MicrostockGroup

I just received this email:


It seems that Fotolia and Dreamstime cancelled their agreements with Pixmac. Anyone got the same email?

Something looks rather fishy...

As far as I know, BigStockPhoto is too.

This is an interesting development.

After the BigStock/pixmac/media bakery/colossus fiasco, I would have thought BigStock would terminate their relationship with them. Nothing has been said about whose fault that whole thing was. I believe that pixmac contends that it was media bakery who changed all of the contributor's copyright information, but a lid has been put on the whole can of worms, so I doubt we will ever know the whole truth.

Has anyone tried to contact dreamstime or fotolia directly? You would think if they have dissolved their partnership, there would have been some sort of announcement...

What was I thinking??  Wishfully I suppose. I've checked out both sites and nothing at all.

A search without search terms returns slightly over 5.000.000 results.

Hurray for it's about time DT. I certainly hope they follow through and I hope they pass on some royalty money to the contributors who were ripped off. I personally opted out early on, so I don't think I will be affected, but there must be many more who will be.

'Hurray' is a bit strong to say the least __ after all it was DT that chose Pixmac as a partner and who gave them access to our property.  I'm glad that DT appear to have caught them with their hand in the till but we still have no way of knowing how long this has been going on or to what extent.

I don't understand the need for these 'partners'. Our agencies already take a big enough slice of the money our sales generate, certainly enough to do their own marketing. Introducing further middlemen can only dilute our cut yet further, reduce the transparency of the transactions and open our work to theft. We don't have a clue what is going on with these partnerships and have no way of finding out either.

Btw, from a few cursory searches it would appear that my images have disappeared but they do still have lots from contributors on here (e.g. Lisa 1800 images, Baldrick's T 900 images, Yuri 28K, etc).

Hurray to the taking back of your 'Hurray' 

I've checked and it turns out I was always opted out of partnerships at DT. I became very sceptical about the wonders of 'partnerships' when Istock kept breathlessly announcing partnerships or affiliations with various other business but none of them appeared to amount to anything.

Pixmac used to have some of my images though, possibly through FT. Does anyone know how/whether you can opt of of these partnerships at FT?

PM is also scraping from 123RF, or at least they were as of about 2 weeks ago. Just FYI.

Exactly what I was thinking. We're find out second hand, after the fact.

Only reason I ever looked to see if I had anything up Partnered on Pixmac was because of what people posted here. No sales and now un-partnered by reading here. Oh wait, it's Microstock, no regulation, no open communications, fly by the seat of your pants, change the rules whenever it helps the agency and keep the suppliers in the dark or try to hide the truth.

1. We have sent the email mentioned above only to photographers that requested information about Pixmac’s source of photos during the partnerships. The emails were taken from our customer support history of questions only. We thought it is fair to tell those photographers about the change.

TO rimglow: Please, could you state your email here? We will get back to you with n exact date and time when you communicated with Pixmac customer support. We’re not crazy to do any “robo calls”.

2. The statement about 11 million images was taken off the homepage.

3. BigStock was never a direct partner of Pixmac, it was Colossus Agency (Media Bakery). And after the discovery of the issues discussed elsewhere, Pixmac immediately took offline the content and ceased the partnership few days later. We asked Colossus for more information about the issue, but we don’t have it yet.

4. Unfortunately downloads of photos supplied by agencies are not reported in photographer reports on sourcing agencies. There’s no way how Pixmac can change that. Our way to change this was to set and stick to the Declaration of Fair Stock Photo Agency, where photographers clearly see which downloads are via the agency directly and which are via distributor such as Pixmac. For example, this already allows Pixmac's direct photographers to sign-off any distributors of Pixmac if they want. With a single click.

5. The reason why Pixmac might bring extra value "as a middleman" is that we might be smarter and more effective in marketing. And we can reach new customers in several other countries. In the end all parts of the chain should be happy. On the other hand we take all the issues discussed here or on other forums always very seriously and we are taking steps to explain and avoid any of them in the future.

In the Colossus case it seems so. Usually it is forbidden by the supplier. We were never allowed to resell the content we got from agencies like Fotolia or Dreamstime or any other agency to third parties.