Shhhh…

… Santa Claus comes tonight!

If you have any iStockphoto.com buyer questions or issues you’d like me to address in the new year, please leave a comment, or email me, and I’ll try to address them in the coming weeks.

Have a great holiday!

Why Contributors’ Expensive Equipment is Good For You

So, you may have noticed as part of last week’s iStockphoto.com big announcements, there was included a per credit price increase of $1 for a package of 10 credits, and a smaller amount as amount purchased increases.  There was also the introduction of the new Value collection, with lower credits per image prices (to be introduced early 2009 with 200,000 images) and the Premiere Collection with offering the bestest of the bestest at a higher cost.  Additionally, the Standard collection has credits per image prices rising from the medium size on up.  So, you’ve got a new way to save money on the Value end, an increase from the middle up in the Standard set, and a new collection of imagery at appropriate prices at the Premiere end.

Ok, so nobody likes price increases, especially with things the way they are now, and to be honest, in my unknowingness of the costs of their end of the business, I would have keep things closer to the way they were.   Schooner Tuna anyone ?  However, let’s take a look at why your customers might be happy you have to pay a little bit more.

Enter the Canon 1ds MK3, the flagship Canon DSLR.  It sports a 21MP sensor, with excellent light sensitivity.  That’s 5616 x 3744 pixels, or natively, 18 inches x 12 inches printed at 300 DPI.  It’s also an $8000 camera.  But if you wanted a DSLR with that kind of resolution to be able to offer XXL images on iStockphoto last summer, it was either that or the 1ds MK2, which now clocks in with 4 year old technology.  So, to be able to offer you, the buyer, maximum flexibility on image size, for anything from a web image to a car wrap, a contributor needed to pay out the big bucks to get a 1ds MK3.  Well, at least I did, and I’ve been shooting my imagery at XXL sizes since June.

Aside from being able to purchase a huge sized image, you get a nice bonus in the lower sizes.  Back when I was shooting with my 6MP Digital Rebel, offering L sized images, sometimes you got noise in your images when shooting in less than optimum conditions.  You always try to shoot at the lowest ISO possible, but sometimes, a situation might call for pushing the envelope.  Well, with the 1ds MK3, not only do you get less noise when shooting in the higher ISOs (sensitivity), when the image is downsized for the smaller sizes on iStockphoto, the appearance of any noise is reduced, and may even be rendered non-noticeable.  So, an L size from the 1ds MK3 in most cases will of a higher quality than an L from the Digital Rebel.

Also, just being delivered today (to me, at least), is the brand new Canon 5d MK2.  I had been shooting with the original 5d since 2005, until I received my 1ds MK3.  The 5d MK2, also sports a 21MP sensor, along with some other new fancy additions, like the ability to record HD 30i video.  I’ll use this as my backup for my 1ds MK3 (instead of my old 5d), but I really wanted to be able to shoot and offer some quality video from something other than the HDV camera I’m currently using.  Using the 5d MK2 allows for the user to use interchangeable lenses, as well as get some great depth of field, something lacking from your normal HDV camera.  While lacking some of the truly “pro” features of the 1ds MK3, the 5d MK comes in at a respectable $2700.

So, these price increases directly affect the contributor’s ability to purchase new, expensive equipment to be able to offer you the best, high quality content.  Don’t forget, along with a new camera, inevitably comes the need for better lenses, or a more powerful computer, additional hard drive space and new software upgrades.  Perhaps, explaining a bit of this to your clients will help then understand the benefit they are deriving from the annual announcement.  Or just keep it in your mind, reveling in the great quality you are able to offer for such a relatively reasonable price.

The Other Big News For Buyers

The iStockphoto.com news about collections and pricing was very interesting the other day, but the best part was yet to come.

In a front page blog post, CEO Bruce Livingstone described a new element to the Best Match Sort.   I talked about searching and sorting way back here – you may want to read that to review the system.  “Best Match” is the default way that the search engine will return an image set from a keyword search.  Basically, you search on “Christmas Tree”, and anything that matches that keyword is returned as a result.  Now, imagine each image has a number from 1-100 assigned to it, and that number is assigned by mixing together how new the file is, how many views it’s had, the size of the file, and a bunch of other stuff.  So, the BM takes the result from the search and orders it, so images that have a number like 1 are close to the beginning (front page) through to images with a rank of 100 (last page).

Now, I don’t know exactly how the sort works, but that’s how I imagine it.  Problem is, sometimes when they’re adding and multiplying things together to get the rank, things may not work like they intended.  For instance, my poor isolated tree below came online, and was doing well, selling 10 times in 5 days.  Suddenly, it dropped off the face of the earth, appearing on something like page (100 images per) 35 of 36 when using Best Match.  Hopefully the intention of the Best Match sort isn’t to punish images that are doing well, but with so many factors, something got messed up somewhere.

The other problem with Best Match, is that there is no notion of relevancy, whether the image is actually an appropriate example of the keyword searched for.  Every image with the keyword is a valid return – the sort is based on a mishmash of data.

All that is about to change, as described here:

A long time ago we developed an algorithm to rank keywords on each file. Since then, we’ve been tracking data for every single file on iStock. Guess what? It works. Starting in mid-January we will start applying these results to BM searches. For clients it will mean more accurate, more meaningful and more relevant results. For artists it means a massive shift. The results for everyone, are going to be very, very different.

So how does this work?  In my imagination, when you search on “Christmas Tree”, you are presented with a selection of results, the way it has always been.  The system remembers your search term, and you go on, paging through a few (dozen) pages looking for the right image.  You come upon my image above, and decide to buy it.  This is essentially your vote that my Christmas tree image is a good example of the term “Christmas Tree”.  That keyword then gets a point added to it, raising the ranking of “Christmas Tree” on that image, but leaving the rest, like “isolated” alone.  The next time someone searches on “Christmas Tree”, my image moves further towards the front of the search, being a proven appropriate match for the term by your purchase.

What is the benefit?  In the end, I see it saving the buyer’s time.  There are a lot of images that validly have the keyword “Christmas Tree”, like this one:

However, if someone is solely searching on “Christmas Tree”, is this the file they want to show up, even if it has high downloads, is new, etc… ?  Probably not.  So, this shifts back in the search for “Christmas Tree”, because it’s ranking on that term is low.  It probably got bought on “senior woman Christmas”, so those would have higher rankings.

I think this is a neat development.  We’ve been asking for this for a while.  It’s sort of a self regulating spam filter.  People can spam “business” onto whatever image they want, but if its ranking never improves with that term, it sliiiiiiides to the back.

So Best Match really does have an element of “Best” now, as determined by you, the buyer.  This is supposed to phase in slowly over the next couple of weeks.  Keep an eye out.

Hot Off The Presses

Over at iStockphoto.com, there’s announcement fun in the air.  See here:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=80935&page=1

Let’s look at one of the more exciting announcements in the post.

Our collection has really come into its own, and this one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. More importantly, our community has strong needs from several directions: Artists need more for the jaw-dropping work they do, and buyers need better deals during this vicious economic uncertainty. So we’re making changes at both ends of the scale.

Reading further, we find that iStock is creating a 3 tiered collection of images.

First, we have the “Value” collection.  It is a modification of the current dollar bin imagery, where all images… are $1 .  Now, this value collection will be based on size:

No word yet on what will comprise the Value collection, except they expect to stock it with 200,000 images by Spring, when it opens.

“Normal” imagery stays in the regular collection, and per image credit prices are rising:

Finally, we have the new “Premiere” collection:

Customers tell us that they’re willing to pay more for top-quality images, especially those where much effort has obviously gone into the production of the shoot. So we want to reward the photographers who are really pushing the envelope. In May we will release a premiere collection of our best, exclusive content.

So, there you go, to start.  Three new collections of imagery.  That’s pretty exciting!

Foreign Languages

It’s been a while since my last post.  Partly due to the Thanksgiving weekend, and partly to a family vacation in Florida.  The annual Disney trek, back to my roots.  But I’m back in Missouri now, where it’s 30 degrees, so….

One benefit of the controlled vocabulary (CV) system on iStockphoto.com, is that instead of using an automatic keyword translation system, each keyterm in the CV can be mapped to the correct foreign language term.  So, now, buyers can search (and contributors can keyword) in their native language, and when translated, these translated words and phrases should be very accurate.

If you speak French, for example, and only wanted to deal with French keywords, while keeping the rest of the site in English, you would click on the link at the top of every page titled “Control Panel”.

When the panel opens, you will see an option for “Search Language”.  Once you change this to an alternate language, keywords will be in that language, and the automatic keyword suggestor you get in the search box when typing will be in that language.  That’s it.  The rest of the site will be in English (at this point).

You can set the entire site (not including content, like forum posts or image descriptions) to another language, by using the “language” pulldown next to the “Control Panel” link mentioned above.  In the image above, this says “English”.  This will change site headers and such, your keyword language, your credit purchase currency, and units of measurement to another country’s defaults.  Basically doing this includes the keyword language choice mentioned above, plus the other things you can individually set in the control panel.

So, you can have the site in German, your keywords in French, and your credit purchase currency in US Dollars, if you wish.  The last thing may actually benefit you, because iStock has some set currency exchange rates that do not fluctuate very often.  If you live somewhere other than the US, you may benefit from making credit purchases in US Dollars, and letting your credit card do the exchange, than purchasing in your native currency and getting what iStock charges.

There are often posts about how keywords are in a foreign language, yet the link at the top says “English”.  Hopefully this will help you remember there is another place to check for keywording language.  Bonjour!