips" up for $10. They sold and later I re-priced them to $75 and they still sold. Except now of course for every sale I get 7.5X the amount per sale. I would say $30 to $40 should be the minimum for all HD clips 5 sec on longer. .i.e. all clips. You may not get as many sales but you will get more money in pocket and you will keep prices strong so that you can get the appropriate value out of your more commercial work. Don't kid yourself. Lot's of my clips are barely considered commercial but still sell for $50 to $75.

Are you looking at my stills priced at $10?  My clips are more in the $30-$40 range.

sharpshot, you should try pricing your clips starting at $50 and upwards, why not try it for a month and see how it goes then report back here with your findings. I used to price my clips (cg portfolio) at $50 and about a year ago increased them all to $60. I based this price upon the market prices from competitors which the majority price at around $60-80. Don't be afraid to do this as you are currently below the average price and an increase to $50 would still be low compared to other sites.

That is clearly keyword spamming, or could even be a copy/paste mistake but either way the inspectors should have noticed it. I find also a lot of the time many non native English speaking contributors are the culprits. But when you have foreign inspectors also with a poor command of the English language then there is no chance

It's pretty obvious as to the real reason why they decided to terminate his contract. It wasn't because of the script he made which empowered contributors to deactivates files nor was it because of his continued stance against unpopular istock/getty decisions (which he has always done since i can remember). I believe Getty wanted to fire a warning shot across our bows for the collective stance which many contributors have adopted recently. This is a very common tactic in large corporations in order to silence employees and regain a sense of dominance, in lament terms 'I'm the daddy around here'. It is basically a form of intimidation.

Getty did exactly the same with the recent cull of istock employees across all departments and management levels. I suspect that the recent cull at istock was planned from a much earlier stage as a precursor to what they wanted to achieve further down the line with istock's direction.

I wish you all the best, sean. You strike me as the kind of person to bounce back and become successful in whatever you choose to do in the future.

canstock, clipdealer and 123rf are all worth uploading to from my own experience, you will get some sales from time to time and combined they do well to supplement the bigger sites.

I'm having a lot of problems with clipdealer, they don't answer my emails which I've sent to support, I've had a video which got lost in the queue so i re-uploaded it and support approved it, then about a month after it reappeared so i asked for it to be deleted and they don't answer me. Furthermore the uploads are taking forever to get approved (month+) and they are not generating thumbnails.

I might give up on these guys, they have been around for a while but i get the feeling that they aren't interested anymore. Hope I'm wrong.

I believe so yes. An ideal example of the perfect site would be istockphoto back in 2006, the design was clean (although a bit dated) the site was functional the search worked and above all prices were good for everyone, designers, corporates etc.

As an 'alternative' to istockphoto I have got to be honest and say that i don't love the layout/appearance of GLstock. No offense to the owner but IMHO the site looks a little amateurish in comparison and I'm not sure it could attract all types of customers from one end of the spectrum to the other eg. corporates to personal blogger. However I fully appreciate their support for the contributor and they do look like a fully contributor orientated site.

To be honest, right now i don't think there is a solid alternative. My vote would be to create an entirely new contributor orientated site which borrows all the best elements from all stock media sites and should sell photos, vectors and videos.

Right now i would say spread your port around and in the mean time start getting ideas on paper.

Just my 2cents.

If you aren't already, i would suggest passing the message around to all your fellow microstockers and directing them to this thread. All of the friends in your istock creative network would be a good start i think.

Wow, funny how times changes eh? a few years ago, everyone was praising istock and now everyone wants to sue them

Ive only got small port with only a few photos and mostly video, but if they were to pull the same trick with video i would be extremely mad and the worrying thing is down the line they could even be considering it.

Thanks for sharing your results. Your experiences are pretty much the same as my own in dealing with these different agencies. I have also had the 30 minute review time from fotolia which i found amazing but as you quite rightly stated their rejections are strange.

I would also pursue the 123, revo, clipdealer they all bring in an occasional sale from time to time for me and i have a small port of around 170. A year ago i gave up on clipcanvas through lack of sales although as always your own personal experience may be different.

My biggest disappointment for 2012 was P5, they were such a good earner up until summer and then my sales literally went off a cliff. I believe this is because of the global crisis but also their Achilles heel is that they accept almost anything and a lot of contributors take advantage of this and upload a tonne of crap. And also they have recently added photos and 3d models which also is flooding the search IMO.

Anyway, i have lots more ideas for videos in 2013, its just finding the time to make them.

Good luck.

I already mentioned this in another thread but their main search bar excludes video from being directly searchable. Although if you put 'footage' into the search it does bring back some results with mixed pricing. To me this says they either haven't gone 100% live with footage or they are not taking it seriously.