First three images free.  Do photographers get anything?

Fotolia Teams Easyspace to Provide Free Stock Photography with All Web Hosting Packages
Wednesday, 01 November 2006

Further to recent partnership announcements and additional web hosting features additions, Easyspace are pleased to announce yet another high profile partnership.

From this week onwards, Easyspace will be teaming up with Fotolia to offer all web hosting customers a great deal on stock imagery and illustrations � allowing them to brighten up their websites with professional imagery.

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

Photographers and designers constantly update Fotolia with thousands of new photos and illustrations each day, while photographers and designers receive commission from each photo sold and revenue from advertising on the free section.

Above all Fotolia is a huge community of creative people who enjoy sharing, learning, and expressing themselves through forums and blog.
Sarah Haran, Managing Director of Easyspace, said "This is a great partnership for our customers and one that allows them to be even more creative with their web sites. Fotolia are a large company, and with over 1.5 million stock images online, our customers are sure to find what their after."

The partnership allows Easyspace web hosting customers to enjoy free downloads on initial signup, and a discount of 10% on every purchase there after.

�We are excited to be collaborating with Easyspace. Every website needs images, and collaborating with one of UK�s most successful web hosting companies is a great way to enable the UK market to discover the creative service Fotolia provides. I hope Fotolia will help bring increased value to Easyspace customers� says Oleg Tscheltzoff, President of Fotolia.

I posted a question on the Fotolia forum about the new partnership and here is the response from admin:

"Hello

This is a normal type of promotion deal. The cost of all that is paid for by Fotolia entirely.

It does not affect what a photographer gets paid.

The way these deals work is: if people are offered any free downloads, Fotolia pays for these and the photographer gets paid in full.

If a discount is offered, the buyer buys, say, 10 credits, Fotolia tops up that with the extra credits. Again, Fotolia is paying for these credits.

So we are paying people to come and try your images out.

In the case of Easyspace, all new members get 3 free credits. This gets them registered and trying the service out, after which we hope they will become regular buyers.

I hope this stops any concerns over this.

Fotolia always pays. The photographers never lose out a thing.

You will benefit as we gain more customers. If people come, try the freebies, then stop, Fotolia will still pay the photographers.

So, this is another great thing Fotolia do for its photographers, helping to make Fotolia the best stock photography company for photographers and buyers around the world.

Eugenie
Fotolia UK"

You can read the entire post here:

http://www.fotolia.com/forum/?thems=24459

Wow is this a first, FT actually paying attention to one of your posts at their forum?

Well, maybe with all of the microstock fiascos happening, and contributors starting to band together, they are starting to listen.  They might have also watched the iStock/VOX fiasco and learned something.

It would have been better if they had made the announcement on their website themselves, but a quick response was the best that one could ask for in this situation.

Now if they would only listen to their contributors and allow modifications to keywords AFTER an image has been accepted...

whoops my bad