If it's just stock photographer forum posts, then I think it's petty.

But if I were running a site and people were posting negative stuff on my Twitter feed where I'm trying to market my business, that'd be a different story.

Also, y'all need to be careful. I have no idea how litigious these stock companies are. Hate to see someone hit with a libel suit. You'd be OK in a U.S. court, but some other countries have libel laws that are much more favorable to plantiffs in libel cases.

It's only libel if it's false.

Quote from: cobalt on May 29, 2014, 06:54

Is DPC really so much more important than Fotolia???

It may well be. The business model seems to indicate that they are willing to sacrifice Fotolia's sales by transferring them to DPC at a loss. That only makes sense if they are calculating on taking a huge number of customers off other agencies.

Shutterstock is much larger than Fotolia but it still has only a surprisingly small share of the overall market - a few percent, I think, I can't remember exactly what they reported - so Fotolia might have only 1% or 2% of the overall market. If DPC could trawl in 10% of the market it might give a huge boost to its earnings, making the loss of Fotolia insignificant.

That's why it is so important to try to stop them. I've long since left Fotolia but they could well take away my earnings from Shutterstock and iSTock if this works.

Anyone getting booted out of Fotolia for fighting this can console themselves with the thought that, with luck, the loss from that will be less than they would have suffered if they had just gone along with DPC and allowed it to turn iStock and SS sales into DPC sales.

I've read that Shutterstock has 4% of the potential market, but I'm not sure what market share it has vs. its competition. That would be interesting.

Quote from: cobalt on May 28, 2014, 14:21

I think those are realistic concerns if a major part of your income comes from exclusive photo sales.

It would certainly be a concern if all of the customers including those who currently use Getty Images suddenly switched to subscriptions and no new business was simultaneously generated. However it seems most likely to me that the hope would be to attract customers who currently use subscription services elsewhere.

I think that's the hope, but it doesn't seem to be shaking out that way, at least for me. My iStock sales are waaaaay down and getting lower as the month goes on. I think they'll mostly cannibalize their own sales. Whether that will translate to more $ remains to be seen.

I didn't get the email, but I opted out anyway. I come from the world of big ad agencies where we pay people for their work. I expect to be paid.

Yep. At least for headhunters and independent artists' reps, they usually take a 20% commission, and that commission is added to the person's salary or the price of their art. So if you're taking a job making $100K per year, you get that 100K, the headhunter gets 20K, and the employer pays out 120K the first year of employment. It's still shocking to me that it's completely upside down in the world of stock images. In fact, until recently I assumed that the big macro stock houses, like Getty, for example, only took 20%. I think all my colleagues probably assume that as well.

Here's their blog post about the NY opening:

https://crated.com/blog/2014/05/new-york-city-launch-event/

Illustrations seem to take a little longer. Also, holiday weekend in the U.S....maybe that slowed things down?

I continue to get favorites and thank-you's on Twitter by simply mentioning the boycott and the amount of images removed and suggesting alternative sites.

Didn't I read in their forums that iStock subs are still to come?

I got a nice thank you from a buyer on twitter after mentioning the boycott and suggesting an alternative (I suggested Symbiostock). It's a nice opportunity to point buyers to the site(s) you feel give you the fairest deal as a contributor.

It takes a lot less time for a reviewer to glance at a jpg source the first time than for the artist to go through the upload process again, submitting the source file the second time after waiting days for review. Sorry, reviewers.

I really wish they'd featured a vector illustration at the top of that blog post. Not that the photographic illustration isn't stunning, but...