What really irritates me is that Showtime and the NFL are huge, rich megacorporations who have paid everyone else for everything else, but they expect only certain people (artists) to either work for free or pay for the privilege of working.

The real stinger in this story is that the Showtime event they are requesting free art for is a Floyd Mayweather fight, and Mayweather is currently the highest paid athlete in the world.

I love that this designer outed them, and I wish more people would do the same. I read a comment on this saying that we shouldn't publicly shame companies that make these requests, that it's "unprofessional". Really? Because I would think that "unprofessional" would be targeting really good, established, professional artists like the guy in this story and asking them to work for free.

Next time I get one of these free work requests it's going right on twitter, facebook, etc...

wow, surprising, you must have been one of their early birds?...

As far as I can find in searching, as of at least May they were still doing this. So I don't think it's an early-bird thing.

Do you think Pond5 is going to be a leader?

In video, sure.

In everything else, not unless they commit to focusing more effort and attention to those parts of the business. Right now I do better at Crestock than Pond5, which says a lot considering I don't even upload to Crestock anymore.

Right now I feel like vectors and photos are just an afterthought for Pond5. Like they heard people wanted that stuff so they opened the doors for it, but then never went any further.

...i don't think new small sites have any chance to emerge right now unless they're backed by millions of $ to be spent in advertising, see the many 500px and similar sites that are still struggling to make steady sales.

we should not forget the real goal of these startups is NOT to make real profits but to gather a large enough customer base in order to be sold to the next VC and shareholder.

Creative Market was my #3 earner last month, well ahead of DT and FT. They're still new and small in some regards, but they're showing some big potential in earnings. Granted that's in vectors at the moment, but hopefully photo sales will pick up as well.

I don't get the feeling that CM is waiting for the next VC, shareholder, buyer, etc. They were already acquired by Autodesk, and nothing really has changed for us, other than that they have some additional resources behind them. Definitely doesn't seem like a startup built with the end goal of just dumping it.

...Gently but firmly let "scabs" know that they are betraying their fellow contributors.  Do it on this forum and take it to social media too, if you have to...

Define "scabs". Active contributors? Inactive? People who didn't delete portfolios?

And do you really want to take it to public naming and shaming of contributors? This isn't DPC where things started out so terribly. DP was a decent deal for a while. I don't think it's right to shame people who have contributed there just because some of us haven't gone as far as deleting our portfolios.

More 5 and 10 image packs masquerading as subscriptions. Wonderful. At least these pay decently. But I'm still not crazy about the idea of calling these small quantities of images "subscriptions".

I see there's a new hashtag getting some use today: #f--kfiverr



And in an interesting irony, Fiverr has been promoting their $5 logo design services using a Getty stock photo. At the size they used it in for the ad it's $45 for the photo.

Guess they're going well on all of these gigs selling copyrighted material if they can afford to shop at Getty.

...If we rule out any new agency or concept nothing will change, the conditions are not ideal but a lot better than most others...

If we agree to every 30% company that comes along, you're right, nothing will change.

This is how we have come to where we are now. 30% seems perfectly reasonable, when it shouldn't. We've already got plenty of sub-50% options. We don't need any more.

Not when there are more and more companies emerging that have proven that we don't need to settle for less than 50% on non-exclusive content.

Resurrecting an old one here...

I've been following a Twitter discussion about Fiverr today, and it has some relevancy to the topic of stock images being illegally resold there.

The Twitter discussion was about $5 logos and Fiverr promoting the service mush to the dismay of designers everywhere. For that discussion check out @zombiebacons on twitter (NSFW language). It gets pretty hilarious when Fiverr reprimands the guy for using profanity.

Anyway, in that discussion someone linked to a blog post titled The $5 Logo in which someone creates a fake startup with a backstory and hires some Fiverr designers to create $5 logos for this fake company.

It starts off with Fiverr "designers" posting examples of their previous logo work, including lots of stuff they didn't actually do themselves and just stole from various design showcase sites. And it ends with a bunch of designs that aren't even worth $5 because they can't actually be used.

They were mostly useless not just in terms of how they were delivered (on non-white backgrounds and you have to pay extra to get the source files) but they included what appeared to be an existing logo just copy-and-pasted into a new image, and (of course) some stock vectors. In the comments of the blog post people very easily found the stock images that were used in the purchased logos.

How this company manages to stay in business is beyond me. The stock image issue is amazing, and how little the agencies seem interested in doing about the infringements is equally amazing. Now on top of that, we can see that Fiverr doesn't care if people completely misrepresent what they offer by showing work they didn't do themselves. And they also don't care if people pass off copyrighted material, design, even possibly trademarked logos and graphics as original work.

Yet somehow they're still in business, happily profiting from rampant infringement of images, graphics, logos, vectors, and surely lots of other digital goods. And somehow no one seems to be able to (or interested in) putting a stop to it.

A couple of weeks ago I started a thread here and also over at the GR forum requesting that Envato consider raising prices and/or royalties to better compete with alternative marketplaces that offer far better deals.

Today they raised the price of every vector image by $1. And although I'd like to think they did it because of me bringing up the issue, realistically this was probably a planned increase. Regardless of how it happened, it's still a good thing.

The raise isn't huge, not the sort of change I am really looking for over there, but it's a start. I'd really like to see them also bump up royalties, but kicking up prices a bit is a nice first step. And probably the more important one at this point, as their pricing has been ridiculously low on some images. This change positions them more in line with the pricing at other places. Still on the low end, but improving.

Mike, i was waiting for Jo Ann. so, what do you do now? are we supposed to ask for an invitation by clicking the INVITE button on their home site?
do i click Jo Ann's site so she gets the referral?

As far as I know, there is no referral program for contributors. Just for referring buyers. So you can just request an invite directly through the site.

I wouldn't believe anyone telling me that they can draw any kinds of reasonable conclusions about whether DPC has an impact on sales elsewhere yet. Good or bad. It's just too soon.

Talk to me in January and I might listen. Until then, no way there is any good data yet.

...Shutterstock which also has a subscription plans that you make from $0.25 to $0.38 per image. I would say it is the same as a Dollar Photo Club income with other name: 25-A-Day subscription plan and DPC pays you $0.25 to $0.40.

So, in sum, isn't it the same? I am wrong?

Yes, you are wrong.

You can't get a Shutterstock subscription for $10.