Where I see a benefit in such distribution partnerships is when the partner is an agency I cannot simply submit to myself, i.e. a market / customers I otherwise would possibly not reach. But if it is an agency like Pixmac, that easily lets me submit my content on my own account (if I wish to do so), it would just mean a reduction of my share of the sales price and makes no sense at all.

Thank you dirkr for the comment. Our approach at Pixmac is to bring higher volume of sales to all YayMicro contributors instantly. Some of them prefer to spend time on uploading to many agencies, some just prefer one hub such as YayMicro. The time saved can be more valuable than the revenue split. That is why I hope the API partnership is beneficial for all parties. For us at Pixmac it saves time and we can focus more on marketing/selling the content.

As for the trust in the industry: Leaf and Linda are right. We'll make everything technically possible to make a perfect system and I advice you to watch/test us anytime too. In the end the amount of eyes might tune the system to perfection...

Seems like every few months something problem pops up about pixmac (do a search on 'pixmac'), trust takes a long time to rebuild especially when new problems keep coming up (although that's better than istock's almost daily issue LOL)

I don't know how iStock handles that, but we try to explain/fix that and avoid that in future. And yes Pixmac is related to a few problems, some were our mistake, some were not. But as we're connected with several agencies, it's more probable that we're involved. It's easy to mask anything if it's only one agency/authority. Pixmac is being watched by many eyes. I think that's good, but also brings in some challenges.

Commissions are different between the two docs you posted
You're T&C still talks exclusivity which you say in one of the docs is Exclusivity is something like DRM in music. It doesn�t work long term.
"We�re trying to become a true Open Company" good and thankfully you've got rid of the $0.02 commissions but "Subscription    30% ($0.25+)    40% ($0.25+)" implies that higher amounts are possible for subscription sales??, however based on your front page pricing, artists cannot recieve the more than the $0.25 minimum???
still have credits earned expire in 1 year so if you havent made payout too bad you lose your earnings.
etc etc

The exclusivity in ToC is going to be fixed soon. As for the share:

- we've removed expiration of credits earned by photographer (a while ago)
- we've removed the possibility to buy the smallest size in subscription so the revenue usually doesn't fall even close to $0.25 (same as SS)
- homepage was innacurate, that's being fixed
- what "etc" do you mean please?

Thank you for understanding.

I'm still a little baffled why you don't just go for it and simply become a 'full-on' microstock agency. That's where the real money is surely? You appear to already have the staff, the offices, the hardware and the development expertise to make it happen. If you are experts at SEO and also have unique access to particular markets, as previously stated, then that can only help not hinder.

The more significant contributors, like Elena, that you are representing the more confidence that others will have to trust you and believe that you can build the sales to make it worthwhile uploading.

Well, you're not the only one. Believe me.

As in every business, it's 80% marketing 20% development. There's no reason to build another small agency as any other, doing only their own business. I hope we're all on a same boat and if there already are agencies with a millions of images, why to build the collection again on our own and loose time/money?

My idea, that obviously is challenging, is that we'd focus on marketing, reaching new markets, doing smart advertising and experimenting with new ideas while failing and pushing our borders further. The idea is internally called "Stock Photo Food Court" and means that Pixmac would be able to get variety of content from micro agencies, traditional RF agencies and contributors to one site. And then by focusing on UX/UI (I'm a designer by trade) achieving the best site to buy "any" picture.

The problem comes with the "being competitor while being partner". Although I'm sure we reach markets and market segments that wouldn't be reached if Pixmac was not here, we surely overlap with others. But the truth is that in the end the amount of money to split is bigger. I'm sure it's win-win. But if you look at that from other perspective we might be only a strange API reseller that grows too fast.

Thank you mantonino and lisafx for giving us a chance. I'll try to do everything to work out this difficult situation.

@zager - I would really like to believe you that there is no problem with Pixmac.  My goal is to make money and removing a legitimate agency that sells my images and pays me acceptably for that is not in my best interest.  But please don't blame contributors for being concerned after three of your major affiliates have severed their relationships with you claiming some sort of fraud.  

If you really haven't been caching and reselling images without payment to your  partners or contributors, then you need to work it out with Dreamstime, Fotolia, and 123, because that's the rumor, and it is pretty persuasive IMO.  

Well, as I've explained in our company blog (http://blog.pixmac.com/2394/explanation-of-single-purchase/). The reasons for all the three agencies were different.

Unfortunately, I can�t mention the company names, due to the nature of the legal processes. But the information was in the blogpost above. This is how it all happened:

As for the first agency that discontinued contract with us, the reason was that both companies are competitors in a certain country. And as we acquired the photographers content from a closing company in that country the situation got difficult with the first agency.

The second agency made an allegation after that independently. And we're working that out with them = explaining everything.

The third agency was a result of domino effect. In other words a mixture of loud photographers on forums, unclear information at that time etc. It was a security step on their side as they don�t want to loose photographers (And I understand that). There was no other issue (technical or legal) such as the allegation of the second agency because of which it all happened. We are currently in the termination period with the third company.

No other partner (out of 20+) terminated a contract with us.

I got the same e-mail today. I want my images removed from Pixmac but stay in the PP at 123RF.

Thank you Wolf for being honest.

I've never uploaded any of my photos to Pixmac, never the less I find a large amount of my portfolio there...Now a silly question to Alex @ 123rf, should it be the responsibility of the contributors to contact Pixmac and fight to have their photos removed from their site, or should it be the responsibility of 123rf, Dreamstime etc. to make sure all photos are removed from the site?

You can contact either 123RF or Pixmac. We will remove your images immediately upon request.

The answer to your question is yes, most definitely, but pixmac hasn't been behaving according to the terms of the API program. You could email pixmac directly and demand your images be removed immediately. I had to do that.

May I ask you where do you source such information? We are fully behaving according the terms of the API. Termination notice comes prior to the actual termination date.

Installing a cache system allowing buyers to download an image X times without reporting it to the agent is frankly said theft. Cache systems don't get programmed and deployed just by mere accident: it's deliberate. I still see the elephant in the room but I don't expect it to disappear any more. You've ruined it  

Without such system we pay twice or more times for any technical issue the supplier had in their system. Or any connection issue the customer had. That's fair for you?

Can you explain in detail where all these supposed 'additional markets' might be that apparently you have access to but the main agencies don't? In the age of the internet I really don't see how that can be.

It would be a list of things that's fairly easy to copy by others. So just one example. We're a Czech company and I personally know most of the designers in the country. Just because I do design since early 90s here. I even contributed to SXC before StockXpert was born. I mean that any other agency can try to be successful here, but because I have the contacts and it's easy for me to negotiate a good price for advertising here we're pretty successful here. The beauty of that is that people from other countries think that Czech Republic is not an interesting market. And maybe is still full of apes jumping on trees. That illustrates that even that everything is reachable by any agency, no agency can reach everything.

I think it is the history of these partnerships that has left a bad taste in our mouths. StockXpert forced migration to photos.com, IS and thinkstock, DT with their mysterious myspace or print partnership, FT with it's unannounced everything, and the list goes on. It's not so much that partnerships are bad, but they should be a little more transparent. Certainly, they should be optional and not forced on us. Everybody has a unique business model they are running, so every opportunity is going to be perceived differently. I just want the option to control those opportunities and not learn about them when something goes wrong.

Completely agree with you cthoman!

To:  gostwyck, cclapper

Seems so. Unfortunately these ideas are not ours although I can't prove it.

To: WarrenPrice

Thank you. In the meantime we'll do everything possible to show that our intentions were fair.

To WarrenPrice: I agree.

To FD-regular:

They must have had an eye for a while on these creative practices to be sure and gather enough evidence.

So far it seems to me that it was a matter of few days. I guess that if it was being watched for longer period of time we would be notified sooner that we have a bug there. So we'd fix it sooner. The technical problem was there (as described in the blogpost) and was fixed immediately after its discovery.

The elephant in the room, the caching, was ignored once again. Can we cut the cr@p about "transparency" and just get that huge Colossal beast out of the room?

There's a blogpost about its extent and technical description above in the discussion.

Just thinking:

The whole microstock business is based on trust. And the trust is really fragile. We did a mistake, we investigated it, we posted a message about what exactly happened as soon as we could. But that is not enough. The problem when being an agency is that there's no way to communicate 'the honesty' or 'the fairness' to the contributor. You can write press releases, you can try to post open reactions on forums, you can meet people from the industry to show yourself and your intentions. But when you make a mistake it turns against you.