News

The big news in December for contributors was full launch of photoworkflow.com, we posted a review earlier in the month.

Other than that things were relatively quiet, most of the news coming from various changes at istockphoto. (most of which I'm not going to weigh in on - but the description "Istock F5 epic fail" that has been flying about does not seem all that unfair considering this is supposed to be a leader in the microstock industry.) It's not easy to make changes to a big website without issues cropping up, but sites like google, paypal, amazon etc seem able to do it without all that many "unforeseen" problems. This, I guess, is the price you pay for making the royalty structure complicated.

Dreamstime celebrated their 10 millionth image with a day long 20% discount sale for buyers and 100% commission to contributors. This brings a total of 3 microstock agencies with more than 10 million images in their own collection (so pixmac excluded). 123rf looks like it will be next in line.

In tandem with last months site updates and introduction of $1 images, Crestock relaunched themselves as "Good. Fast. Cheap" at the start of the month. Their previous price levels and site style placed them more towards the premium end of microstock.

Updates since the last news post:

Fotolia added 10k of legal coverage to images downloaded from their site, full details of that in their license terms; they also announced they now have 10 million images. Fotolia also made a small change to the prices of images which that have not sold in the past 12 months. The vast majority of fotolia contributors, those photographers with less than 25000 images i.e. 'Emerald level' and below will be unaffected. Those photographers above Emerald level and above will find the priced of their unsold images reduced (if not already set to $1) to fotolias 'best prices' i.e. $1 XS to $10 for XXL. Prices remain at 'best price' until the image has sold 5 times.

A couple of big news stories since my last update, the most noticeable one was the F5 update on istockphoto, but for contributors I think the news that prostockmaster is now available free of charge is the biggest story.

ProstockMaster Free-for-all

Prostockmaster was relaunched as freeware, I wrote a review of prostockmaster 2 years ago (needs updating!) while it was still a commercial product with a free option. Prostockmaster is microstock assistant application which helps in the process of keywording and uploading images to microstock agencies. The program supports uploading to 9 different agencies, IPTC keyword setting, image search and can also provide sales statistics. Full details can be found on prostockmaster.com

This month in microstock; quite a lot happening, nothing earth shattering (which is nice!) but lots of interesting little stories: