MicrostockGroup

What's happening with the recently hyped "bridge to bigstock"?   I know a few contributors were invited in January, that's the last I heard of it.  

On the Shutterstock site it says the 2 companies have different markets: "Shutterstock to high volume image users and Bigstock to users who only need a few images at a time."   In the same page it says that only "high-volume" contributors are being invited over to BigStock.  Is it just me, or is this self-contradictory?  

So are they just creating yet another outlet for Yuri, and competing with themselves on price - or could this actually be a channel for lower volume/higher price images?

Ok, so it's a perfect match - high-volume sellers and low-volume customers.  In other words, WalMart.  Huh?

Well never mind that.  What about my actual question - does anyone know the current status of this deal?

If they're migrating the biggest selling portfolios, that obviously means they want to homogenize the content, and sell exactly the same stuff on both sites. So what's the point? If the 2 groups of buyers want the same stuff, why run 2 sites?   I already know the answer: different 'pricing plans'.  

I'll bet they end up with nothing but 2 web sites, operated by the same people, running on the same servers, and selling from the same image database.  And putting all their efforts into ever-more-convoluted marketing schemes.

I hope you're right.  But I can't let go of the bricks-and-mortar analogies.  On the internet, all stores are side-by-side and the idea that you can have 2 virtual storefronts, both selling the same goods, differentiated by "decor" and pricing plans, strikes me as a boat anchor.   It might work if one site is in Chinese and one is in English. 

But separate sites for high-volume vs low-volume buyers?  Are the search results supposed to be different? Or just the fonts and colors? I don't get it. 

Not sure if you're serious or just pointing out my ignorance, but in either case I've probably expressed enough cynicism for one day.  What do I see happening here? Just another mindless corporate acquisition, the usual big talk about 'synergy' that isn't based on anything real, and the acquisition eventually shut down.

A microstock inventory is good until the clothes in the photos go out of style.  These guys don't want to spend more millions reviewing images or editing keywords.  They want marketers to come up with more ways to repackage what they already have. 

As is often the case, I hope to be proven wrong.

It's quite simple. SS and BigStock have separate employees although they are now housed in the same building. Each agency appeals to a different market sector so that's why BigStock won't be shut down.

I don't see it as any different to Getty who, as well as the 'big name agency', also have IS, TS, JUI & PC within their stable. I do think shutting down StockXpert was a huge mistake on their part though and a gift to their competitors.

Having different products to appeal to different types of customer is a well a known strategy. That's why nearly all those washing powders on your supermarket shelves are made by just two companies, Unilever and P&G.

What I'm really asking is: when are the rest of us going to be allowed in on this marvelous synergy?   I'm already getting 33 cents from high-volume buyers, now I want to get 33 cents from low-volume buyers too :-)

So as the big portfolios are linked to BigStock, all those low-volume buyers paying $1-$3 commissions are now going to be seeing tons of  images they could be getting for a lot less, next door at SS.  This couldn't be just a gimmick to herd them over to subscriptions at SS?

How can I possibly be so cynical?

I couldn't see it changing anything for buyers.

but ss helps ensure that there biggest contributers are on BigStock and they are only paying for reviewing once, making BigStock more profitable.

I was just invited last week to their program. I don't have a large  portfolio at SS but have much less on Bigstock so for me I'm quite
happy they are migrating the extra images over there.
Sales have been good but I'm hoping it will give a big boost to my portfolio's exposure and sales. 

Stockastic,

Take it from a small-time buyer, there is a chasm of difference between Bigstock and Shutterstock.  Despite Shutterstock's cheap "per image" prices, none of their subscriptions will be cheaper than Bigstock for me, until I have such a high volume of image requests from my clients to warrant maintaining a continuous subscription to their site.  And there thousands of others just like me.

I think you said something else at the same time.

This brings all the new images from the biggest sellers and producers into Bigstock and invigorates the collection there, as well as making it much larger at the same time. That means new material faster.

Another way to look at it for the artists is The Rich Get Richer

In other threads people have commented on how IS is driving out the smaller producers and new shooters. This will have the same effect. You have just been carpet bombed by a couple million new images that took no review, no keywording and nothing but a bridge.

Looks to me like SS isn't trying to kill off BigStock but trying to bring in more new and high quality material that some bigger artists wouldn't have taken the time to upload to a smaller site?

Like others the lowest sale I've had on BigStock is 50c but the quarters add up faster on SS. Different markets, different buyers, same images.

Have you ever heard of Yum brands? They all sell franchised food, they all compete with each other. They are all owned by one Corp.

Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Long John Silver’s and A&W.

Some stores are KFC/Taco Bell, I've seen a KFC/Long John Silver and a Taco Bell/Long John Silver.

As long as SS and BigStock pay me, I'm happy. I'm not so sure I see some conspiracy here to drive anything down, just to bring in more sales of more images. It's not always about us? 

The way I see it, the microstocks would no doubt like to raise prices to their customers over time.  But percentage-based payments to contributors would eat into those increases. 

So one goal has to be to get rid off of the 'commission' model and come up with new marketing plans where the selling price isn't disclosed to the contributor - in fact, where there is no simple answer to the question "what did the buyer pay for the image?".

A simple way to do this is a subscription, where no commission is paid on the up-front subscription fee; we get paid an essentially arbitrary amount per sale.  SS can raise their subscription rates without increasing payments to us; or just reduce our payments.  They're still called commissions, but they're not.

Now SS owns the brand name and customer list of Bigstock.  Watch for creative pricing schemes that move at least part of the buyer's payment out of the individual sale transaction.  That doesn't mean pure subscriptions, necessarily, just ways to disguise payments for images as "service fees".   Maybe the small buyer pays $10 a month to "join" the agency, and then gets discounts on individual image purchases; we get nothing from that $10 and percentage-based commissions go down.

I'm just speculating, of course, and don't have any inside knowledge of this business.