Getty and Corbis are stuck in the last century.

Well, she does have a case against entities who stole or used the images in violation of TOS, I would think. Playboy and Amazon may have decided to agree not to sell books or place ads that feature images that violate TOS. Possibly SS exerted pressure on them too? Who knows.

You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVJxvwldwog

Hopefully the case will be dismissed, since there's no way she can prove where the images came from, and indeed they could have been stolen off her own Facebook page. She herself made them available for free on the internet (from my understanding of the situation).

Unfortunately it takes a long time and a lot of legal fees answering and disproving baseless accusations.

My guess is that she's suing the photog because he's the only person she has an agreement with. It may be baseless, but it doesn't stop someone from suing you anyway, and then you're stuck paying lawyers to defend yourself.

Credit sales are only one type of sale at iStock....there are also Partner program sales and subscription sales. They show up the following month. So you're seeing the sales you made last month adding to your earnings now.

Welcome! Looks like you're off to a good start.

It's taking more than two weeks for me.

I don't know. To me it sounds as if they see Getty as primarily a mid stock agency and SS/FT as primarily microstock agencies, even though Getty has iStock and SS has Offset. Mid stock is being squeezed by pricing competition from microstock sites which are gaining market share.

If subs are now 25% of Getty's revenue, that's still a minority percentage. And so far subs have only decreased overall revenue there (judging by comments made by contributors here). They'll have to get a whole lot more subscribers without cannibalizing their own customer base if they want to make that successful.

Wow...new batch of jpgs approved within minutes.

If you have a few thousand good vectors you should be able to make that kind of money. Vectors tend to bring in a higher amount per image than photos, I believe. But you need to *not* try to copy the best-selling vector images, because they sell well for a reason and already have a good search position. It will be very difficult to knock high-selling images off the front page unless your work is amazing.

I expect SS will continue to gain market share, but I have the opposite prediction. I think they'll start making more big sales to ad agencies and pay contributors more. I say this because for the first time, I'm working in a major ad agency that has a contract with Shutterstock. It was all Getty until recently. And the art director I'm working with is impressed by the rise in image quality over the past couple of years.

Usually a settlement comes with a non-disclosure agreement, which means nobody will know what the settlement amount is. It's also possible some of the parties may be dismissed from the lawsuit (hopefully). I think the trouble here is that the model expressed reservations before agreeing and the photographer reassured her, then her reservations turned out to be correct. That might be a sticking point. However, the real culprits here are the buyers, who (perhaps) broke SS's terms. The lawyers may negotiate and drop the photographer and SS from the suit because they acted in good faith.

But unfortunately, once you're sued you're forced to hire an attorney and respond, which sucks. I know...I was sued last year (it had nothing to do with micro stock). It took a year and thousands in legal fees before the suit was dismissed. Good times.