MicrostockGroup

Good point. No, I don't recall ever having had a sale other than the 'standard', subscription or an EL priced accordingly.

Maybe someone (who isn't banned) could enquire on their forum?

If I remember correctly you (only) get a highest xl, xxl, xxxl sale from those print sales, no EL.

Patrick.

So for print sales of maybe hundreds of dollars, we get a standard DL price? I wonder what Fotolia gets paid for it. Anyone know that?

Then there is other stuff which doesn't involve print sales. For example, look at the prices on a normal microstock partner site they use is www.fotkyfoto.hu/


There are about $4.3 per 1,000 Hungarian forints and the prices here are
XS = 1,198ft (0.1MP) = $5 (roughly)
S = 3190ft  (0.5MP) = $15
M = 4968ft (1MP) = $22
L = 6556ft (3MP) = $27
XL = 7350ft (9MP = $32

These prices are about three times Fotolia's rates (even for European buyers) so if the agent is taking 40% commission (as Alamy does), Fotolia will still be getting close to double the normal price per sale. So what are we getting credited with? Is it just going as credit sales at XS, small, medium etc., so we get, say $2 for an XL sale that netted $32 and probably gave Fotolia something like $20? Is it 25c for a $5 sale, where Fotolia took $3?

Obviously, you have to allow for the percentage that the partner takes before looking at how the remainder is split. But I don't see how you could reasonably convert a cash sale into a credit when no credits were involved.

If fotolia gets a $3 slice of another site's sale, how should it calculate that? Should it say "Well, that site called the sale XS, so we'll call $3 one credit, regardless of whether the XS is the same size as ours or not", or should it say "$3 is double to price of a euro credit, so we'll call it two credits", or should it say, "we call $1 one credit so this is three credits", or should it say "We say we pay 25% commission, so this is worth 75c to the photographer"?

I seem to notice plenty of room for smoke and mirrors in this one.

I have full faith and confidence in FT doing the right thing by giving us a sizeable chunk of every partner sale, since they are so concerned that we get a good deal on other sites.



 

Yes, I'm seeing lower prices now, but that wasn't a higher-priced file. Maybe there was some sort of usage filter I'd activated. It's hard to know when you don't speak the language.

The highest prices you see on that site are for large canvas 'art prints' which are effectively inkjet prints using chromogenic inks (very expensive). Now, if you look at the price of posters from the same image you'll see a price of around €60 for a 160cm print. These are presumably printed with normal printers inks which do not have archival longevity and are much cheaper to produce. However, there's no way the printer can be paying the FT EL rate as that's usually more than the print price for silvers, golds etc. So, my conclusion would be that they're using XL/XXL downloads for these prints, canvasses etc and if they can use this type of download, they can just as easily use a subscription to get that file size from which they can download 750 files/month and for which the artist receives between 25-45 cents/ download depending on status.

You see, images are effectively free these days!