Wow, he's a Microstock Millionaire!
That's amazing after nearly going bust more than once.
Wonder if he meant sales, profit or turnover? Only profit is sanity.

Quote from: loop on June 03, 2014, 16:34

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 03, 2014, 14:04

On October 12 I wrote:
Interesting factoid: "Yuri" is showing "greater than 25,000 sales" on 78,000 images since the new identity was created in April. I'm rather surprised to see that one of his top business images is selling in the 10cr-55cr price bracket.

Today that identity has "greater than 54,000 sales", which means that portfolio, which still has 78,000 images has achieved 19,000 sales in 37 weeks. Which is 513 sales per week = 26,704 sales per year, = approx. one sale for every three images over the course of a year.

So if you have 1,000 Yuri-quality images on iStock, you could expect to get about 350 sales a year, or a sale a day. Presumably a lot of them are priced at Vetta levels (I can't be bothered to try to estimate how many are and how many are not) but even so, the return on effort for a top exclusive doesn't look all that amazingly exciting to me.  Perhaps that is why they have to allow him to sell on loads of other agencies as well as being "exclusive" with them.

It suggests to me that all the exclusive's sales are struggling. It looks as if I will sell about one file in two from my non-exclusive portfolio on iStock this year - obviously at a much lower price point than Yuri's.

Sorry, but something is amiss in this calculation. Not being a great stock shooter, not working with great production expenses, best models etc, and so, not having "great quality images", I sell way more than 350 sales a year for every 1.000 photos. And when I say way more, I mean way more.

There's nothing amiss with the calculation and if there is anything amiss with the data then it means that iStock are deliberately publishing low figures to confuse us - I doubt that they would go to that trouble.

I suspect that his collection is almost all Vetta and that the price is putting customers off. If your files are all Vetta then I will agree that something must be wildly wrong with the data.

Edit = Just checked and only a small percentage are Vettas, the bulk are scattered across all the collections with quite a lot in Main and a quarter of them in the second level (signature?).    It does seem very odd that his sales are so low but it also seems odd that iStock would want to understate his sales as that would discourage, rather than encouraging other artists.

I note that the figures I give are in line with Jim's original post, noting that he had managed fewer than 100,000 sales on iStock in more than a year (presumably from his main account).

MAybe his market is simply flooded with similar stuff.

I've heard of folks giving up their crown but maybe the king has lost his crown before he had a chance to wear it...

Yuri�s Numbers

With his original Yuri_Arcurs collection Yuri hit 1.5 million career downloads on iStock sometime in the first half of 2013. He is still listed as having 1.5 million plus downloads which means that he has had something less than additional 100,000 downloads in the last more than one year. When he went exclusive he had about 18,000 images in his non-exclusive collection on iStock.

After going exclusive iStock created a separate Yuri collection. His 1,257 best selling images from the Yuri_Arcurs collection were moved to the Yuri collection. All of them have been downloaded from iStock more than 200 times and 294 of this group have more than 1,000 downloads each. Currently the Yuri collection has had between 54,000 and 55,000 downloads since it was established. It is not clear why there are two collections as all the images in both collections are exclusive.

Yes. All his "original" work he had already submitted while being non-exclusive was moved to a new account, first called "Urilux" and then renamed to "Yuri". Ever since the move of those images (including all his prior bestellers) the new downloads on those images are added to the profile page of the new account. So to me it reads: "With his 70,000 images he generated 54,000 new downloads within about a year"

The original "Yuri_Arcurs" account still gets fed with new images, though. The oldest image in that account is dated February 2013, so there was an overlap when his team had probably sent 60,000 images to iStock/Getty directly - those were added to the Yuri account - and at the same time maybe newly produced images continued to be uploaded to the existing account. That is my thought why the old account has so many pictures again.

In the new account, you can see that just 100 out of his 45,000 new images have generated more than 10 downloads. Roughly 8,000 images have had exactly 1 download, and about 4,000 images had more than 1. Using some guess work and statistics, you could assume that the downloads on this portfolio would add up to about 8,000 * 1 + 4,000 * 4 + 100 * 40 = 28,000 downloads. Give or take, maybe 30,000.

So my guesstimate would be that in total he had about 80-85,000 downloads on 115,000 images within the past year on iStock itself. Far from the download numbers we used to expect in microstock but considering that the average royalties paid to iStock exclusives are more in the range of $12-$15 these days plus IS exclusives are making an additional 10-30% of their royalties through the GI Sales, it's still more than a million dollars in revenue.

On October 12 I wrote:
Interesting factoid: "Yuri" is showing "greater than 25,000 sales" on 78,000 images since the new identity was created in April. I'm rather surprised to see that one of his top business images is selling in the 10cr-55cr price bracket.

Today that identity has "greater than 54,000 sales", which means that portfolio, which still has 78,000 images has achieved 19,000 sales in 37 weeks. Which is 513 sales per week = 26,704 sales per year, = approx. one sale for every three images over the course of a year.

So if you have 1,000 Yuri-quality images on iStock, you could expect to get about 350 sales a year, or a sale a day. Presumably a lot of them are priced at Vetta levels (I can't be bothered to try to estimate how many are and how many are not) but even so, the return on effort for a top exclusive doesn't look all that amazingly exciting to me.  Perhaps that is why they have to allow him to sell on loads of other agencies as well as being "exclusive" with them.

It suggests to me that all the exclusive's sales are struggling. It looks as if I will sell about one file in two from my non-exclusive portfolio on iStock this year - obviously at a much lower price point than Yuri's.

Just shows that Yuri is as susceptible as most of the rest of us to the 'new files not selling' phenomenon (since late Sept 2012), and possibly the 'early sales penalty' (since late 2011 at least). Both issues which have been brought to iS's attention via their forums and Fb often, but they have no interest in resolving.

Mind you, I bet Yuri gets more than 40% - he almost certainly (I say with no empirical evidence) managed to negotiate a higher percentage along with his faux-exclusive deal.

Quote from: EmberMike on June 03, 2014, 16:41

I have a file that was accepted in early May and priced at 22 credits ($42 USD). Which I would ordinarily think is an insane price point for most of the work I upload there. But it's actually selling. I got 3 sales on that image in May, $21.82 in royalties.

Are you exclusive at Istock?  AFAIK all non-exclusive stuff is at rock bottom price.  Or is it different for illustrations?

Illustrations are priced higher depending on quality and complexity.

Quote from: MichaelJayFoto on June 04, 2014, 03:35

Quote from: Pickerell on June 03, 2014, 12:55

Yuri�s Numbers

With his original Yuri_Arcurs collection Yuri hit 1.5 million career downloads on iStock sometime in the first half of 2013. He is still listed as having 1.5 million plus downloads which means that he has had something less than additional 100,000 downloads in the last more than one year. When he went exclusive he had about 18,000 images in his non-exclusive collection on iStock.

After going exclusive iStock created a separate Yuri collection. His 1,257 best selling images from the Yuri_Arcurs collection were moved to the Yuri collection. All of them have been downloaded from iStock more than 200 times and 294 of this group have more than 1,000 downloads each. Currently the Yuri collection has had between 54,000 and 55,000 downloads since it was established. It is not clear why there are two collections as all the images in both collections are exclusive.

Yes. All his "original" work he had already submitted while being non-exclusive was moved to a new account, first called "Urilux" and then renamed to "Yuri". Ever since the move of those images (including all his prior bestellers) the new downloads on those images are added to the profile page of the new account. So to me it reads: "With his 70,000 images he generated 54,000 new downloads within about a year"

The original "Yuri_Arcurs" account still gets fed with new images, though. The oldest image in that account is dated February 2013, so there was an overlap when his team had probably sent 60,000 images to iStock/Getty directly - those were added to the Yuri account - and at the same time maybe newly produced images continued to be uploaded to the existing account. That is my thought why the old account has so many pictures again.

In the new account, you can see that just 100 out of his 45,000 new images have generated more than 10 downloads. Roughly 8,000 images have had exactly 1 download, and about 4,000 images had more than 1. Using some guess work and statistics, you could assume that the downloads on this portfolio would add up to about 8,000 * 1 + 4,000 * 4 + 100 * 40 = 28,000 downloads. Give or take, maybe 30,000.

So my guesstimate would be that in total he had about 80-85,000 downloads on 115,000 images within the past year on iStock itself. Far from the download numbers we used to expect in microstock but considering that the average royalties paid to iStock exclusives are more in the range of $12-$15 these days plus IS exclusives are making an additional 10-30% of their royalties through the GI Sales, it's still more than a million dollars in revenue.

He made a million on Shutterstock as well as I believe, not counting his other 23 agencies. If thats the case, he might actually be making the same or less after his move to IS. Seems like a case of shooting himself in the foot.

its way below than what he has doing, he was already at 3M back in 2012 (the year before going "exclusive")

� Income �way higher than $3 Million a year�, 8 figures in sight

Yuri licenses over 10 million individual images each and every year (which works out to about 5000 per day).

http://hunchmag.com/interview-yuri-arcurs-the-top-selling-microstock-photographer/

I don't believe everything I read, I just believe it is interesting for this topic

Whatever that project he claims he is managing is about - if it does not include a substantial raise in non-exclusive commissions it will be a project I will continue to watch from the outside...

Quote from: dirkr on June 04, 2014, 06:41

Whatever that project he claims he is managing is about - if it does not include a substantial raise in non-exclusive commissions it will be a project I will continue to watch from the outside...

Honestly, I think he knew his response to the OP would find its way here, and they (the man himself, IS/GI principals) wanted to see what kind of rise they could get out of us mere mortals. They are fresh out of ideas and I bet they rely on msg posts to get ideas as to how to strategically enhance their product. Nothing but my gut supporting this claim, but seems reasonable since we do occasionally get the "we're listening" emails.

That may be true.
But I'm not holding my breath to see if they take up my proposal... 

Well, at least from now on whenever istock does a step in the right direction and improves, we know who to thank

Maybe bringing back the 100% royalty day for exclusives was his idea as well. At least for the exclusives there will be some benefit if Yuri pushes for improvements that will benefit his portfolio.

I agree wholeheartedly. I do wish good things would happen there for the sake of those of us who have worked so hard to get images accepted there with weekly limits implemented, and for those of you who were on the * end of broken promises, changed systems, etc that have just simply eroded your sales.  So I do wish that Yuri and his fairy dust works, but I am not holding my breath. Companies simply cannot just keep "trying things" and seeing what sticks, and that is tantamount to what Istock is doing/ has done. But deep down, me, you, everyone else who is serious about microstock would like to be wrong, see them do a reversal and thus enjoy the fruits of our hard work. But I won't be holding my breath.

Quote from: ShadySue on June 04, 2014, 05:22

Mind you, I bet Yuri gets more than 40% - he almost certainly (I say with no empirical evidence) managed to negotiate a higher percentage along with his faux-exclusive deal.

Very, very unlikely. That's not how it works with Getty.

Instead they suck you in with fawning platitudes like "Professionals deal with professionals" __ and boy, did Yuri fall for that one or what!? Can't quite believe how naive he was. Bless!

Yuri (and Lise) probably get 45%. They got the level, and RC's have been granfathered the last years.