any idea of approximate cost to set up a stock selling site?

what for? for our future

Getty is running out of money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-25/carlyle-s-getty-images-said-to-run-tight-on-cash-as-profit-drops

so you can expect even more elaborate schemes to reduce our royalties and present them to us as great new opportunities.

Warmpictures and Symbiostock are not good examples, especially symbiostock those sites looked terrible and even worse was that everyone had different licensing terms some of which were incoherent.  It was never going to succeed without major changes.  Stocksy is a much better example.

Well if people really wanted a long term view we'd all be selling only at pond5, stocksy and 500px. But then we all want present day cash flow as well. so in comes shutterstock and istock and we settle for a low % of the price just to see a paycheck every month.

Its a costing game, As long as we don't have a way to judge what the product costs (our images) we will be ok with selling it at any cost as long as it sells.

It's also a perceived value game. If a buyer sees an image with perfect lighting, properly organized and doctored food, shot with a full frame with a great lens and treats it in the same way as an image that i snapped in a restaurant before my meal then its impossible to get the buyer to pay more for the quality shot

Then there is supply and demand. We all crib about how the agencies now have the highest no of images and more images get added everyday. We've created a panic amongst us that the industry is going down and the only way to sell is "be less greedy and settle for lower commission". I've hardly ever seen a post that talks about how much image useage has increased. How now even if my blog needs an image I'll hit SS or iStock. Like small farmers we know almost nothing about what our final customer is doing

And then there's the finance bit, if a company is taking 70% of the price then they have that much more money to spend on marketing, promotions, meetings with buyers etc. So its hard for a new company to retain less money and be more competitive unless we all realize that if we get more money we also have to shoulder some of the marketing responsibility (stocksy did this well, with all the contributors-owners sharing it heavily on social media) maybe we all can do the same for 500px or Pond5 or Canva or Alamy

Hope someone reads this long post

Quote from: izzikiorage on August 22, 2015, 23:00

And then there's the finance bit, if a company is taking 70% of the price then they have that much more money to spend on marketing, promotions, meetings with buyers etc. So its hard for a new company to retain less money and be more competitive unless we all realize that if we get more money we also have to shoulder some of the marketing responsibility (stocksy did this well, with all the contributors-owners sharing it heavily on social media) maybe we all can do the same for 500px or Pond5 or Canva or Alamy

One problem is that some of them are using their take for CEO bonuses and stock options while their market share decreases. 

Alamy and 123rf both gave us commission cuts with the promise that their extra take was going for increased marketing for better sales but I didn't notice an increase at either one.  At 123 I'm sure it was just for the owners.  Alamy gives most of their profits to charity, but it is a charity run by the family that runs the agency.  I have tried to find out what the charity supports and what percentage of their money goes to charitable operations versus administration but was not able to find out anything - it may be that the "charity" is mostly for the family and a way of hiding how much they are earning (it also may be perfectly legitimate, I was just surprised that I could find almost nothing about it outside of Alamy).

Maybe marketing costs are so high that it is impossible for an agency that charges less than 50% commission to survive - I don't know.  Pond5 and featurepics both pay 50%.  Featurepics is hanging in there but sales are slow.  Canva pays us 35% but they are increasing sales so that is OK - they are the one agency nowadays that really seems to be doing something different to increase customers.  I guess the Adobe deal at FT also is a new variant but it hasn't translated into much of an increase so far.  The others are mainly just competing on price.  Using commission cuts to advertise their low prices, which results in the need for more commission cuts is not a good use of resources IMO.

Alamy and 123rf both gave us commission cuts with the promise that their extra take was going for increased marketing for better sales but I didn't notice an increase at either one. 

Alamy gives most of their profits to charity, but it is a charity run by the family that runs the agency.  I have tried to find out what the charity supports and what percentage of their money goes to charitable operations versus administration but was not able to find out anything - it may be that the "charity" is mostly for the family and a way of hiding how much they are earning (it also may be perfectly legitimate, I was just surprised that I could find almost nothing about it outside of Alamy).

Please look istock subscription sales, in a basic math setup, buyers give $2,5 per image to istock for monthly 100 image download, but we get $0,27 per image, it almost equal 10% commision!......

so istock get 90%, we get 10% from one subscription sales,

look what a big difference and what a big GREED!!!