MicrostockGroup

Take a look over here: http://www.shutterstock.com/subscribe.mhtml

You can subscribe for one day which is new, download 25 images and pay 29 Euros. 29 Euros are currently $ 44.95.
That means the customer has to pay $1.80/ image. I as a photographer if I am over the $500 mark receive $0.30.
That is ~16,7% commission!! Even lower than IS.

So does that mean we are looking forward to a huge raise in May?

I just calculated for the cheapest/image subscription:
1 year = 2049 Euro= $3175 = 25X365 images
If the user uses it fully that means ~ he pays about 35 cents/image, which seems fair to me if the photographer receives 30 cents :-)
But of course the customer most likely will use it on weekends and holidays as well as on some days he might just forget to download the 25 images. I would be very interested in the real commission a photographer receives.

uhm I am not sure how I feel about those new products. Obviously SS will have to make some good changes in our comissions in may, they did mention so ......

I guess we will have to sit patiently and wait.

Freezingpictures:
I am on a subscription site which gives 50% to the photographer. Normally I get 0.65-0.75 per download. So I guess shutterstock is giving us about 20% comission from the gross sales they make. Numbers match up since ELs cost $100 and we get $20.

When I go to the link, I don't see a daily subscription?!?!

I only see subscriptions that start at 1 month.

I see both new products: the 1-day subscription costing 29 Euros (25/day) and the 1-week subscription costing 79 Euros (10/day).

p.s.: Personally I don't care at all what sale strategies they adopt. The only thing that matters to us is income (not even submitter percentages). Shutterstock as of now is doing ok, even if I'm feeling big, big fluctuations on a daily basis, the review times are getting longer (and more importantly: unpredictable) and the image lifespan getting shorter. Definitely not optimistic facts, but if they raise the per-download income enough and if the sales stabilize, I'm ok with it (no matter the products).

One more thing: What I certainly don't like is, on the other hand, the traffic analysis of SS on Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/shutterstock.com. Especially compared to iStock (which has almost a 4x rating) or by checking the 3-year stats.

The aproximate commission that SS pays out has been debated before, but I think it is generally the lowest in the business regardless of what the average really is. Yuri estimated it at somewhere around 10-15% if I recall, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was accurate.

It's terrible, and unfortunately we'd be fools to be in micorstock and not work with SS because of the overall good earnings. But just imagine how much better those earnings would be if they paid a fair commission.

This subject can be debated ad infinitum.

My view is: low commissions give the agency spare budget to spend heavily on advertising - hence the low commissions at IS and SS for many people translate into the highest actual income.

At the other end of the scale is an agency like Featurepics - high commissions, no money left for anything else.  Result: low sales, low income.

"Desperately offering lower and lower prices...."

Really?  Where have you seen that?  If anything the opposite is true - big price increases recently at BigStock, Istock, Fotolia.

What is dragging income down is the subscription agencies - yes, they are fighting amongst themselves, waiting to see what SS will do in May, and in the process they are all devaluing their businesses.

I said it many months ago and I'll say it again - the more agencies that are launched, and the more they squabble amongst themselves trying to scrape an income from the tail end of the market, the more the genuine high volume customers will get fed up and go to Istock (or to DT or FT).

None of these new agencies will take customers from the big players; 80% of the market has gone to the big guys and all the new agencies are fighting for the remaining 20%.

I expect to see more and more quality photographers go exclusive at iStock.  And the agencies will only have themselves to blame.

Well most of your posts give the impression you are already on that track.  What's the holdup? Are you waiting out your 6 months on DT? 

Personally I would not consider going exclusive on istock with their being in a constant state of flux.  First Getty brought big and somewhat unwelcome changes and now there are new owners only a couple of years later.  How long will the new owners hold onto it before passing it on to the next bidder?  And what havoc will they wreak in the meantime? 

No thanks, I like security, and just like in the other kind of stock market, that only comes with diversification.

SS is on a very good way to push the more advanced microstock photographers to IS exclusivity.

I wouldn't go expecting any great rate hike on the basis of SS's 25 shots for 29 Euros offer. They've set the price high on that because they know that anybody taking that offer up is definitely going to take all 25 pics.

As they have stated before, if customers on their normal packages took all they were entitled to they'd be running at a loss, so they aren't going give the submitters great big rises on the basis of a few people taking a one day special and probably disappearing, never to be seen again.

Come May, I predict they'll put the photographers cut up to 35c. And I wouldn't be surprised if they raise the minimum earnings requirement from $500 to $750 or even $1000 either.

As for the one day deal, try looking on the bright side. The reason you have to keep uploading to SS is because most of their regulars have already downloaded all your older shots. If they get plenty of one dayers you might find that your old stuff begins to pick up a few hits here and there. 

I dont see why theyd raise it any more than the minimum. The benefit of only selling with a subscription is that no one really knows what percentage they take- so they can lower the percentage gradually over time and itll be hard for anyone to tell. The only problem with this is the number of people going exclusive with istock, but they are influenced by far more than shutterstock, so it makes sense for them to slowly lower the photographer's cut. I bet they rise only 5 cents at a time- now itll go up to 35 cents, and the only people who get that will be on a higher "canister"- you have to have something like 2500 dollars worth of past sales. That way they slowly add a canister system.

I'm sure there will be lots of speculation on the pay increase leading up to May - I'd personally be in favor of adding extra tiers to the commission structure. It makes sense to reward longer term and more serious contributors who presumably also contribute a greater proportion of the best stock on the site. Theoretically it would be possible to introduce 2 or 3 more tiers to the equation - thereby offering serious contributors a decent enough increase, while keeping the overall cost of the increase in check.

I'd have thought it would be in the interest of the site to try to hold on to as many of the more experienced photographers who are considering IS exclusivity as an alternative.

Although there may well be greater fluctuations in earnings on IS at present, it still offers one big advantage that in my opinion hasn't been fully exploited yet - the potential to offer a progression to contribute to Getty for exclusives. For me if the equation starts to favour exclusivity on IS, I'd probably go that way and concentrate additional energies on developing a RM portfolio.

One other observation - Since I put my uploads to DT on hold about 9 weeks ago, I've haven't had any reduction in income.

I hope Shutterstock will realise they have to change things quickly.
They are chasing away European customers by letting them pay in Euro with the current dollar rate, and pissing the contributors off by paying them in dollars ,and with a low commission on top of that.