MicrostockGroup

Oh come on, its a small world!  everybody in this game, Bruce included knew the Getty reputation, long before he sold. Ofcourse he didnt do it on purpose, thats not what Im saying but he must have knew damned well it was going to change his IS beyond recognition.
heck! if mortals like us could guess it, so could he.

There's always been that speculation that Rob Sylvan might have left his post at istock under similar conditions. The timing of his departure and the things going on at istock seemed more than coincidental.

Pure speculation of course, but not an uncommon theory.

It is clear that sooner or later each of those big-micro-stocks will cut royalties for contributors unless contributors are going to find a way to defend against it... and it means to act together and raise theire voices and demand higher royalties ...particularly facing the rapid change of the dollar value that is going to be disastrous very soon... Those guys out there know very well how the global market works: the income of poor countries influences the price of labour of the richer income areas of the world in the way that the value of each service is driven down year after year... the same is going to happened with photography... in fact this has already happened in the past - the price of the image has droped so much that you cant actually find anything cheaper than the picture on SS in the market Ask yourself: is there anything cheaper than 36 cents in the US? You can even state: the cheapest product in the world is photography! and who did that? Well Microstock companies did that.

Now they are going to go further: they know they are in a posession of millions of images that have the huge market value and they can play with that as they wish: because not many people will decide to close their stock collections even if they announce one day that royaltis are going to drop 50%...

another words they deal with unorgenized labor force (microstock photographers) that is powerless and can not negotiate its condition and cannot demand any raise of sallaries as labor force of any kind use to do by strikes or union negotiations etc.

The major problem is that SS appears to to be the most influential gigant of the industry right now and they are probably preparing to take the position of global monopolist... as soon as it happen, our perspective will look pretty grim...


I work for advertisement company in eastern europe and I use SS and I can tell you the price of 30 cents per download is radiculous if you think about the price of corporate marketing actvities, Big companies get used to the fact that the photography in these days is FOR FREE. Another words Photographers have been cheated and they have been humiliated by big business and by Microstock companies who flooded the market with the free images and the problem is now that the we are now surrounded by images that we dont appreciate anymore (and it doeas not work anymore)... and the next goal will be to transofrm the static picture into the moving picture (footage) and thats why about month ago Shutterstock was calling all its contributors to change their activities into shooting movies. The age of static picture is going to the end and its price is going to drop drasticly in the following years since it has smaller and smaller value in commercial activities. Corporate marketing requires another form of imagery (particualrly in internet) to chase their commercial goals.