Dreamstime have announced a change to their photographer comission structure (dreamstime forum post) following a recent announcement of an increase in credit prices. The new structure leaves royalties for exclusive photographers unchanged at 60% but creates a tiered structure reducing royalties for non-exclusive photographers to 30% for the least popular images. Popular images still receive 50% royalty rate. Previously dreamstime paid a flat rate of 50% for all sales of non-exclusive photographer images. Exclusive images from non-exclusive photographers have also taken a bonus royalty cut from 10% to 3-5% over standard depending on sales levels.

This makes dreamstime photographer exclusivity far more attractive than it was, it seems that the previous offer just 20 cents per upload over the royalty of an exclusive image from a non-exclusive photographer was not attracting enough exclusive photographers to dreamstime. With the recent increase in cost of credits some non-exclusive photographers may see improvement in their earnings despite the royalty drop. Dreamstime hinted in their statements that their previous higher than industry average royalties was affecting the amount they could spend on marketing their images.

The new structure still offers one of the best royalty rates for photographers who produce high selling images, and the baseline rate of 30% is still above that of several of the other top agencies.

The agency also announced 90% increase in traffic according to third party stats monitoring sites, while that sounds like spin and is not necessarily a reflection of actual sales, even if only partly true it still indicates significant growth for dreamstime.

More discussion about exclusive microstock photos and photographers

Comparison of microstock agencies offering exclusivity

Comparison of royalty rates

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