After yesterday unveiling thinkstockphotos (announced late last year as the 'new Getty subscription site') Getty have announced that Stockxpert will close with almost immediate effect.

Stockxpert Buyers

Credits are no longer being sold on stockxpert, nor can new buyers register. Those with existing credits on SXP can transfer them on a 1:1 basis for credits on istockphoto.

1/5 of Images Transferred

Contributors that had opted into reselling images by subscription at SXP have had many of their images transferred to thinkstock. 365 of the 409 Images I had on SXP have been transferred, perhaps I should rephrase that as "are now available via" thinkstock. For the immediate future contributors still log into SXP to access their earnings, stats and control their images. It looks like not all my 409 images are available purely because I have some identical photos on istockphoto also available via thinkstock and these duplicates have been filtered out.

On thinkstock content sourced from stockxpert is now part of the "Hemera" collection, and while I'm not sure that this is exclusively the images from SXP a comparison on search results from this collection and identical terms on SXP gave me the figure of just over 20% as stated above. Possible this figure will climb as those who have not opted into the subscription sales on SXP change their mind; but noted that there was some strong resistance to the price point that Getty was offering contributors of just US $0.25 per download.

It was coming for a long time

There had been lots of rumours and comments following the acquisition of Jupiterimages by Getty that Stockxpert was doomed. Then following the August news that all advertising on stockxperts parent site stockxchng was to be redirected to istockphoto the outlook did not look good. The ending of photos.com sales (again replaced by istock) and a few other issues like broken links on the site meant that the signs were all there. My inbox at stockxpert marks out the time-line.

All that said, I for one was not expecting this news, but we could all tell something big was happening. With rumours that stockxpert were implementing Gettys controlled vocabulary I was, perhaps naively, in the camp that thought a big transformation about to happen. Indeed it has, but closure was not the transformation I was quite expecting. The future of the collection currently housed at SXP is a little hazy to me. With no way to upload new images it looks like we are just 'cashing in' on this collection before it ages.

What's wrong with just having photos.com?

well I guess it's branding, that's just another sign microstock is now completely mainstream:

photos.com (plus) is a website that offers subscription stock images at $249.95 a month
vs.
thinkstock is a brand that offers subscription stock images at $249.00 a month

• Printer Version
• PDF version