News

 
Microstock News

gimmick advertising starWith Chris Anderson's new book "Free" in the pipeline and comments I heard at UGCX like "What about creative commons, it's the elephant in the room everyone is ignoring", there is a lot of interest and perhaps concern about how low exactly the price of some stock images will go. Will the price to the end user of 'ordinary stock images' be driven to zero in the same way as other digital assets and services such as digital music, on-line email, holiday bookings etc.

I think that in a few years time with market saturation of 'ordinary images' as it is, then we will see a fair amount of this type of work being made available for free. I'm not talking about the style of image that sells for 100's as macrostock, but the very easy to shoot, low set-up cost that is the staple of microstock. What would happen to the market if the best 30% of the images that one of the largest agencies rejected were set free on the internet? That would perhaps, be a million quite usable stock images most of them with only very minor defects.


Fotolia have announced a new commission structure including a new option for exclusive photographers in addition to the current options for exclusive images and non-exclusive images.


veer

Corbis have anounced their plans that veer.com will host a collection of microstock priced images heralded as 'marketplace' from 23rd Feb.


On Wednesday 7th Jan istockphoto will launch their new price structure for 2009 (which means a pay rise for istock contributors). Details of the new pricing can be found at istockphoto 2009 prices.


Good news for image Buyers
Dreamstime are offering a 15% discount on purchases of credits until 10th Jan 2009

discount stock images from dreamstime

(Once purchased you have 12 months to use the credits)
Read our Dreamstime Review (for photographers)

 


Fotolia, again(!), have played the "Lets change to rules on the Quiet" game by increasing the number of images you need to sell to to earn a higher commission. It's understood that those who have already reach a 'ranking' tier will retain that rank even if the number of sales needed has increased above the number of sales they have made. A table of the new tier vales can be seen below along with the old values on the right.


You might never had heard of them, and if you had read our keenimages review you wouldn't even be uploading to them. Now they are going to close.

Keenimages were are side shoot of shutterpoint. If you have a keenimages account they have announced they will migrate it for free to shutterpoint for 6 months (you will need to pay thereafter).


Following an acquisition, Canstockphoto.com images will be made available via Fotosearch.

"Introduction of Can Stock Photo content will begin on the Brazilian and Japanese sites, www.fotosearch.com.br and www.fotosearch.jp, with more sites to follow. Once the content is fully rolled-out, Can Stock Photo contributors will be exposed to millions of Fotosearch visitors every week. Through Fotosearch, contributors will be able to sell images as prints".


Both Shutterstock and Dreamstime have announced reaching image upload milestones. Shutterstock have added 2 million images to their collection in the past 10 months bringing their total image count to 5 million. Dreamstime announced that they had accepted their 4 millionth image, taking on 2 million new images in less than 12 months, dreamstime also highlight that they now have 1 million registered users, I just wish they were all actively buying!


A couple of stories this month that didn't quite merit a whole post:


Popular content