Sounds horrible *shudders*

Quote from: jsnover on June 15, 2010, 17:40

"Please note: this email is intended for you, we urge you not to encourage other photographers to join during our special invite program, we intend to only invite the best photographers for premium placement during this time."

Since I'm far from being amongst the "best photographers", I'll humbly obey their request, and let the privilege of being paid a whopping 10c for an image to the cr�me de la cr�me. 

You are always good for a good laugh . . .  so, HA HA!

So if one person signs up for a month and pays $100 and downloads the entire database in that month (70,000 images), you tell me that they're going to pay the photographers $7000?  I'm going to look up the contact infor cuz I have some land for sale.

... Ridiculous!  They had better widen their "invitation only" pool, because no self-respecting microstocker is going to give images away for .10 a download.  

I wonder who actually did send them their images as they obviously got a few contributors already.

Regarding "invitation only" - it appears that anyone can sign up right now directly on their site. This is just a huge clusterf***.

I wonder how tight the fine print is, as even I could make money downloading an unlimited number of my own images for 10 cents a pop. (or maybe we could just make a microstockgroup account that buys one of each of our images every day. I'm sure I have 100 crap rejects somewhere on my hard drive...

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of dls get restricted in the future, but the 10 cents stays.

I got that email too.... I consider it an insult, offering 10 cents per sub download. Hope most people do too. Good luck to them with building up content.

Judging by the number of people who jumped on the Thinkstock bandwagon for $.25, I wouldn't count on it. When people use the reasoning "well, 25 cents is better than nothing, right?" I can also believe there will be many who say "well, 10 cents is better than nothing, right?" too.

Hello Everyone!

I am an account rep from DreamStock.com I just wanted to chime in and say that our rates are lower than others because we are approaching stock photography in a different way, as a result our rates must stay competitive. Since we are offering an unlimited download plan, customers will tend to download more often, which means a photographer's earning power will actually increase! While we pay 10c per download via our unlimited download plan (medium images), we pay 50% commission rate when a customer purchases single images via our credit based system (extended licenses, bigger image sizes etc).

DreamStock is still in beta but we will be aggressively promoting it in the coming months as we are well financed from some big investors/banks. Those who upload to sites such iStock or Shutterstock know these sites get thousands of submissions per day, some of these sites have grown from 1-2 million images to well over 10+ million images in such a short period of time. We are inviting premium photographers to submit their images now so they get premium placement "First come, first serve". Of course if you didn't get an invite but have great looking images, you're welcome to join!

Those who join early will generally get a competitive edge over their competitors because their download counts are usually higher and as a result their images will feature more prominently near the first page of results. This is because we will be sorting our images by "Most Popular" by default.

We're just starting out but so far we've had a huge response!! We currently have thousands of photos waiting for approval and more are being added every week. We hope to surpass 1 million images within 16 months.

I wonder how tight the fine print is, as even I could make money downloading an unlimited number of my own images for 10 cents a pop. (or maybe we could just make a microstockgroup account that buys one of each of our images every day. I'm sure I have 100 crap rejects somewhere on my hard drive...

This is against our terms of service. While we welcome genuine downloads, we have strict policies against those who register accounts to artificially inflate download numbers for their associate photographers. Accounts/photographers involved in this scheme will be removed from our service.

If you have any other questions, feel free to visit us, we're generally on live chat. 

I just wanted to chime in and say that our rates are lower than others because we are approaching stock photography in a different way, as a result our rates must stay competitive. Since we are offering an unlimited download plan, customers will tend to download more often, which means a photographer's earning power will actually increase!

This is flawed thinking. All the significant subscription services rely on the fact that the average subscriber only downloads a fraction of their entitlement __ thought to be about 30-40%. The agencies would lose money otherwise as the commissions payable on 100% of download entitlement are invariably equal or greater than the cost of the subscription.

All you your plan is likely to achieve is to give you a competitive advantage over other agencies (by paying us less you could sell subscriptions cheaper) and, even worse, your plans would be an absolute gift to 'customers' such as HeroTurko and the like.

You have no chance of succeeding without the support of the major contributors and you have absolutely no chance of gaining that with a feeble offering such as this.

because we are approaching stock photography in a different way

No kidding! 

it is INSANE like you said!

Quote from: dreamstock.com on June 18, 2010, 09:56

.....

Do you really underestimate THAT much our ability to think? Do you have any idea how many newcomers / low earners  came with same blah-blah "aggressive marketing" & stuff?
Surf around this forum and you'll be much more documented before coming with bold claims and expecting to be taken seriously. 10 cents / download - not even the guys that submit to Thinkstock will work with you.
As I said, take a look around here, you're obviously mistaking us for a bunch of naives.

eheh right!

You are assuming the 10c rate per subscription download will stay this low forever, this is not the case. You may remember that Shutterstock raised their download payout from 20c to 25c in 2006 and increased this as years pass by. We will be doing the same.

That statement totally contradicts the 'business reason' you gave in your first post. I don't understand why you added a smiley above either __ unless Dreamstock is supposed to be a joke. You are clearly wasting both your time and ours.