I have about 350 shots on IS. Half of them are on PP. In January 40% of my IS income came from PP.

The PP is successful for no one, regardless of the money they may have made.

Quote from: sjlocke on March 07, 2011, 09:07

The PP is successful for no one, regardless of the money they may have made.

But wouldn't that have been the attitude of RM photographers at the advent of microstock sites?

Nope.  RM photographers were not undercutting themselves purposefully.

Quote from: sjlocke on March 07, 2011, 09:56

Quote from: michealo on March 07, 2011, 09:43

Quote from: sjlocke on March 07, 2011, 09:07

The PP is successful for no one, regardless of the money they may have made.

But wouldn't that have been the attitude of RM photographers at the advent of microstock sites?

Nope.  RM photographers were not undercutting themselves purposefully.

I thought RF photographers came from RM?

Mostly not, there's a huge share of amateur photographers there. RM photographers were unwillingly forced to do RF..
Sending all your IS files to PP is simply shooting yourself in the foot. Buyers are not stupid, they will Google your username, and find the cheap place to buy your files.
I used to send my unselling IS files there. It was useless, I'm out completely now.

Quote from: michealo on March 07, 2011, 05:53

One IS contributor has reported PP sales of over $300 for January, with over 750 dls.

I think you'll find Shank-ali is not actually being truthful or indeed means to be taken seriously. It's what he does __ that and constantly try to talk up the PP of course. For example he also claims the excellent 'Cambridge in Colour' as 'his' business website.

Whose website is it?  His profile says he's in engineering and I know he's in the UK.  I mean, obviously the CiC guy writes better and actually uses spaces after punctuation.  And the photography style is totally different. But it seems weird to claim someone else's website as your own :\

Quote from: michealo on March 07, 2011, 05:53

One IS contributor has reported PP sales of over $300 for January, with over 750 dls.

I think you'll find Shank-ali is not actually being truthful or indeed means to be taken seriously. It's what he does ...

Absolutely, it's the UK sense of humour, somewhere between irony and sarcasm: not meant to be taken seriously.

One IS contributor has reported PP sales of over $300 for January, with over 750 dls.

Anytime I hear someone who is making (relatively) good sales in the PP, I am always curious how their Istock sales are going during the same period.  Seems like a lot of people who report growing PP sales are also reporting drastic drops in their Istockphoto sales.  Yet they fail to acknowledge any connection between the two...

Quote from: jsnover on March 07, 2011, 13:34

Sean McHugh is who sends the e-mail if you subscribe to CiC's newsletter. I am as sure as I can be without knowing that Mr. Shankie has nothing to do with CiC as he poo-poohed an article on it I referred him to way back when. He was wrong about something and I pointed to CiC's tutorial on that subject. He said who had time to read; he just wanted to take photos

Oh I believe you guys that it's not his site, just confused about why he would claim it was!

Well, he's just a little different

PP brings me 90% of what normal DLs do and I only have just over a third of my photos on PP. And the percentage is rising from month to month. So I really don't care;)

You need to be careful as someone's been giving dire warnings about how IS are ripping everyone off with the PP;

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/is-ripping-submitters-off-with-pp/msg0/?topicseen#new

Ooh __ that's one of yours too!

Quote from: gostwyck on March 07, 2011, 20:18

Quote from: Slovenian on March 07, 2011, 17:53

PP brings me 90% of what normal DLs do and I only have just over a third of my photos on PP. And the percentage is rising from month to month. So I really don't care;)

You need to be careful as someone's been giving dire warnings about how IS are ripping everyone off with the PP;

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/is-ripping-submitters-off-with-pp/msg0/?topicseen#new

Ooh __ that's one of yours too!

Oh my Lord.   

Oh, Snap!

Quote from: michealo on March 07, 2011, 05:53

One IS contributor has reported PP sales of over $300 for January, with over 750 dls.

Anytime I hear someone who is making (relatively) good sales in the PP, I am always curious how their Istock sales are going during the same period.  Seems like a lot of people who report growing PP sales are also reporting drastic drops in their Istockphoto sales.  Yet they fail to acknowledge any connection between the two...

Yup. Sean Locke is down enormously. It must be all the stuff he's got on PP.

Take a look at the Feb sales thread on iS. It seems almost everyone is down, regardless of whether they contribute to the PP or not. You can't isolate those in PP, look at their sales drop and say "oh, that's because of the PP" and refuse to compare that with the results for people who aren't in the PP, it's entirely unscientific.

If I remember correctly, Sean's drop in February was 2% more than mine even though he has grown his porfolio by a much larger percentage in the last 12 months than I have.

I suppose some people have bought my stuff on TS instead of paying more for it on iS but there is absolutely nothing in the available figures that shows my iS sales being systematically worse than those of people who are not in the PP.

There's also a logical disconnect between the fact that you contribute religiously to the "buyers leaving iStock" thread, and then attribute PP people's fall in sales to their participation in that programme, not to the departure of buyers (and their departure has never been blamed on TS, it is blamed on the general site problems, price rises, the search order or, rarely, to objections to the way iS treats us).

So sales going down is a bad thing caused by TS and only affecting PP members, while buyers quitting is a good thing that punishes Getty but will not show up as falling sales for contributors.

How was your February, out of interest?

In my view, sales fluctuation has a principal cause: best match tweaks. And PP could have a secondary but also significative weight. Las week I got one e-mail of someone asking if she coul find some specific file of my IS folder at TS. Having answered her no, the file sold in IS (L) minutes later