MicrostockGroup

Sorry to say this, but you are wrong this time Mr Hat. 

Chad Bidwell already stopped by the Yahoo Micropayment boards to confirm that the offer indeed is for 23 cents to 30 cents per download.  He doesn't understand why contributors are concerned. 

He also claimed our earnings will be 2 to 3 times higher next year because of subscriptions.  Well, that never happened with StockXpert.  Why should anyone believe this?

On top of the subscription issue, May was really slow at FT for me. Although it's not a huge earner (8% average) it's the lowest earnings I've had since November. Seems like every time they change something (V2, search engine, etc) contributors suffer.

They were showing promise but this is just another push for me toward IS exclusivity.

Agreed.  Quite frankly, even if I don't choose to go exclusive at IS, I feel my work is simply worth more than .23.  Even if I reduce my overall earnings slightly by removing my Fotolia portfolio, I will be able to sleep better at night knowing I'm not giving my work away for such a paltry amount.  I posted a message on Chad's thread but suspect it will get removed.  Hopefully he will still see it regardless.

Very bad news. I have a BME at FT this month, and it's way ahead of DT, which is sinking, partly because of the low subs earnings. Now, they will go down together.

Time to think RM.

My sentiments exactly, in fact, I have decided to pull an allnighter and prepare a bunch of images for Alamy that I have been procrastinating doing. This is just the motivation I need. So you had 6 sales on 173 images? impressive. Most people there, including myself so far, do not have sales like that with from so few images, not on photos anyway.

Let's put a little scenario to the test.

Let's assume that most buyers of XS standard switch to subsciption, kind of logical assumption.
Take the % of XS sales and calculate these sales at 0,23 cent compared to 0,37 cents.
This should give already a rough estimate how much income will decrease (again).

In my case, with the huge drop of income because of their  messing around with the search engine of already 43 % this month, bringing in the assumption would lead to a total decrease of about 55 %.

When DT introduced the subscription plan my sales there dropped considerably, it took me months of hard work and uploading to climb back to the state i was before their subs plan.

Why does FT think they can do a better job.?.. i'm puzzled.

Not happy at all.

Patrick H.

There is no way that I will pull my portfolio until I see what affect it has on sales here and elsewhere.  I have made over 700$ this month with FT so I would have to lose a lot of money elsewhere before I considered this action. I think that a lot of the really big players that make a lot more than I do won't pull their portfolios whatever they are threatening as the only ones to lose would be themselves. I can't imagine a scenario where my overall earnings would go down by over     700$ because of the FT subs and that is even more true for the big players.
Saying that I think that they should reconsider the 23c and have something more inline with SS as 23c is a step back for microstock.

Well at least on StockXpert 99% of my sub sales are for XL files and vector, that's why I'm so pissed!
And my regular sales are now mostly for XS.

So not only I'm loosing a lot of $5 sales to a $.30 sales, but my pay per picture sale is now lower than it used to be because I mostly get $.50 for XS instead of the $2.5 or $5 I was getting before for L or XL.

To me that the proof that LOT of regular buyers are switching to sub, and that's bad.

Subscriptions suck.  SS should be the only one selling subs.

a slight raise:


but still low.

(there are only 2 sapphire members, and 0 diamond members).

Isn't Rubis more than Sapphire???
http://us.fotolia.com/Info/Ranking

Simply hilarious.

Oh, this is BS.  I was upset when I thought I was getting .30 at emerald level.  .29?!!!  Nice that they bumped the bottom end, but they are leaving the top end - IE their main producers - feeling hosed. 

I'm not particularly happy about this either - I certainly don't want Fotolia taking any market share from SS if I am to be paid 10c less per download. I have always been very positive towards FT and have had a lot of success with them. This is the first thing they've done that disappoints me (other sites have done many things!) and I hope Chad will listen to the larger contributors like Lisa, myself and Andres. They need to be matching SS at least.