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Messages - fieldsphotos
26
« on: September 16, 2013, 21:08 »
I uploaded about 5 designs just to see how it was (time consuming). I did see the announcement about being able to just upload the images, but I haven't checked it out yet.
I did get a sale today for $5 so I think I will upload some more images and see if the new system is less painful.
27
« on: August 13, 2013, 23:15 »
How do you know when you become a pro seller?
I have earned well over $100. Some of my earnings are from third parties which do not count and others may have not been cleared yet, but I am not keeping track of the details.
Do they actually send you a message to tell you that you have reached the status of pro seller so you can enter the pro seller forums?
I believe you get an e-mail as I recall. To count towards your $100, it has to be from the US store, so no foreign sales count. 3rd party sales DO count. There is a delay because all the earnings have to be cleared, then they don't get to it until the month afterwards. I remember that I was well over $100 for long enough that I sent a message to support to ask about it. Got a non-answer from support, but did get the pro-seller notice not long afterwards. Dunno if that was coincidence or not.
28
« on: July 27, 2013, 08:36 »
i would never contribute to SS. i value my work far too much to sell it for such a pittance.
pittance in my dictionary is having 12.2$ at iStock this month (not even half day at SS)
i guess we have two different dictionaries, $12.20 is a couple of dollars more than my average royalty per download at IS by a few bucks ($3-$4). my last small S+ paid $11.00 so there is no way in hell i will sell that image 28 times at SS at XXXL size to make up the difference. even a small image on the main collection pays around $1.50, that would still mean i would have to sell it on SS 3-4 times. no thanks.
Ah, this old argument again. While it must be nice to have an established port at IS as an exclusive, that is no longer an option for most of us. I do know that my new files had stopped selling at IS back before I pulled my port. And as an indie I was selling at TS which is a worse rate than SS and I hadn't gotten an EL in years. However, at SS with the same port, my new stuff sells, I get ELs and $2.84 sales regularly and I make 4X more money. It is true you would probably have a hard time recreating that performance at SS. But remember that for many of us without that established best match position at IS, IS is a very low performer. If you are starting microstock today as a newbie, IS is painfully difficult to sell images at. And with the deck stacked against new images to gain best match position since new files don't sell (except at TS), newbies will have a very hard time even making it to the "become an exclusive" bar let alone crawling up the RC ladder. So, it is pretty irrelevant what YOU make at IS, since I believe it is no longer possible for someone starting out to recreate that same success there. Just consider yourself lucky.
29
« on: July 22, 2013, 13:35 »
( http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=354958&page=24 - I don't know how to link directly to the post) From Lobo: "Everyone's graphs will look that way. There is currently no need for everyone to post their graphs. We are well aware that there was a reporting issue from May 1-19. We have a solution prepared. I'll have an update later this morning on what's being done to correct that." Oh, boy, I always love iStock's "solutions". I am only $0.11 away from making payout after I deleted all but 2 images in my portfolio, so this extended PP saga has been killing me (I rarely make sales on IS - it was mostly PP). I just want to make that last payout so I can leave the account dormant and forget about IS and all its drama.
30
« on: June 28, 2013, 21:59 »
Wow, yeah big change. I saw the preview screen shots of the new layout in the forums and they didn't look too bad. My stores survived pretty well, but now that only 12 categories show on the front page (and no obvious way to see the rest), I am going to have to reorganize all my stores down to just 12 main categories then use sub-categories below that.
It does have a bit too much white, but whatever. Maybe it will look better once I get a header fixed for it. Now that they have standardized the stores, I assume they will be able to make appearance adjustments to the site as needed.
31
« on: June 25, 2013, 08:15 »
Hmmm, interesting developments. Changed my royalty to 15% and had 4 sales since. However, before the 20th of June I changed it to 50% but the last 2 sales of the 4 sales, were on 21 and 23 june, at 15% still.
Wrote support about it, but maybe the 15% does work in getting more sales.
It will be interesting to see how your sales compare with the higher rate going forward. I have heard some people get more sales at the 15%, but not enough to cover the higher royalties they had been getting at their previous rate. I just hope Zazzle gives us better royalty management tools like they have mentioned on the forums. I would like to set my royalty rate by product more easily so that for the really expensive items on the site I can set a lower rate than the cheap stickers and stuff. I figure people are probably more price sensitive when buying a $180 laptop bag or a $40 iPhone case than they are with $1.00 postcards, etc. I can change royalites by product now, but only 100 items at a time, and it is still clunky and time consuming. My ideal would be a system more like FAA where you can set a default rate for the different products on a single screen.
32
« on: June 24, 2013, 21:10 »
I spotted the e-mail today about the store customizations. I agree, there are some folks who paid to have their Zazzle stores prettied up and now they are SOL. (As well as the small sub market of folks who were designing store fronts for other sellers). It isn't going to affect me much, as I already use a category sorting system, and had virtually no customizations on my store. It always seemed my store was pretty pointless, I don't think anyone browsed it. I would guess most of my sales traffic was from the marketplace or affiliates.
I do like that they will unify the storefront look - I think it will give buyers a better experience - especially on mobile devices. For every well designed and beautiful storefront there were 10 that were almost unreadable with crazy colored text on the wrong color background. My own storefront was definitely not something I am proud of, and I am a bit relieved that I won't have to worry about it anymore.
I hate that we don't know WHEN this will happen. Only "soon".
33
« on: June 21, 2013, 13:29 »
No, it doesnt matter what we want. The buyers are the ones complaining and leaving, as they rightly should. Heres an idea...why dont the micro sites work together, like many other industries, and all make a move to slowly raise prices on all their sites? That way, everyone keeps their piece of the pie, and everyone wins, assuming those price hikes are shared with contributors. The answer, of course, is that it will never happen...because of greed.
...
Isn't that why the book publishers are being taken to court right now? Banding together to set prices? I agree with several people here, the problem is the royalty %. I am fine with providing photography for a low cost market - my production costs correspondingly low (I am not hiring models or renting studios), but I would much rather get $5 or $7 for that $10 sale instead of the $1.50 I get now. I understand the agency should get a cut for marketing, providing the purchase interface, quality control and legal paperwork. But is that worth 85%? I would guess the downward slide will eventually hit bottom enough to drive out many of the high production value folks out of the micros and on to somewhere else. Dunno how low it will have to go before it hits that point, though. This micro industry is still relatively young, I imagine it will consolidate and settle out at some consistent level. The individual photographer has to decide if they are going to ride it out and hope for the best, or keep changing and finding new avenues for income. There appears to be a resurgence in "mid" stock niche agencies as well as the grassroots Symbiostock project going on right now. Who knows what will catch on and find that hole in the market like iStock did back in the day.
34
« on: June 16, 2013, 21:04 »
Regardless of royalties - the site is so buggy and slow, how do you guys even use it? I played around with it a bit, and it either freezes on me after I spend 15 minutes creating a series of products, or crashes, or some products or categories just disappear into thin air... it takes at least a few days to update my "store", so I can never be sure what I've done already... tons of time wasted! should have concentrated on FAA - at least the uploads there are straightforward.
Yes, Zazzle can be very frustrating. When I joined, they were in the midst of several major site bugs where everything was taking well over 24 hours to post to your account and even adding things to store categories took over 24 hours (and each time you clicked on it, you reset that counter - ugh!). I thought I was going crazy clicking on links and then not having it work, but reading the forums confirmed it wasn't just me. It seems to be running a little better now - although I have been having quick create problems yesterday. I did set up my templates for quick create, but then a bunch of them broke when they updated some of the products, so I haven't taken the time to re-do them. And if you have your own templates, I never figured out a good way to go back and add my old designs to the new products via a quick create - it seems like you need to have huge amounts of organization skills outside of Zazzle to keep track of it all. I wish there were easier ways to see which design I have where, which one needs to be added to the new iPhone 5 cases for example, etc. My biggest complaint about Zazzle is the lack of metadata import function. At least FAA can read your keywords, which saves a ton of time. Hmmm... maybe someone needs to create a "Deep Meta" for Zazzle. Then again, with the negative site changes, maybe not.
35
« on: June 08, 2013, 10:11 »
Hmmmm.....what's the deal? Did they get lessons from iStock or what??
LOL. Sad, but true. Many submitters are comparing this move to what Cafe Press did. I was never there, but apparently they forced all royalties from their marketplace to 10%. After that designers fled to Zazzle in droves (which helped Zazzle grow tremendously). So many folks feel pretty betrayed. Now I suppose folks will start looking for the next POD site to migrate to.
36
« on: June 07, 2013, 19:01 »
Hi Sarah!
was there a fee before this last change? (see my picture above)
Yes, the fee has traditionally been set at twice zazzles default royalty rate. Up until these new changes, the fee kicked in at 20% which was twice the default 10%. I believe you can see that info on one of the royalty screens in your account, but I am not sure where. I think it used to kick in at 25% when I first started there. Edit: found it in the FAQ under the question about recommended royalty rates. http://www.zazzle.com/sell/designers/nameyourroyaltyNow the default rate is 5%, but zazzle is giving us a "break" by setting the new fee royalty cut off at 15% instead of 10% (which would be twice the new default) That's part of the problem with zazzle- keeping up with all the changes. You leauve it for a month or two and 15 new products are out or these type of things have gone down. And it gets hard to catch back up since so much of the details are buried in the forums. I only caught this change because of the email they sent out.
37
« on: June 07, 2013, 18:48 »
As if Zazzle could be a bigger waste of time than it already is. :-(
you can say they aren't worth your time (not surprised!) but they are certainly worth for other, too bad we don't know exactly how much money Zazzle is doing, I would say a ton more than most middle tier
actually I have one for you (don't tell anybody) but I do more $$$ there than in all agencies beside SS 
I am the same, they are my second best agency and worth my time. (i am not a big player in any of this, though). They did e-mail this to sellers, but you have to have emails turned on in your profile to get them. Based on the comments in their Proseller forums, some folks will be losing $1500 to $2000 a month from the VB change, which implies they are doing as well there as some of the bigger players at the micros. Mostly designers seem to do well with lots of illustrations. You can also do very well selling the various niche markets, ie wedding invitations and stuff. Design all matching themes invitations, envelopes, thank you cards, stamps, etc and buyers often buy the whole kit. EDIT: wait, what am I saying? Zazzle is a waste of time, don't bother.
38
« on: June 07, 2013, 16:44 »
And not for the better. They are removing the volume bonus program for sellers and moving it to affiliates only. Also, they are now encouraging folks to lower their royalty rates to the new lower limit of 5%. http://forum.zazzle.com/news/important_newsThe news not mentioned in this announcement but was announced in the Town Hall forum "meeting" was that any royalties set at 15% or greater will now be subject to their 5% transaction fee. The transaction fee comes out of the royalty you made. So if your royalty rate is set at 15% and you sell a shirt for $20, your royalty would have been $3.00. They will then take the 5% transaction fee out of that and you will get $2.85 instead. (assuming my math is correct). Town Hall discussion: http://forum.zazzle.com/townhall/town_hall_ivThe volume bonus thing won't affect me too much, since my port is still small there, but it was a nice incentive for growing my port there that is now gone. Some more established sellers were making 30% of their income from the volume bonus amounts, so it will be a kick in the teeth for them. The new lower limit on royalties just doesn't bode well for the future IMHO. I fully expect we will see the new royalty "cutoff" for promoting etc lower to 10% in the near future (down from the 15% it is now).
39
« on: June 07, 2013, 16:24 »
Pond5, you set the price, and if people would like your photos on posters or canvas prints, try Zazzle , you set your commission.
Alamy is an disappointment for me, got all the micro price lately, you have no control of the price whatsoever.
I've heard that on Zazzle any product with royalty set over 15% is not considered in their marketing campaigns and is also not picked up by any of their partners. So, its another way of punishing you for trying to make money off your own work.
The Zazzle comments are entirely true - they will not promote your items at royalty rates set higher than 15%. Major affiliates for Zazzle will also not usually promote your items at royalties higher than 15% either. And based on the announcements Zazzle made today, I would expect that royalty cutoff amount to lower in the future. I suppose you could try Fine Art America, but so far I have had zero luck selling anything there. Other folks seem to do OK, though.
40
« on: June 03, 2013, 23:26 »
ETA: schools and colleges should require project work to list the legitimate sources and copyright information of content used. In the same way that proper universities have always required a properly formatted and annotated bibliography. Or else a fail.
+1. Requiring students to credit photos as well as text sources would go a long way towards educating the general populace about photo copyrights.
41
« on: May 19, 2013, 13:09 »
to me it sounds like a super fake.
Yuri's father ? hahaha ....
on that we agree, just that 
Oh well - everybody always just seems to want to read their own words. If you dont know, why write?
Dhoxax IS Yuris father.
Dhoxax has the same images in his port as Steen Wackerhausen does over on Stock Fresh (so they appear to be the same person). According to the wikipedia (I know, I know), Steen Wackerhausen is Yuri's father. I am sure someone better at Google reseach can dig more correlations out than me. https://stockfresh.com/gallery/StonyArthttp://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-uVista.htmlOf course, for all I know, "Wackerhausen" is as common of a name in Danish as "Smith" is in the states and its just a coincidence. But it seems legit on the surface.
42
« on: May 19, 2013, 12:28 »
...
indeed microstock is here to stay but look at their target .. they're mostly bottom feeders and they've even the guts to complain about pricing.
... I don't know about bottom feeders only buying microstock. I work for a very large Fortune 500 company that uses microstock images all the time. Now, sure, they don't use them for their major ad campaigns (they actually have in-house photogs for those - and frankly wouldn't use stock imagery those anyways), but there are sure hundreds of the microstock images all over the internal websites as well as employee training materials, etc. (I actually have fun trying to figure out how many of the images I recognize in our training slides). These things are updated constantly, so I am always seeing new images on the internal pages I have to visit regularly. So even with the big players there is a market for micro. And, really, isn't that what micro is for? The company can keep fresh interesting images in our "employee engagement" brochures without spending a ton of money.
43
« on: May 12, 2013, 11:40 »
You must have gotten the lucky reviewer on the landscapes. Sigh. I submitted a batch from my recent trip to Hawaii, and they rejected 3/4 of them. The ones they kept were the ones I thought were the weakest images. The rest they rejected for being "too similar - subject oversaturated" or whatever. So, apparently, they have tons and tons of aerial photos of Kauai already and don't need any more (A search reveals a grand total of 49 in the database  ) I had stopped contributing to them because I was getting so annoyed by the rejection rate, especially since I mostly do landscapes. But I dropped iStock after the Getty/Google debacle, so I am back to dealing with Fotolia to make up the difference. The kicker is the few landscape images of mine they do allow in the database always end up selling very well - so its not like their customers don't like them. Maybe I should think of that as some sort of weird advantage - the few landscape images they do let in are competing in a much smaller pool than at the other agencies so they sell well.
44
« on: May 06, 2013, 20:36 »
CS2 works fine for me. I dont need fancy filters in new versions.
It all depends on your workflow, I suppose. For me, Adobe always wins when I buy a new camera body and my older version of Camera RAW doesn't support the new RAW file. Then I shake my fist in the air and yell "Adoooooobeeeeee!" in my best Captain Kirk. (And, yes, I know I can use the software the comes in the camera to process RAW files, and that might even produce better results, but I don't want to add another step or more file types to my current process)
45
« on: May 06, 2013, 15:23 »
I just looked at the subscriptions, they are all priced for "annual commitments". If you cancel before your year is up (after the 30 day trial period), you are billed 50% of the remaining commitment terms. http://www.adobe.com/misc/subscription_terms.htmlI haven't found the info on the month to month pricing yet. Depending on how they price that, it might be cost effective for me to just buy a month here and there when I need it. (I am only a hobbyist at this) I am interested in the new camera shake tool they are advertising. I would be very curious as to how good that ends up being (especially since I just did a helicopter tour and ended up with fewer keepers than I had hoped for due to the chopper motion - several are "almost" sharp enough, but not enough for large prints let alone stock)
46
« on: May 06, 2013, 13:05 »
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/06/adobe-launches-new-creative-cloud-only-apps-and-services-photoshop-cc-indesign-cc-illustrator-cc-dreamweaver-cc-and-more/Man, I don't like having to pay a subscription for software - I was on the "every other verision" with my Photoshop purchases. I currently have PS 5 and was waiting until PS 7 for a possible upgrade. I may think about changing my workflow. Lightroom has become almost all of my workflow - as soon as they add perspective corrections to it, I might not need Photoshop for much anymore. I also have a purchased copy of Illustrator, which I guess is going to be doing the same thing. Guess that is the last Illustrator copy I will buy for a loooong time, as I am not enough of a vector artist to justify the subscription price.
47
« on: April 07, 2013, 11:30 »
So it's not me. 
The quality on SS is certainly impressive though I believe the royalties are much less.
Depends on how you look at it, SS pays you around 25-30% which is more, but in $$$ it could be less.
Less %age than an exclusive makes at iS, and less than 25% when you start out at SS.
True, but the bar to the first pay raise is pretty low, even I made it past the first $500 with my small portfolio there. And that first pay raise from .25 to .33 is a big jump and your earnings increase significantly after that.
48
« on: April 02, 2013, 16:52 »
I haven't tried much experimentation with prices, but I have heard both arguments over in the Zazzle forums. I agree that the referral % getting taken out does take a bite. I do virtually zero promotion, so I think if you have a good promotion network it might work for you to be at higher %.
Some people choose the % based on the item. For more expensive items like the computer sleeves, they choose a lower % and then pick a higher one for cheap stuff like stickers and cards where people are less likely to be price sensitive. This seems like it might have promise, but it does take a lot of effort to do that since you can't use the global % change tools.
49
« on: April 02, 2013, 14:14 »
Good topic. I have mine set at 15% so that my products are included in their promotions. (They recently changed the rules so that if you have a % higher than 15, your products won't be included in some of their promotions)
Kind of low % stock-wise, but I see zazzle as a different model since you/they are selling physical goods (instead of licenses)
It is a lot of effort to make products, but I feel its worth it. I have made just over $320 since I started Jan 2012 which is better than I did at 123RF, Dreamstime, Fotolia and iStock for the same period (I have a small portfolio).
50
« on: February 07, 2013, 23:18 »
Very interesting topic, as I consider myself a newbie based on my port size (even though I have been messing with this stuff since 2007). I currently have 153 images at SS, and averaged 60 downloads a month last year, mostly subscription.
Out of curiosity, I looked at my numbers back in the "feed the beast" 2007 heyday, and with a port of around 30-40, I was getting around 140 downloads a month as long as I was uploading. Of course, as soon as I stopped, the downloads dropped dramatically to around 20 d/l a month. (Too bad I didn't spend my time building my port up in those days instead of now - ah, that 20/20 hindsight). At least SS is more consistent nowadays even if you aren't uploading every week.
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