Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on January 02, 2012, 13:20

We now face an uphill battle of near-unlimited licensing, plateaued demand, massive supply increase, and rock bottom pricing. Most industries would have collapsed already under these conditions.

Supply and demand; supply and demand; supply and demand. The three rules that determine market prices.

Our problem is not so much the prices our images are sold at but how little of that money we actually receive. Can you imagine how much money we'd be making if Istock had chosen to pay 70% commission for exclusive sales (i.e. the same rate that app developers receive)? Both Istock and their contributors would be laughing all the way to the bank by now.

I think iStock is laughing a lot harder right now, as it is . Why would it be better to pay at least 3x more to the contributors, they wouldn't sell more anyway, since the price for the buyers would be the same and there are very few ppl that are not uploading to IS due to low commission percentage (besides that I don't think they even need more content, if they got 20% more, they probably wouldn't sell even 2% more)

Yes, RM prices are falling and I wonder why. If you can get a $5 RF license for almost unlimited use and time why would you pay more for an RM license. At least with the RM license it has defined usage, duration, possible renewal, and can be tracked.

Whoever came up with RF went way too far on loosening up rights. They could have very easily just simplified the usage model a bit to make it easier on buyers, left everything else intact, and image producers wouldn't have taken such a hit. Just like with micro pricing. They could have went reduced the $500 macro image to $100 instead of $1 micro and would still have been doing well.

We now face an uphill battle of near-unlimited licensing, plateaued demand, massive supply increase, and rock bottom pricing. Most industries would have collapsed already under these conditions.

RM is falling because of the unfair RF competition ! how can you beat RF after all ? as a buyer i would go 100% RF too ...

secondly, years ago only a certain type of images were available as RF so buyers were forced to go RM for anything else.
nowadays it's all over and i can find just about anything sold as RF, sometimes with even higher quality and creativity than RM.

exclusive usage and the whole mumbo jumbo is becoming a small insignificant market niche, and serious customers don't even use stock images, they pay somebody on assignment !

yeah whoever come up with RF was probably a marketer, not a photographer, think about the old PhotoDisc CDs ...after all we talk about photos, creative imaging and bla bla bla, they talk only about selling a product and making profits quick, they could care less about photography, Getty itself is owned by a bunch of bankers and traders, Corbis by Bill Gates...