MicrostockGroup

Same here, living in EU and paid in USD. I had no idea there was a earnings difference between currencies. I assumed contributors that are paid in euros or pounds get less credits to compensate. It seems I was wrong.

Also if I remember right when I joined there wasn't an english version for the european sites...

I wouldn't mind there being such a massive differential __ if contributors were actually given the choice of which currency to convert their earnings into.

Of course under those circumstances you can be certain that FT would ensure the difference disappeared PDQ. It's not much of a surprise that the differential appears to work hugely in their favour with 70% of contributors reporting their earnings in USD, the lowest payout, and just 9% in Euro.

Why can't they just be transparent and fair and pay us a percentage of the actual sale price like every other agency? That's not too much to ask is it?

maybe we should open another account in another currency  and start uploading there?

I signed up to Fotolia Germany in Jan 2007, payment is in Euros.

My US sales account for less than two percent of my total sales. I am sure that is no coincidence, because selling to a US buyer (who paid his credits in US$) and paying out to a Euro contributor (who is payed in Euros) is the worst thing that can happen to Fotolia.

So if Fotolia would decide to change their current system (i.e. payout in percent of the sales price in the respective currency, not in percent of credits), I am sure they would change some bias in their search engine leading to a different distribution of sales...

I remember that when I sign up on FotoLija Min payout was 500$ by wire transfer with they 30$ fee for transaction and in this time my country was not supported by MoneyBookers like PayPal today, now and in this time of my startup in MicroStock I wonder that I will receive that payment in 20 years...
 
So my first priority was to setup all my micro accs to USD to avoid additional conversions between currencies and there are no too much rooms to choose (Only one). After half or one year MooneyBooker was open door for my country so it was not difficult to have payment in 100USD in first time and now I think it is lowered to 50$ for payout.
In this time USD had about 30% bigger value than today compared to Eu...

No, there isn't unfortunately.

I asked support to switch from GBP to EUR - back when fotolia had a very unfavourable credits to pounds conversion rate - and they told me I should open a new account in another currency, but no way of transferring pictures.

Which is a weird answer anyway, because I think it's not allowed by their tos to have multiple accounts actually.

But now I am glad they didn't allow me to change: having some payments in GPB allows me to buy things on Ebay UK without paying paypal conversion rates twice.

It's strange my girlfriend has hers in Euros because she registered overseas.  Guess that's a positive right.

I initially registered via the US site, thus getting paid in USD, but decided to make the switch to Euro.

I contacted support with a (thought through) request / approach (Uploading all images  - roughly 1500 in total - to the new account, then closing the old account via FT's support, and only then submitting the uploaded images to the new account)

My findings:
- Uploading all images prior to submitting the lot took a lot of time, but hardly any effort (upload speed issue)
- FT support closed the old account within a day or two
- Submitting them took less time - MR's are conveniently stored by upload date, and with that knowledge from my old account, I took that into account on determining the upload order). In total, it took me about 12 hrs.
- Review was swift; the first images were already approved before I finished submitting the lot.
- More images were accepted, compared to the old portfolio. A lucky break, I guess.
- Sales levels improved considerably. Not sure why, they just did.

In hindsight, I think it was worth the effort.

Same here. The time I signed up, 1 credit was 1$ but when checking the EU site 1 credit = 1€ which is totally unfair. I must have missed the option to sign up in Europe, even if I had to fill in my location, I ended up at US site.

I wrote to support and they told me it was not possible to transfer or change your account this way but advised me to make a new account on the EU site and they will then transfer my earnings from one account to another. So they did, nice from them, however I had to re-upload all my files again, not being sure the same will be accepted again  . Luckily I only had about 20 files accepted

Grtz
Litu