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Messages - Elenathewise
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701
« on: August 19, 2010, 14:32 »
Actually, it's just became clear to me, from all that was said here, there seems to be a very good explanation.
Shutterstock pays 25c (?) per download to new and low-selling contributors.
The best-selling ones and older ones with many sales are paid 38 per download.
Now, if I was looking ANY (including slightly scummy) way to increase my profits, I would realize that 25c is about 65% of the 38c payout and would try to serve the customers mostly 25c images, thus increasing my profits. I would throw in a few real best-sellers in the search results so it won't be all crap, but many customers are satisfied with low quality images anyway, so it wouldn't be a big issue.
Here - Shutterstock getting their increase in profits, most customers are OK with mediocre images, the only ones that are getting screwed are hard working photographers with big high quality portfolios! The ones that helped making Shutterstock into what it is today. Ironic, isn't it?
Ha. That explains ugly stuff in the "best sellers" search. That explains leveling off the profits for old portfolios. That explains Shutterstock reporting that they are doing well. That explains new people seeing good increase in sales.
Disclaimer - this is just my theory, I don't have any official confirmation of this (and I don't think I'd ever get one), but I am pretty convinced that that's the case. See, my formal education is Ph.D. in Physics, I can tell a good theory when I see one:)
^^^ SS can't win can they? They arrange commissions to reward their most productive and successful contributors ... and those same contributors then accuse them of artificially rigging the sort order to minimise payments.
I don't believe that is happening. SS is a staggeringly successful business model and I'm sure it is extremely profitable without resorting to fraudulent activities. If Jon was in it to make a quick buck he could have sold out for tens of millions of $'s years ago. Instead he's done the opposite and acquired BigStock.
Oh, I am not saying it's fraudulent. They are not doing anything illegal or anything that violates the contributor agreement. They can serve images in whatever order they want. And yes, they are winning big time:) And it's the only explanation that fits all the facts - for now; maybe there is a better one, but I don't see it. They arranged commissions to reward most productive and successful contributors and then they made sure that their files are not selling too often to reduce the payouts. It's not a quick-buck, it's a nicely working business scheme.... it just smells a bit in my opinion...
702
« on: August 19, 2010, 13:11 »
703
« on: August 19, 2010, 13:08 »
Actually, it's just became clear to me, from all that was said here, there seems to be a very good explanation.
Shutterstock pays 25c (?) per download to new and low-selling contributors.
The best-selling ones and older ones with many sales are paid 38 per download.
Now, if I was looking for ANY (including slightly scummy) way to increase my profits, I would realize that 25c is about 65% of the 38c payout and would try to serve the customers mostly 25c images, thus increasing my profits. I would throw in a few real best-sellers in the search results so it won't be all crap, but many customers are satisfied with low quality images anyway, so it wouldn't be a big issue.
Here - Shutterstock getting their increase in profits, most customers are OK with mediocre images, the only ones that are getting screwed are hard working photographers with big high quality portfolios! The ones that helped making Shutterstock into what it is today. Ironic, isn't it?
Ha. That explains ugly stuff in the "best sellers" search. That explains leveling off the profits for old portfolios. That explains Shutterstock reporting that they are doing well. That explains new people seeing good increase in sales.
Disclaimer - this is just my theory, I don't have any official confirmation of this (and I don't think I'd ever get one), but I am pretty convinced that that's the case. See, my formal education is Ph.D. in Physics, I can tell a good theory when I see one:)
704
« on: August 19, 2010, 11:38 »
Good point by sjlocke. Also I remember sjlocke say somewhere too it is not Shutterstock not growing over time, it is seller's piece ofpie is smaller
because more supply by new contributors with better idea. Or maybe another Istock quote , the drop of sales for specific contributor is not
indication that agency sales is bad , only the contributor share of commission is in decrease.
Yup that's why I am trying to find out if anyone's sales actually increased (at least proportionally to number of uploaded images) over the last couple years. So far among the contributors with big mature portfolios I see only reports of decrease or stagnation. The only increase was reported by Xalanx, but looks like it's a fairly new portfolio just getting "up to speed". If newer contributors report increase and older - decrease, that would indicate SS is making most money on selling new images by new contributors with lower payout rates. As to quality of images, Andres, I don't think they care. Many of the people (not all:)) working for the micro agencies wouldn't tell a good image if it bit them from behind. Many of the customers don't need high quality images. And many agencies see low prices as the only way to compete. I have also considered moving to macros mostly. But my sales on Getty and other macros are not that impressive. I think that's it, dudes - we are screwed:)
705
« on: August 18, 2010, 21:47 »
A small factor is that SS has pretty much maintained the same acceptance standards through this period and FT/IS have really tightened theirs. Higher percentage of new files to compete with at SS? I'm willing to bet that you have quite a superb acceptance rate so you likely have similar numbers at the three sites, but for me FT won't take many "people-less" shots (they take maybe 60% of what SS accepts). Have your individual downloads increased accordingly on FT/IS, or RPD or a combination?
I have almost the same number of files on FT and SS, less files on IS (because of upload limits). I upload less files per month to IS than to other agencies for the same reason. Here are the numbers for downloads: Istockphoto: March 2008 - 2020 March 2009 - 2362 March 2010 - 3156 (regular file purchases) Shutterstock: March 2008 - 6882 March 2009 - 5770 March 2010 - 5852 See what I mean? The size of portfolio increased 4000 images on Shutterstock; for Istock about 2000 images. Number of downloads on Shutterstock actually fell since 2008, but earnings remain the same (due to enhanced downloads here and there). But no growth. For 2 years. Which means if didn't keep uploading I would see the sales actually go down, by 40% or so.
706
« on: August 18, 2010, 19:06 »
In a HOLDING PATTERN with Crestock. Waiting to see what, if anything, Masterfile does to regain the reputation hugely tarnished by the old owners.
I wouldn't hold my breath:)
707
« on: August 18, 2010, 19:01 »
Yes, but in the same timescale SS have probably increased the size of their library by 3x. Over many, many months now they've been adding new images at the rate of 80-100K per week which equates to 4-5M per year. Against those numbers I'm only surprised that our income hasn't fallen further although that's probably a reflection of how many truly pathetic images SS accepts from 'contributors' that clearly haven't got a clue. I really don't know why they waste their bandwidth and reviewing costs on such idiots. Such images always contain vast amounts of spam in their keywords too and they just clutter the searches and make the good stuff harder to find.
With over 5 years under my belt and 4K images online my 'growth' has turned negative since March. However for the last 30 months SS have certainly maintained their contribution to my total income relative to the other agencies. They've averaged about 27% of total income over that period and this month are actually projected at over 30%.
Yes, they do add a lot of images, but so do other agencies, right? I do see growth on FT and IS (and a few others) - the more I upload, the more I sell - not steep of course, giving the percentage of new files relative to the portfolio size, but looking back a couple of years I see significant increase in number of downloads. But not with Shutterstock. Not seeing a significant increase in downloads with almost doubling the portfolio size over 2 years is really strange... Actually the subscription downloads even decreased compared to what they used to be, the earnings stayed the same because of enhanced and on-demand downloads. For me they are about 20% of my income. Which is way less than they used to be in 2008.
708
« on: August 18, 2010, 14:37 »
From my experience - SS makes weird changes to their search engine, every once in a while. This, added to the mass of new files in some periods (like NOW for example) can lead to a plateau in sales. The criteria at the base of their SEO is very well hidden but sometimes returns very weird and ugly stuff. It's so random that I'm thinking its hand-made, not done by an algorithm - perhaps this is the way they choose to "refresh" first pages of the most popular. We'll never know, remember that it's one of the few agencies that doesn't even let us know the number of views per file (among other things).
Yeah I did see weird stuff happening - most popular pages sometimes have a God-awful images included, clearly there not because of number of downloads. Also made me think that someone's messing up with stuff manually. Ah well. I wonder what's their earnings as an agency for the past year for example? If they report increase in sales, they must be doing it on new images mostly. Or some set of portfolios that clearly doesn't include mine:) Oh and btw - your portfolio is absolutely awesome, but you already know that 
Thank you:)
709
« on: August 18, 2010, 13:38 »
I too decided to give them another shot - I had stopped uploading for 9 months until they actually made my first payment. I was hopeful that the review standards would become more coherent. So, as an experiment, I submitted 25 images (all with high rate of acceptance at other microstocks) about 3 weeks ago. All 25 were rejected today due to:
Due to a large number of submissions of this nature we can only accept those of superior quality.
I've asked for clarification and am waiting for a response. But, in short, their review strategy appears to be to reject the entire backlog. So, for me, not worth the bother until I hear that they are changing policies or they make a bounty offer for new submissions.
Hee-heeee.... They are selling images for 25 cents a shot and want "superior quality".... Wonder what are they smoking there... From what I heard about Masterfile they are a bunch of stuckup snobs - well, good luck to them losing money on their recent purchase;-)
710
« on: August 18, 2010, 13:26 »
Actually I am seeing an increase at SS. Almost every month I beat some record. In number of sales, ODs per day, total month income, etc. But nevertheless - I keep the beast happy.
Anyway, taken into account that I started far too late in this business, my increasing numbers might not impress you too much.
Yup it used to be like that for me too - 2 years ago. But then it just leveled off. I do upload on a regular basis, keeping pretty much the same pace. I wonder if it's related to them giving preference to newer files - although I thought they did change that a little while ago? If they still do it, the ratio of newer files to the size of portfolio would definitely affect sales. Which is kinda stupid because then there is no incentive to upload once you reached the "wall".
711
« on: August 18, 2010, 11:59 »
This has nothing to do with the summer slowdown.
With over 10, 000 images in my portfolio currently I see a troublesome trend on Shutterstock - my sales are practically the same there as they were 2 years ago, when my portfolio size was about 6,000. So adding extra 4,000 images just kept me afloat there.
However, I am not at all "hitting the wall" on other agencies. Fotolia has grown substantially, so did Istock. The only other agency with the same pattern as SS is Dreamstime - in spite of increasing portfolio size, sales are actually worse than 2 years ago.
Does with mean that both Shutterstock and Dreamstime are losing their market share? If this was due to the economic slowdown, or growing libraries, you would expect to see the same trend everywhere, which I don't see.
But then I see people reporting good sales on SS - makes me wonder if there is something wrong with my portfolio on SS (some technical problem?)
Anyone with large portfolios and more than 3 years in this business - what's your data on SS for the last couple of years?
712
« on: August 14, 2010, 10:24 »
My sales just stopped there after it's been acquired. It's really weird. I used to make at least a 100 bucks a months there, now it's the middle of the month and my earnings are about 8 dollars!:) I wonder if they disconnected my port from a search engine or something like that...
Regarding rejection reason stating the image is too "simplistic". Wow. That's really stupid. Did Masterfile come up with that one? I don't remember Crestock having one of those. In any case, all points to Crestock going down in flames...
713
« on: August 07, 2010, 22:58 »
I hate it!!! I don't like change in general though  Why did they have to change the contributor end at all? I was so used it, it was so nice and cozy  What was the point of moving your earnings from the top of the page to the bottom? Who's benefiting from it and how? I am definitely annoyed by it... This whole change thing is annoying. It's like you get used to the buttons on your good old tablet to the point it's your second nature and then when you want to upgrade to new model you find that they moved the buttons around. Anybody knows why they do that?... (it's a riddle. the answer is: "to annoy me")
714
« on: June 26, 2010, 11:52 »
Not be an ass, but i really can't relate to this thread... to me it always seemed reversed. My somewhat more 'special' stuff gets easier accepted than the typical stock things (which often come back as LCV, probably true these days too)  I feel like now more than ever they ("they" being SS,iS, DT) like the stuff that is a bit different.
My latest 4 accepted at SS are pretty dark and/or B/W stuff and you see enough others in newest too... strange everyone else seems to have such a different experience.
We are talking here about the overall trend based on the reviews of thousands of images. Not to be an ass, but your "latest 4 accepted" does not statistically qualify:)
715
« on: June 26, 2010, 11:48 »
Most recently I had many rejections for not indicating a picture as an illustration. So the reviewer doesn't have the ability to distinguish a photograph from a illustration. Then there is the group of 4 images where the first two get rejected for noise and the second two get rejected for too many similars. Sorry I don't understand that at all. Many rejections for focus, on limited focus images where there is in fact a focal point and that focal point is where it should be. But the guy with the button went to the school of f/64 and couldn't image such a thing.
I hear you! SS is especially bad. I tried to complain, and they sent me snippets of the out-of-focus areas of the images (which all had a clearly defined focal point) and told me my images are blurry! I couldn't believe my eyes! Seriously - how can you be in business for so long selling images and not understand even the basic concepts of depth of field? Apparently, easy enough:) Your example about "noise" and "too similar" rejections made me laugh out loud:) I think we all see where this is all going... At some point I'll just stop submitting to some of the micros. You know what else is funny? I was invited to participate in a survey by SS as one of their best-selling photographers a little while ago. One of the main questions was "how can we attract more talented photographers to our site" and get more good images in their collection. I told them - identify people that are selling well and stop getting in their way. Train your reviewers to be photography professionals and to recognize good sellable images. So they spent money on that survey and are doing exactly opposite - turning people away. Money well spent!:) Well it's their choice.
716
« on: June 25, 2010, 20:06 »
See, that's the thing. If I upload people isolated on white, nothing "fancy", no shallow DOF, no special lighting, they snap it up. Objects, too. The problem with these is they don't sell this days - there are way too many of the same style and theme on every agency. You would think they would want to diversify their collections with more interesting shots - that, by the way, if you manage to get them through, sell like crazy. ... Maybe I should concentrate on building up my Getty RM portfolio - never had a rejection there by the way, not even once. Plus you can get really creative with that, which is way more fun... Hmmm....
But that was a bit the point. Give Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what's God's. My gloomy mystery stuff sells much better on iStock than on ShutterStock, by the way.
Yeah, I know. I did get the point:) I wish I got it sooner tho. For some reason I kept expecting that with microstock industry maturing things will change - the prices would go up, they would have more qualified reviewers, they would want better and more creative images. I don't know why I expected that. The prices did go up just a tiny bit, but everything else remains the same. They stick with the same crowd-sourcing model that worked for them 5 years ago, and come to think of it, why wouldn't they. Ironically, on their best-seller list there are many artistic images that somehow got through - with color casts, lens flares, heavy processing. The buyers like them, but the average reviewer would never accept these. Why wouldn't they look at these and think - gee, this is actually selling well, maybe we should accept those too? I guess it's a limitation of this business model - if you pay reviewers too little, you have to give them very straightforward directions - color cast is bad, lens flare bad, blur is bad, etc. It takes a photography professional to see that image just "works". Considering that they receive loads of crap every day remaining a crowd-sourcing business and low image prices that even makes sense. So ya, I agree, give them what they want if you don't want rejections. f/11 - f/16 is your friend, couple of softboxes for even lighting, simple of white background, nice pleasant-looking models - smiling and wearing pastel-colored clothes. You'll get these accepted. As to the sales, it's a different story:)
717
« on: June 25, 2010, 11:05 »
For the last month my approval rate dropped at SS to 20% - I am submitting batches of 5, and pretty consistently get approved only 1. Approval rate on IS did not change. Is it me that cannot fit SS composition and lighting standards (majority of rejects), or others see something similar too? Not at all. SS is 100-80% consistently, IS varies between 80-50%. It takes a while to find out what they want. In general it's clear (not necessarily high-key) in-focus shots with a simple and uncropped commercial concept. I still love to do other stuff, but I became very selective what to upload to microstock. Reviewers of both sites are strict, but they know their trade. With 20% acceptance on SS you should review your style, or better, post some examples of rejected shots.
See, that's the thing. If I upload people isolated on white, nothing "fancy", no shallow DOF, no special lighting, they snap it up. Objects, too. The problem with these is they don't sell this days - there are way too many of the same style and theme on every agency. You would think they would want to diversify their collections with more interesting shots - that, by the way, if you manage to get them through, sell like crazy. But no. They want the same stuff they have already crapload of. Why? - beats me, no logic here. They also lose customers looking for higher quality work to the "traditional" stock agencies. It's almost like they consciously decided they they will have only mundane, simple-to-shoot stuff, all-in-focus, straightforward lighting. I am getting more and more fed up with this myself - being selective what to upload to them is a good idea... Maybe I should concentrate on building up my Getty RM portfolio - never had a rejection there by the way, not even once. Plus you can get really creative with that, which is way more fun... Hmmm....
718
« on: June 22, 2010, 14:25 »
well, all i can say is that everyone is free to found his own www.my-stocksite.com microstock site, and to make a rules he thinks are o.k. e.t.c.
o.k. that is true that for let's say... (2010. -1983.....=...) 27 years, i had no image "rejected" with any of microstock rejection reasons. my customers do have only one criteria: i like (or dislike) image i need. and that's it. no counting pixels, no finding noise, no looking at 200% (or re-examining big print form the film).
these standards are well... we can discuss about this. -but - these are rules. anyone can take it, or leave it.
Yup it's all true if you're selling your own images. The moment you start selling someone else's, it becomes some form of partnership. You can't just do whatever you want, or you'll lose your partners. Let's say Istock decreased commissions to something entirely ridiculous, like 5%. How many of us would stay? Same with the reviewers. They have to be at least semi-qualified people. Everyone has rejections here and there, it's part of the business, most people don't complain when it's business as usual - some accepted, some rejected, some make sense, some don't, whatever, moving on. But when they let someone who has no idea what they are doing to work on the queue, it becomes a problem. Then, in my opinion, as partners, we have every right to complain and request the problem to be fixed.
719
« on: June 22, 2010, 12:54 »
Im sure they have some summer-reviewers or trainees. My latest experience with an oil-industrial shot, well?? blimey, even the knowledge of English was questionable. Im waiting for autumn to upload any special photography, dont want to go through all that again.
I totally agree. My previous batch had 100% acceptance. My last batch got rejections that made me think some mentally challenged person was reviewing the images. It's probably trainees or summer students or whatever. I've noticed too it happens every summer. The question is why is Istock allowing that. It's very time consuming to submit to them, so assigning unqualified people to review images is a huge waste of our time. If they don't care about us wasting time, maybe they should care about rejected images that are good sellers and frustrated photographers who'd quit submitting because of this crap.
720
« on: June 18, 2010, 13:29 »
I just wanted to chime in and say that our rates are lower than others because we are approaching stock photography in a different way, as a result our rates must stay competitive. Since we are offering an unlimited download plan, customers will tend to download more often, which means a photographer's earning power will actually increase!
This is flawed thinking. All the significant subscription services rely on the fact that the average subscriber only downloads a fraction of their entitlement __ thought to be about 30-40%. The agencies would lose money otherwise as the commissions payable on 100% of download entitlement are invariably equal or greater than the cost of the subscription.
All you your plan is likely to achieve is to give you a competitive advantage over other agencies (by paying us less you could sell subscriptions cheaper) and, even worse, your plans would be an absolute gift to 'customers' such as HeroTurko and the like.
You have no chance of succeeding without the support of the major contributors and you have absolutely no chance of gaining that with a feeble offering such as this.
I don't know if a "flawed thinking" or a blatant attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.... No seriously... I do participate is sub programs and sites, like Shutterstock. I get paid 38c per sub download, and it does add up. But what Dreamstock offers me is a to pay me 1/4th of what I earn of Shutterstock for the same images. I mean, if you have a regular job with some company, and then another company approaches you and says: "Hey come on over work with us, it's gonna be great, we'll pay you a quarter of your salary for the same job! Who-hoo!" - wouldn't you consider them insane??? And yes, the argument of "more downloads" doesn't stand any ground. As gostwyck said, customers always buy less than they pay for, otherwise sub models wouldn't survive. The "unlimited" option will not change that fact. They'll still buy only what they need, and it doesn't matter if their plans are limited or not limited - they are not using it up even with the limited plans. So we're back to the 1/4 of a salary that we're supposed to jump on. With the unpleasant consequence of people buying cheap unlimited subscriptions for peanuts and uploading our portfolios to other sites under their own names. What an offer! How can anyone resist? ... 
721
« on: June 17, 2010, 12:16 »
I got that email too.... I consider it an insult, offering 10 cents per sub download. Hope most people do too. Good luck to them with building up content.
722
« on: June 15, 2010, 15:34 »
Hi Lisa, I noticed the same thing with the new images on Istock... Old images that I forgot I even had suddenly sell:-). I guess they are tweaking the search engine again.
723
« on: May 26, 2010, 13:52 »
Hello,
Usually when looking at images that sell good I find that photo collages sell rather well (at least at shutterstock when arranging by popularity collages are among the top images). I tried to make some of them and upload them to the Shutterstock (did not try others yet). Every single collage was rejected due to "Composition--Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping, and/or composition".
Here are two of those collages (btw. each separate image included in collage has already been accepted):
 
How could they be improved?
What are your experience with collages? Have you been rejected when sending them? Excluding Shutterstock what are your experience on other agencies?
Thanks for the answer,
regards
miskolin
I do see value in collages. The images the collage is composed of is usually smaller resolution than the original one. At least that's how I would do it. So it's not really devaluing your images. The advantage is that the buyer would have a nice looking composition of images shot in similar style and united by the same theme. Style and theme are very important for collage. Miskolin - your second collage seems to be a collection of fairly random images. Soup, coffee, water, cupcakes? What is this collage trying to convey? In that respect I understand "composition" rejection. The first collage at least sticks with fruits and vegetables, but again, pretty random ones. I would do fruits separately and vegetables separately at least. Even better would be thinking of a more concrete theme - like Mediterranean cuisine for example. Cascoly - the collage you posted looks a bit messy. The theme is obvious, but I have to make an effort even to look at it. The composition could be much more "clean". Making a nice "working" collage is a skill on it's own - you have to think about the concept and matching colors and shapes, and so on. Most people just slap a bunch of images together and call it a collage. Maybe that's why some agencies don't want to accept them.
724
« on: May 19, 2010, 17:55 »
Tons of s**t that is way worse than these images gets accepted at IS (and other agencies to be fair) everyday, especially from exclusives. Just go to their front page and see what's under "exclusive uploads" tab. Maybe if you tried to get accepted as an exclusive it would be easier.... Not that I am particularly impressed with the photos, but I've seen way way way worse;)
725
« on: May 14, 2010, 13:28 »
I was always wondering why these were called "Hot Shots" when some of them had 0 a just a few downloads. "Editor pics" would be a better name for them in my opinion.... And yeah, how some of them pass the review without being rejected for "overfiltered" is a mystery... ;-)
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