News

It's certainly been an interesting start to the year. The period from Jan to March has often been the time when agencies announce changes to commission structures and pricing, often choosing a nice time in amongst some other controversy to quietly slip a press release out. Note: even if you only skim over the threads and blog posts linked to here, this post will take a long time to get through!

D-Day a.k.a. Deactivation Day

Unless you've been a long way away from civilization (and yes it does happen... life often gets in the way of the blogosphere!) you will probably already be aware of the events surrounding iStockphoto and Google docs, here's a recap:

A slew of mobile phone microstock stories recently, startups and funding, but a lot of it smelt strongly of press release garbage; some amounting to little more than a new category added or an upload competition. There is clearly interest in mobile phone stock - for now I think it's an interesting niche, and my only concern is that I've underestimated it by all but ignoring it; something I plan to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

What I can say for sure about mobile phone stock:

Picworkflow officially launched of their "in development" retouching service at the start of the month. The service allows photographers to select from a series of processing and retouching options including having each image go through a quality review where retouchers will suggest which services are required or remove services if they feel images are not of sufficient quality. More information via the picworkflow home page. (Read our previous review of the picworkflow distribution and keywording services)

April was a reasonably quiet month for microstock news, but May was a lot more interesting!

IPOs, Investments and Rumours

There was a trio of microstock finance stories earlier this month starting with the Shutterstock IPO release. Regardless of your opinion on this story the prospectus document makes a really interesting read! Shutterstock plans to raise around $115 million through it's IPO.

This was followed by fiance firm KKR investing US$ 150 million in fotolia in return for a 50% stake in the company, in a "bid to consolidate the fragmented marketplace for licensing online digital images and videos".

I'm trying hard not to make a habit of rolling two months news into one news post, I'll try to keep things monthly! A few big stories since the New Year, probably the most contentious was 123rf changing their royalty rates.

123rf New commission structure

This story starts back in December when some 123rf users received a message (I didn't find out about that till January when I logged in and there was a message on the log in page) about a new commission rates. A thread on microstock group follows the events. Originally the changes were to affect new users only, with existing accounts being grandfathered: