Following the success of sxc.hu (stockxcng) and the commercial followup stockxpert, both bought by Jupiter media then Getty in turn, Hungarian developers 'Dream Group' have just launched a new microstock site stockfresh.com.

Another new microstock site... Is it just another one that will flop in a couple of years?

I can't answer that question, but not all new microstock sites launch, stagnate and close leaving little but some unhappy forum posts. Deposit photos have been trickling in sales for me (a surprise!), pixmac seems to have been growing their business steadily too. Most of the photographers who had 'time' to upload to stockxpert before getty pulled the plug are perhaps looking for somewhere else to upload, admittedly that space might have already been filled by corbis' veer.

So what has stockfresh got going for it?

The failure (and subsequent resurrection) of crestock shows us that even if you have a good sized image collection, professional site with all the right features and marketing 'toys' there is no guarantee of success. So what weapons does stockfresh have to defend itself in the microstock jungle:

• A very attractive commission rate, min. 50%
   
• Almost 10 years experience managing the success that was stockxpert
   
• Big names: Yuri Arcurs, Iofoto, MonkeyBusinessImages and more already onboard
   
• 100,000 images already online

The site launched on Tuesday with 100,000 photos. Clearly with other agencies paying incentives to build image collections stockfresh faces stiff competition, there was a time that 100,000 images made an agency a pretty important player in microstock, now it seems that 1 million is more the 'start line' we expect. StockFresh has some work to do to attract photographers and buyers to their startup. Peter Hamza, one of Stockfresh's founders says the agency has been built from scratch with the values "simplicity, quality, fair pricing and last but not least fair commissions".

I'll be uploading my images to StockFresh to try things out (with obvious hopes), as ever a review will follow...

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