I raised this issue in their forum ( See 8 days and waiting) I eventually got a reply yesterday from support stating we'd be paid today - I'm still waiting 

"Every Winter I get the Funk, a deep abiding darkness seems to wash over my brain", "Every Winter I lock myself away", "Every Winter I create a band new body of crap", "By January I am exhausted and depressed", "By Spring I am happy again", "This winter is exceptionally dark", "What is this great sickness"

Maybe SAD

Blimey you wouldn't want spend Christmas at his place

But I can not sell a portrait of my neighbour's child to be used in an advertisement, can I? 

Adelaide that's your choice, but you do have the options to set restrictions on how it's used if you so wish.

By the way before Pete tells you, it's a driver not pilot 

Richard .. Lawrence has responded to point 1 by explaining how we're doing things differently.  To add to this point, until you know what the average downloads per subscription are, you cannot be sure that your 25c per download on SS represents a fair return.  But let me put it this way using UK prices; if all SS clients in the UK downloaded their full quota of 750 images at UKP149, SS couldn't keep the lights on.

On your second point, well, we're not that original.  Other sites have these provisions already.  Take a look at your contract (http://submit.shutterstock.com/tostos.mhtml) with SS - see 7.f.   Were you aware of this? 

We're both reserving the right to do this.   However, Vivozoom is not reserving the right to change the contract without your consent.

If you change your mind, we'd be delighted to represent you.

Tom

Tom,

Yes I'm well aware of how Shutterstock operate (incidentally it's 38c not 25c) and also their contract terms, but you're not Shutterstock and you're offering a different subscription package and targeting a different sort of buyer, a buyer that until now hasn't had what you're offering and if what your marketing suggests you will be offering them something that will be too good to be missed from their point of view, with that in mind what makes you think they'll do the decent thing and stop at 5-10 downloads. And I'll ask again if you're so confident that they will why give the option to download 75 times that amount?
And for the record we get the same commission on Shutterstock whether the buyer downloads their quota or not, if that means Shutterstock have to work by candlelight it's of no concern to me and if that means they close the doors then the buyers will go to one of the other sites I'm on.
On your terms you'll do well whether the buyers use their quota or not, it's the contributors that face the risk.

As for the part of the Shutterstock contract you quoted it states:
Shutterstock does NOT currently deduct chargebacks and refunds from submitters for Standard License downloads but reserves the right to change this policy at any time without notice.

Now although that gives them the option to do it in the future they don't and haven't, and the only microstock site that I know of that do is Fotolia, however having been contributing to the traditional market for many years I know for a fact that the buyers there (especially the eastern block one's) are all too keen on doing a moonlight flit.
You say you're both reserving the right to do this, your contract does not state you're reserving the right, it implies that you will do it.

Don't start me on other parts of the contract!

By the way why all the comparisons to Shutterstock, I was lead to believe you're trying to be a new microstock site with a difference.

The kit you've linked to are nowhere near powerful enough for product shots, you need at least f16 for a product shot and that's subject dependant, if you're thinking of offering your services to companies you'll possibly be needing up to f32 as they're not looking for artistic depth of field on their shots. With a 150w strobe you'll be lucky to get f2.8!
As for portraits you're still going to struggle unless you're just looking to use them for mood lighting and even then they're low.

In an ideal world I'd say get a minimum of 400w to use for your portraits and a lot more if you're seriously looking to offer product shots, however if by product shots you mean you want to do some isolations for stock sites 400w would be a starting point.


 

donnelt (Tom) I take it the site is due to launch very soon, I have a couple of questions:

1. Am I right in understanding that you will be offering a subscription package to buyers for $300 a month with a daily download limit of 25, and if they choose to use their full limit the contributors net commission will be 16 cents per image.
I've taken this figure from the contract example.

2. Is it correct that if a buyers account goes into bad debt or their payment bounces that Vivozoom will take a clawback from the contributors commission relative to the images that buyer bought.

I'll be honest with you I'm not too keen on these terms, you're about to start offering a warrantied image service to buyers who have traditionally spent hundreds on photos and who traditionally quite often disappear into the night without a trace, and the result of this is that we the contributors get a possible 16 cent per image and the knowledge that we may have to pay that back knowing our image has already been used.

I have no doubt your site will be succesful with the old traditional buyers, they get 750 photos for the price that they've been used to paying for one!

The contributors seem to be getting ..........

funny he says about being exclusive yet he was on here a few weeks back asking about agencies and what to do with his rejections and from memory saying he may have made a mistake by not submitting the rejected images at least to other agencies.

I wonder if he gets paid by Fotolia for * up so much.

For the "regular" licences it makes some sense, as the commission here might be a way to push people to exclusivity...

Who in their right mind would even consider going exclusive on Fotolia?

This monday is a holiday but i still hope my payment request into my Paypal account is processed by next Monday!

The way I read the chart is that Paypal payments have been shifted to Tuesday this week because of their public holiday today, you shouldn't miss out a payment this week.

I've no problems with uploading a passport photocopy to any agency, it has my name and address on it which can be easily obtained by anyone if they're really that bothered and to be honest for �5 you could go to any pub in east london and buy a fake one anyway, so if someone wants to go to the trouble of hacking into an agency system for a black and white copy of my passport good luck to them.

This is an excellent argument.  I definitely see how that could be a problem. 

I have heard others say they blur the personal info when they upload the releases and that seems like a much better solution to me than actually executing a document with fake details to upload to the micros. 

I can see that blurring the info could lead to some agencies rejecting the release because the info cannot be read, there is a way around this and it's what I mentioned when I spoke of what the modelling agencies do, the release that you upload to an agency requires contact details on it, there is nothing to stop you putting your own address, phone number and email on the one you upload to the agency, if a model ever needs to be contacted they can come through you and as you hold the details of the model you can then contact them.
The details are not fake per se, they are genuine contact details for the model albeit via yourself.

The most important factor is that the photographer holds a release signed by the model, and to be honest if you speak in any great depth with any agency management you'll find that is all they are actually interested in, they know the info cannot be shared or used but they have a duty to make sure the contributors are aware of the legal implications because the images are available for commercial use.

On a side note as this thread was started in relation to iStock, I had an image rejected on iS because the release of a minor had the mothers details and under the mothers address I wrote 'same as model', the inspector wrote that the address section still needed to be filled in, I wrote back saying that the release is a perfectly legal document and that if they didn't like it just reject the image but check with a superior first, twenty minutes later it was approved. Kudos to that iStock inspector for doing the right thing but it also leads me to think that on a lot of occassions they don't know what experience the contributor has so they have to treat every images as if it was the contributors first. I know we all love to bash reviewers but I do think the agencies could make their job a lot easier.

My own personal view to how this problem could be avoided is that you upload one release for each model which is viewed at the agency HQ by agency staff, that release is then held on secure storage and when you upload a shot of the same model on subsequent occassions you just tick a box for the approved model, then no reviewer actually needs to see the release but they know an approved one exists and hence the possible security breaches are bypassed.
I actually think it would be a much better solution that what happens at present, and more cost effective in the long run, the time it takes for a reviewer to check a release to see that the i's are dotted and t's crossed could be time spent reviewing more images.

@ the guy above who said he's doing a release review on iStock, sorry I'm not typing all this again 




 

Hahaha... Richard, you surely have something with him. I wonder if you're the reason for which Laurin Rinder doesn't come around helping people here on msg too... 

 

Oh I'm sure it is, I don't do anything to him other than ask him to provide proof of what he say's, if he chooses to avoid me that's his choice and we can guess what his reasons are.

I am quite surprised though that Shutterstock have allowed five pages of people personally insulting this Ken Rockwell guy just because he said what he did about Rinders book.

I suppose I'm not the only math wizard here, but he says half the CD is things we already knew and 40% is about how to make money with microstock. So what's the other 10 percent?

Probably Rinder telling how he's been in the industry for years and that he shoots like Photoshop doesn't exist, or some other fanatsy.