Just got email from fotolia:

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Everyday we are asked if Fotolia offers a subscription service, when we say no we often lose potential clients. However we are now excited to announce that we will soon have our own subscription service. The Fotolia Subscription is a true revolution for all of us. Together we'll be able to, find new customers and increase our sales volumes.

The remuneration conditions for sales from subscriptions will be different from the traditional system. Each download will generate an income from 0.23 to 0.30 credits according to your rank. Once again, the increased sales volume will increase your income.

By default, all images will be available as part of the Subscription service but it will be possible to switch off this option for exclusive images in the "My Profile" section of your account. According to our analysis, contributors who participate in the Subscription service will see an increase in only a few months so don?t hesitate to try selling images via Subscriptions.
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Very low royalty for photographers...

br, MjP

nooooooooooooooooo!


p.s.
why there is not any official news about it on FT site?

That's bad news... I am relying on Istock and Fotolia to sell my "complicated" vectors since I don't want to give them away for a few cents... and now... Istock may be the only one left.. however, istock keeps on rejecting these complicated vectors... ugh!

Once the subscription start, I am only going to upload simple vectors and see if the sales would at least be half of SS, if it is, then maybe it would be ok.. but still.. $0.23?? That's bad!

Fotolia will have to really impress me with the increased sales volume, or I will drop them in a heartbeat.  They only make up 6-10% of my income.  I can live without them if it comes to it.

23 cents?  No wonder FT admins rarely visit the indie boards.

And I just noticed they increased their max file size to 30 MB. When did this happen? Of course, I usually use the flash uploader but only had a single file to upload this morning so went through the http upload and noticed the different size.

23 cents Sharply?  Are you seriously ok with this?  Suppose they come out and say the lower end will be 18 cents instead.  You still ok with it?  Where do you draw the line?  10 cents?  1 cent?

I'm all for subscription sites.  Shutterstock is by far and away my best earner, and I look forward to seeing how the iStock plan works.  But Shutterstock gives me 33 cents per sale, not 23 cents per sale.  Why should I accept a 1/3 pay decrease for the Fotolia sub plan?  I guarantee they won't have 1/2 the volume of Shutterstock.

People make fun of Canstock and Crestock for only giving 25c per sub sale.  Now we have Fotolia willing to lower the bar.  This is very bad.

Sure, I want to get as much as I can, but I'm not going to refuse to sell just because they aren't paying me as much as I'd like.

Maybe if people refused to sell, they would indeed have to pay you as much as you like?

I don't get the direction at all.  Prices are rising everywhere, Shutterstock is now giving 33c per sub sale to anyone who has passed a pretty low hurdle, and Fotolia comes out and decides to completely turn back the clock.  This is bound to p*ss off a lot of contributors.  Especially when it comes from a company that cannot keep their search running properly for more than a month at a time.

Actually now that I think of it, they pretty much killed their website when they upgraded to 2.0.  I assume the software changes to allow sub sales will probably take them down for another 2 months.

It was inevitable. With Fotolia what concerns me is they don't have the sales volume that SS does and are now offering about the same pricing scheme. That means they'll get some new subscription clients, some existing ones will convert to subscriptions, and I'm thinking my earnings will stay the same of drop. I don't see a mad rush new subscription clients suddenly driving up SS-level volume for them. We'll see.

Quote from: sharply_done on May 30, 2008, 04:01

Sure, I want to get as much as I can, but I'm not going to refuse to sell just because they aren't paying me as much as I'd like.

Maybe if people refused to sell, they would indeed have to pay you as much as you like?

Maybe true, but it would require to be a huge amount of committed people to make a shift like that. Don't see that happening.

What happened to the angry torch and pitchfork mob for StockXpert subscriptions? They got StockXpert's attention but it fizzled because human nature took over (perception of loss of money from opting out) and people started opting back in (lack of committment).

You sound frustrated, not committed.

I don't have a problem with a 30c commission for subs, which tend to offer high volume.  In my experience StockXpert hasn't delivered the high volume, but I still look at them as reasonable commissions considering the cost of a subscription package.

The Fotolia commission, if this is true, is brazenly low balling contributors.  I see this as a pretty big difference.  I will need 143 sales from FT from every 100 sales at SS to keep a similar earnings pace.  It sounds to me like Fotolia is saying, "Hey we'll just keep 75-85% of the profit and you will all accept it, because you always do."

The way I look at it, the best Fotolia has ever done in my portfolio is 10% of total earnings.  Right now they are about 6%.  I could live without them.  It would not hurt much at all to give them up.

Consider this -

I submit to 7 sites.  Each site requires 14% of my time, all things being equal.  But Fotolia only returns 6% of my earnings.  That's not much of a deal from where I stand.  True StockXpert only returns about 4% of my earnings, but they seem to be sharing profits with contributors a lot more fairly.  I could drop Fotolia today and still keep 94% of my earnings every month. With a little growth from the other 6 next month, I wouldn't even remember who they were.

Trust me, I can be as committed as I need to be.  I want to see the true offer first, and try to ascertain if the offer is fair.  If I don't feel it is, I'll pull out the minute I see subs replacing the majority of credit sales.  You can hold me to that.

No Dan, still not right.  Before anyone panics, read the actual words of the announcement....

"will generate an INCOME of 0.23 credits......"

I don't see what I am missing.  An income of 1 credit is 35 cents.  So 0.23 credits is 8 cents.  Help me out here.

No Dan, still not right.  Before anyone panics, read the actual words of the announcement....

"will generate an INCOME of 0.23 credits......"

With 0.23$ per download we can panic or opt-out. All these subscriptions programs make me sick. Soon, I will spend more money for my psychoanalyst than I earn in microstock. Istock exclusivity for RF and RM sites could be good couple.

I think IS has the advantage with subscriptions because they're the only one with an entirely different model. The rest of the sites just copied SS's model.

depends if u get 35 % of the 0.23 or 100 % ....