March 2012 Microstock Update | MicrostockInsider

March 2012 Microstock Update Tweet

By Steve GibsonMon, 2012-04-02 05:29

Summary: Nothing sensational to report this month, mostly marketing related stories and milestones.

Photodune announced they had added their 1 millionth image

Crestock had a marketing push offering a special small sized subscription for 3 days only. Bigstock offered some discounts over the April fools weekend.

Yaymicro added some stats features, new reseller partners and increased their minimum filesize to 6mb "Due to increased customer and partner demands". Interesting that those older <6mp images at the long running agencies from the days when 6mp was super expensive professional grade camera still have a value, however that will mean nothing if buyers 'expect' that any images shown will be available in all resolutions; it's inevitable that those images will be further demoted as resolution expectations increase. The new ipad makes 3mp simply the size of a full screen background, never mind making that image square so it can be in either aspect... that would be minimum 4mp without any crop.

Fotolia seem to have some new subscription offerings (as I understand it no effect on sellers rates) I can't find any more info about this but I'm fairly sure they were not offering monthly and daily subscriptions back in Dec/Jan, the monthly offer (what was monthly is now called daily?) is a lower priced entry to subscriptions for less frequent buyers. What I actually thought was interesting was having the subscription operate like a pay-as-you-go mobile phone plan, with unused credits that roll over to the next month.

Zoonar announced Getty images as a distribution partner "As of now you can only submit photos which don’t require a model or property release. We hope to offer you a new release management tool by the middle of 2012". Zoonar also announced a decrease in their partner sales commission "We are also pleased about the number of submitted photos in our partner system. Because of high revenue generated by Getty, AGE, DPP Fotofinder and the other partners we get a lot more submissions now than a few months ago. Unfortunately, our costs for keywording, checking, translating, captioning and deleting photos has risen considerably".