Bigstock announced pay as you go licensing (read: credits not needed, just buy an image when you need it). This is comparable to the offering currently made by pixmac and cutcaster where buyers can pay and download an image without first purchasing credits.

The table below shows the contributor payout rates for the new system, payouts from credit purchases remain unchanged.

Depositphotos announced an auto suggest feature (a bit like the search suggestions in firefox and google) that provides a list of keywords or key phrases in a drop down when you type a few letters into their search box, it also displays matching photographer names so you can try searching "yur" or "mon" to see some well known profiles.

istockphoto introduced a much requested sort by price option finding a convenient middle ground that includes both 2 credit exclusive and 1 credit non exclusive images when set to the cheapest '1 dot option' option.

Microstockposts posted some discussion on istock loosing traffic to shutterstock . Graphs of visitors don't offer insight into the value of those visitors (mirrored in the comment "like comparing an Audi to a Lada") they do show some fairly obvious trends! The traffic situation does seem to mirror some of the results I saw in sales results last month on various blogs; istock might just have shed their lower end customers leaving only their most lucrative ones(?).

Dreamstime launched a twitter tool to announce new uploads and sales to your followers and earn referral revenue from sales.

123rf look set to become the fourth agency to reach 10 million images, launching a competition for a macbook air for the 10,000,000th image. (I think a design-a-poster competition might have also been a good idea.) 123rf also made a change to their upload system to (by default) accept images that were rejected for use as RF into their editorial collection. A checkbox during upload offers "If my submissions are unfit for RF, I agree to allow them to be accepted into the Editorial Section provided they are deemed to be newsworthy." this is designed to stop perfectly good editorial images being rejected and having to be uploaded a second time as editorial only use.

Lookstat launched a comparisons to average tool that compares your sales "performance" to that of the lookstat index allowing you to see if it's just you that is having a bad month or if sales are down in general.

Last month it seems I missed the new keywording tools launched on microstockgroup. The main keywording tool is noting particularly novel, but I really like the oversized keyword buttons to click on; perhaps it's just a tablet style design trend to make everything look like "my first computer" but I imagine that works great on a large touch screen (perhaps bigger than a tablet). There is also a keywords compare tool that allows you to compare two lists of separated keywords and highlight the exclusive and mutual words.

In Other Blogs...

Picniche posted some interesting stats on "Where do independant microstokers submit"

Search upgrades at deposit photos on the microstockgroup blog

Can a Voluntary Code of Conduct Make a Difference in Microstock from microstockdiaries

Microstock for beginners - a roundup of previous posts from niltomill

McComber Photo on exclusivity, shutterstock and istock

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