This deal is not unlike Autodesk buying Creative Market. Like Adobe, Autodesk is also in the process of trying to sell users of Max, Maya, etc on subscription/cloud deals. A trend it seems. It is not impossible that some corp could merge with SS in some kind of cloud play. (And if I were Canva I would be very afraid of a Photoshop with stock-image-search-and-buy built in.)

On the bright side, presumably Adobe will integrate a stock-image-search-and-buy functionality into Adobe Acrobat and Adobe's website creation software too. Also After Effects for videos. Those could result in more stock sales than from Illustrator or even Photoshop.

Either way I give you three guesses as to which group ends up the losers in this horse trade 

On the Dark Side, prediction: Adobe will recruit Behance users to contribute stock images to its cloud subscription system, increasing our competition. Then Adobe will give the Behance contributors' images priority over ours, the way that SS created OFFSET and advertised it on the SS site to give favored priority to non-SS photographer/illustrators, while locking us out of the new store. Or the way IS has always given favored search engine placement and other special advantages to its pets.

...and saw that it was $1900 to start...

My arm got tired just looking at people trying to work on images by touching the screen. A $500 laptop and you pay on $1400 extra to give yourself bursitis. And for an extra bonus you get to do it while struggling with Windows 8, the worst PC OS interface ever devised by humans. I think I'll pass.

Our job Now is to hold on to what we have.

It's tough. Livin on a prayer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMeN0CFNWmk

With half the month gone, my sales at CanStockPhoto are less than 20% of my sales for November, 2013.

And also troubling, I submitted some illustrations last Saturday and the number of EPS files waiting to be reviewed ahead of mine has not decreased. So no vectors reviewed in almost a week I guess.

Background: I'm an illustrator since 2005, did not submit any images in October.

SS, which makes up 38% of my revenues was unchanged from October 2013. However, all other sites were down, causing my total revenues to be down 14% from October 2013.

You said, "...if you are going to bring models, paid clients (weddings, graduations, Etc.), lighting, tripods, crew, or ask for special permission to restricted areas, or possibly block the general public from enjoying the area, you will be asked to pay for a license."

That is, people (me) bringing tripods will be asked to pay for a license, you say. So are you making a distinction between a 'license' and a 'permit'?

You won't need a permit. That's the point.

"...an in-app image browsing experience..."
Is that sort of what Canva is doing?

No, I admit that I did not read the whole proposal and information.

I was assuming that what you said was true when you said, "True if you are going to bring models, paid clients (weddings, graduations, Etc.), lighting, tripods, crew, or ask for special permission to restricted areas, or possibly block the general public from enjoying the area, you will be asked to pay for a license."
 

No you don't need to buy a permit. Did you read the actual proposal and information?

Quote from: michaeldb on October 18, 2014, 21:50

Quote from: Uncle Pete on October 18, 2014, 19:22

...True if you are going to bring models, paid clients (weddings, graduations, Etc.), lighting, tripods, crew, or ask for special permission to restricted areas, or possibly block the general public from enjoying the area, you will be asked to pay for a license.

Let me get this straight: I live in a place with a national forest all around me. I hike in it often and have for many years. I have yet to see any fashion photographers or bridesmaids blocking the trails. But in order to be protected from them, I now must buy a permit to carry a tripod with me if I want to take some snaps using a long lens?

And that's a good idea?

Strange. I have been on Veer since the beginning and have consistently earned $30 - $60 per month there for years. Suddenly this month I got a total of $1.30 in sales for the entire first half of October! My WME by a long, long ways.

Now today, in one day, I got $9.35 from sales of 3 files, apparently to 3 different buyers. A little too strange to be the old 'ebb and flow' IMO.

...I love me some CanStock.  They've been an incredible company to work along with, over the years.

Same here. Duncan has always seemed like one of the good guys in microstock. To update what I posted above, my Sept 14 was 30% better than Sept 13 at CanStockPhoto, the only site which had a significant year-over-year increase for me. And October is off to a good start, over $15 per day so far.

Quote from: Shelma1 on September 22, 2014, 12:52

Just saw the Shutterstock ad on Facebook. More than 1,100 likes and hundreds of shares. Meanwhile, iStock's FB page collects more and more disgruntled posts, mostly from buyers. Time to buy shares of SSTK?

I think iStock have greatly underestimated how negatively it reflects on your brand and your company when you treat artists so poorly year after year, especially in the relatively tight knit creative community where there is considerable overlap between buyers and suppliers.

+1 As I prepare to stop submitting microstock forever and move on to different things, I have one last comment on iStock:
While the decreasing revenues from microstock are mostly probably due to oversupply of images, it hasn't helped that so many image-creators have continued to do business with a company which they know does not act in good faith.

I stopped submitting to iStock years ago and removed most of my images, I literally thank God that I didn't need money badly enough to continue to partner with a company whose actions were so often divisive, dishonest, and destructive. I can't help but wonder what microstock would be like today if all microstockers had done the same. Would DP and others have tried their greedy dishonest schemes if they had seen iStock put out of business for what its actions? I suspect that even SS would now be paying more attention to the issues raised by contributors, instead of just dismissively posting mostly canned responses.

Looks like the microstock party is over, but how much longer might it have lasted if we suppliers had acted with more resolution in the face of unacceptable behavior by the likes of Getty/iStock?

$11.04 sales on CC so far this September. I had $38 in August, so this month is slower. That is pretty much true for all sites for me though. September sales usually are a big improvement over August, but it is not happening this year.

Who ever said he was "king"? He made the most money but he also spent a ton on staff, facilities, his own site, etc. The king/queen would be the person who has the most in their pocket at the end of the day, and I'd venture a guess that it hasn't been Yuri in a long time.

True.
     
    If I had to bet on who made the most money net from microstock it might be that Scott who did the 'gold guy' illustrations.  For a long time it seemed like half the downloads in microstock were of those gold-guy renders.  I remember guesstimating at one time that Scott was making about $750k per year, and he had virtually no expenses, just a PC running 3DS Max.
 
    Then one day, almost overnight, the gold-guy disappeared from Most Popular searches, Images-Downloaded-Today lists, and This Week's Top 50. In this business it seems that something can become too popular and suddenly no one ever wants to see it again.

    After all, how many overexposed smiling Scandinavians can you bear to look at before you can't stand seeing another one?  I think MxR's theory may be right that Yuri Arcurs saw the handwriting on the wall and the End Times coming and when he sold out to Getty he was playing them for suckers.

    The person who netted the most money from microstock last year? My guess would be Anja Kaiser.