News

 
Microstock News

bigstockphoto this week announced that they are starting to accept editorial images into their collection. This follows a similar move from dreamstime and several other agencies who have accepted such images from start-up.


photoshelter logo

Midstock (or perhaps 'user contributed' macrostock) agency photoshelter have announced that they will close their PSC (photoshelter collection) on 10 October this year.

Photoshelter had some very Impressive marketing, they appeared out of nowhere about 12 months back, spinning lots of buzz out of their 'shoot the day' and "we won't accept images also for sale on microstock sites". Quite an impressive achievement to build a professional looking stock collection out of a site that was just a way to archive your photos a year back. Many photographers took the bait and uploaded their work for the promise of 70% commission on sales for $50 plus (prices varied by usage).


Photography professional and microstocker Yanik Chauvin has posted the first part of what looks to be a great two part series detailing his microstock workflow.

"my-workflow-from-a-to-z-part-1"


istock are clawing back with a little marketing this month, along with a double royalty day for exclusive photographers they are offering double ($20 instead of $10) for members who refer a new member during September. New referred members are required to purchase pay as you go credits or a subscription.


So it's blatant promotion but who cares if you can win a nice shiny Cintiq Tablet!

To enter you need to live in US, UK, Canada, Germany and France, and all you have to do is fill out your details on their entry form. You can enter each day for more chances to win.

 


StockXpert have caused a furore over the past week with changes they planned to make to their image sub licencing options, and despite the title of this post I'm sure they did not do it for the media attention!

There is nothing to panic about, after a lot of pressure from the microstock contributor community they have modified their planned changes.


Update: March 2014 - Getty have announced the end of their flickr partnership

A recent post on flickr makes for interesting reading. It's long been anticipated that flickr would include some way for users to sell their images, and until now there has been lots of debate about how this might be implemented. Because flickr is photo sharing for the general public, it's less likely that photo editors / image users are going to want to wade through screen after screen of pictures of kids and pussy cats. Flickr is also not really the place that photographers think about selling photos; while flickr has many quality images, it is still by it's nature, 'amateur'.


Shutterstock recently announced the acceptance of their 4 millionth microstock image. They post themselves as the worlds largest microstock agency, and it would appear that their subscription system rather than 'cost per image' business plan is working better than ever.


To almost universal joy of most microstock photographers dreamstime (read our review) have announced a new pricing stucture.


Someone got good value with this one from dreamstime...

Dreamstime Microstock Photo Time Magazine cover using microstock photo from dreamstime


Popular content