Fotolia have announced a new commission structure which will come into effect next week. The changes will reduce commission to lower non-exclusive fotolia rank contributors by around 20% (e.g. white rank commission reduced from 25% of sale to 20% of sale). Low ranking exclusive photographers fare even worse dropping from 42% to 35%.

The table below shows the new rates, (hover over the image to show the old rates). Clicking the image currently links to a page at fotolia displaying the new rates before they come into effect.

istockphoto have announced a restructuring of their royalties to take effect in January next year. There is quite a lot to digest, if you have not already read this post on their site then get a drink and take it all in.

A couple of days ago there was a post on the lookstat blog titled top search keywords for energy, it compared search terms in Google in an attempt to estimate popularity of energy images on microstock sites. Earlier this year I did something similar in a post about seasonal stock images, and at the time I made the point that I wasn't exactly sure how well Google search terms related to searches on microstock sites.

So that set me thinking... (yes, be very afraid) Just exactly how much of a match is google trends/adwords data to what people are searching for at microstock sites? Clearly there will be some relationship, but I'd also guess that there are lots of popular terms that will not have a proportionate number of microstock searches. It's difficult to know how similar the two are. Is it reasonable to assume that popular keywords in Google are more likely to lead to more microstock sales as those keywords make popular subjects hence there will be related businesses in need of such images? As they say "assume makes an ass out of u and me".