Welcome to indielife!

It will take a while to understand what sells best where and to get to know the different agencies, but I am sure you will be glad you did it, because you have so many more options and if one agency upsets you, just forget about them for a while and focus on another one.

If you have a seperate contract to getty, then this doesn�t get cancelled. And since Getty takes exclusive images, you can continue to build a portfolio there if you want to. It is a macro agency, unless you get a contract with offset, corbis, or stocksy or one of the many smaller macro houses it is probably good to have at least one macro agency in your port. And I am sure the marketing for Getty itself will always be a priority.

If you haven�t done video yet, look into it because it is a new market with average downloads of 18-22 dollars per file.

If you upload to fotolia/adobe, try adding some exclusive images to see if it will help portfolio visibility.

There are new smartphone trends/ agencies, so have a look at the smartphone apps (fotolia/eyeem) and maybe also specialist agencies like stockfood, spacesimages if you have content that would work for them. Most of all, don�t just look at the big three or four micro agencies, there are many, many smaller agencies out there that can add significant income to your portfolio.

It all takes time, just keep uploading, experiment and ask around your peers what works for them.

Everybody will have a different mix of agencies and themes that bring an income, but that is the beauty of indielife, whatever you produce, there will be a place for it somewhere. There is no bad photo, just the wrong environment.

The other agencies are no angels, so you might run into problems as well, but nearly everywhere you will find more modern interfaces and upload systems than on istock.

I had a great time with istock and certainly being exclusive was good for me for many years, but I don�t regret being indie now, the freedom I have, I will never give it up again.

Exclusive images yes, artists exclusivity never again.

Quote from: tickstock on July 13, 2015, 11:20

Maybe you haven't read Paulie's previous posts but I don't think he's going to be uploading to SS or Fotolia or the other micropayment sites.

Quote from: cobalt on July 13, 2015, 12:03

I had a contract with getty through the getty invite program in 2006/7? and that contract didn�t end when i ended my istock exclusivity. there is also nothing in the contract that says it terminates in relation to istock.

Interesting. Do you still submit to it?

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 13, 2015, 12:14

Quote from: cobalt on July 13, 2015, 12:03

I had a contract with getty through the getty invite program in 2006/7? and that contract didn�t end when i ended my istock exclusivity. there is also nothing in the contract that says it terminates in relation to istock.

Interesting. Do you still submit to it?

No, I terminated the contract after the getty/microsoft deal, I was very disappointed the way it was handled. With over 1.3 million free downloads of my files I expected a professional reaction to solve the problem together not what was done instead.

I now have files on getty via eyeem, but these are simple smartphone files, usually snapshots with a filter, I don�t care too much what happens to them.

But eyeem is my partner for them, who they work with for distribution is their own decision. Since they are a German agency, if there was an issue it would fall under German copyright law which is very strict.

And my main interest is their own smartphone marketplace that they are just beginning to build this year.

But if you want to go mostly macro, then probably keeping the contract is worth it, because getty also distributes your files via corbis,masterfile etc...there are many indies with a getty contract.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 13, 2015, 08:43

I read that the premium stuff like E+/Vetta still stays at Gettyimages.com

Just to be sure you understand this: As far as I know this is not how it is planned to be. It is more a technical issue they couldn't get solved (yet), so don't be surprised if at some point your images disappear from Getty. I had to ask for them to be removed (since I wanted to submit some of them elsewhere), though.

What was "semi-officially" said is that images don't change collections (probably also due to technical issues). So your past images will remain in the Signature collection and 3 credits will be charged to the customers (yes, with the claim of being exclusive... ) but you will only receive the independent royalty of 15-20% depending on your level.

I will be curious to know what happens with iStock Subs and Partner Program payments. As I have read between the lines from others, I think you will only get paid non-exclusive royalties as soon as the crown is gone, even though the sales still happen during your exclusivity. So expect a lot of $0.28 to be paid towards your account in August for the July PP and subs sales.

Good luck and all the best. It's a tough market. 

Quote from: MichaelJayFoto on July 14, 2015, 03:56

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 13, 2015, 08:43

I read that the premium stuff like E+/Vetta still stays at Gettyimages.com

Just to be sure you understand this: As far as I know this is not how it is planned to be. It is more a technical issue they couldn't get solved (yet), so don't be surprised if at some point your images disappear from Getty. I had to ask for them to be removed (since I wanted to submit some of them elsewhere), though.

What was "semi-officially" said is that images don't change collections (probably also due to technical issues). So your past images will remain in the Signature collection and 3 credits will be charged to the customers (yes, with the claim of being exclusive... ) but you will only receive the independent royalty of 15-20% depending on your level.

I will be curious to know what happens with iStock Subs and Partner Program payments. As I have read between the lines from others, I think you will only get paid non-exclusive royalties as soon as the crown is gone, even though the sales still happen during your exclusivity. So expect a lot of $0.28 to be paid towards your account in August for the July PP and subs sales.

Good luck and all the best. It's a tough market. 

Everything Michael says is correct. I also abandoned exclusivity some months ago. Automatically all subs (even if sold when you still were exclusive will get the non exclusive rate). Now the opposite is also true if you ever want to recover the crown. The higher price of your now non exclusive images will make the transition to non exclusive not so rough and the images in Getty will also help. Your images will eventually get mirrored to Thinkstock too if technicalities allow it.

I wish you good luck. I went back to exclusivity because independence didn't work out for me. Although the revenue you get is similar if you are in many agencies ( I was in the top 11 ) there is more work involved supplying images, collecting and checking the money, deal with bugs at 11 site instead of 1. At the end I calculated it was same revenue for at least double the work. But it has some advantages too. Your portfolio is much more visible because your best match images are different at every outlet, acceptance rate was never a problem for me as I was at 95%+ on every site but some files that didn't get through for whatever reason at one spot did so at the others many times.

I think that to make a living becoming independent now (where you don't have the advantage of good search position of your portfolio like long time independents ) is too hard if you are not in macro or/and medium stock options like Offset, Stocksy, etc. If you produce now high quality work I would definitely not feed those images to the microstock beast.