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1. Do you report the full sales price of a image / item (not the commission from Envato) as revenue to your local Tax Authorities? If not you are committing a tax fraud.
Envato currently insists that the complete sales price is YOUR income and you have to deduct later their commission as your expense.

I'm in the US and I'm not a lawyer, but I think that regardless of what Envato calls the money they pay us, I think I have a reasonable case that the money I receive from them (especially as I don't know who the buyer is or have any possibility to influence the price or terms of this "sale" I made to the unnamed buyer) is my income, not the amount the buyer paid Envato.

Just because they call it something doesn't make it so.

There are a number of situations - companies that tried to call hourly workers managers to avoid paying them overtime, for example - where one party tries to change the definition of a transaction so that it contradicts what's actually happening. I think that's what Envato is trying to do.

I will stay for the moment, but if I thought for one second that I'd have any tax issues as a result of them trying to impute income to me beyond my royalties, I'll leave.

I have no problem with free photos as long as the ones you get for free are clearly not as good as the ones you pay for - as noted above.

In everything I've seen to date - and I looked at the Canva blog post, though not at the many sites they reviewed - it's very clear what the difference is. Free stuff generally looks like it was someone's own snapshot - best way to see that is one of the sites that runs paid shots next to free ones, like this:

http://freerangestock.com/search.php?search=woman+computer&submit=&match_type=all

I still see things like Dollar Photo Club as a much bigger threat - full size images and illustrations for $1 with no volume commitment. That gets you really good quality stuff for a pittance.

I did a few searches, but I don't see prices on anything.

You can click on a contributor's name, but that just goes to a page with no information and no portfolio.

If there are search results, you get a minuscule window with mini thumbnails and have to click a link to see them all. When you do see the results, clicking on the thumbnail just puts up a hover preview - you have to click on the three dots to see more information

Everything seems like too many steps to get the simplest things

Then there's the notion of requesting things. iStock tried this ages ago (Buy Request) and shelved it because it just didn't work well. There are a number of sites with "briefs" where contributors compete to get the sale (or a lot of times no sale). I don't see how this model works at microstock prices. iStock's request forum worked really well for a while - designers and contributors hung out there and could interact. They nuked all of that; not sure how you get the hoped for interaction going on a new site - photographers don't join without buyers and buyers won't bother without contributors...

There seem to be so many things left unsaid - about when you take 10% vs 20%; are there any standard licenses you offer or does each contributor invent their own; do you have FTP upload and do you read IPTC data; What's this limit of 10G of storage with a note about e-mailing if you want more? - "You'll start off with 10GB. There are plenty of other ways to increase your storage for free. If you need mass storage email us. "; do you do any marketing at all or is it all up to contributors; do you exercise any control at all over model/property releases, copyright issues (vectors that are traces of another person's photograph, for example)?

Why get the agency involved? If you want to work with someone on a project, submit the images and split the earnings with the other person, you can do that right now - just draw up a contract.

I don't know that the naming is right - royalty free isn't really what the following terms map to IMO - but from my three sales in January, here are the two variants called "royalty free"  but limited by use and time:

Country: Worldwide
Usage: Non-Editorial Electronic and web uses, Use on website and social media, worldwide for 5 years.
Media: Corporate website, single design

Usage: iQ sale: Magazine, Editorial print and digital use. Up to DPS, inside.One time use only

The other RF sale was the largest amount - it certainly seems reasonable to offer fewer rights for less money if they have a market for that.

The only problem with the limited rights sales is tracking that buyers don't overstep their licensed rights (something that Canva neatly avoids). I can't imagine Alamy really pays much attention to that unless a contributor brings it to their attention.

I guess credit sales is pretty much history now, on all sites.

Not really. In January, my subscription sales at Shutterstock were 34% of my total earnings - meaning that 66% came from OD, SOD and ELs. It has been around 40% subs for quite a while now.

At some other agencies that got bitten by the "I want to be Shutterstock" bug, like Dreamstime, subscriptions ate into credit sales and reduced overall earnings (their level system notwithstanding).

SS started out as just subscriptions and has slowly and steadily been growing their non-subscription business. I'm not thrilled about subscriptions, but as part of an overall mix of sales, it can work. I am guessing that the growth of SS's non-subscription business has largely been at Getty's expense.

Edited to add that I looked back at Jan 2014 and Jan 2013 and the subs sales in each of of those and 2015 are all within $3 of each other, but in Jan 2013 subs were 54% of my total, Jan '14 44% and Jan '15 34% (I was back as an indie in Jan 2012, but was still ramping up; subs then were 57% of the total).

In other words, all the growth is coming from the non subscription sales.

So they're revamping their invoices:

http://marketblog.envato.com/news/new-statements-invoices/

and have written a blog post out of their take on their new business model

http://marketblog.envato.com/news/envato-market-platform/

I made a forum post about how this just doesn't work at all for PhotoDune - if it were a marketplace (like Creative Market) - I would get to decide what was for sale and at what price. It isn't and I don't.

And my fun fact is that my last sale was 1 day ago for $1 (don't remind me; I'd rather just watch the balance go up)!

Hope they will kill DPC.

It'd be nice, but the Twitter spam (the paid "isn't DPC wonderful" stuff) is still alive and well, plus Matt Koslowski is talking them up today - groan!! Given how he makes his living, it's a real shame he's supporting this POS "agency":

https://twitter.com/MattKloskowski/status/560520522229096449/photo/1

With those low royalties, does that mean they only got small sizes of your work as JPEGs? Not saying fraud is ever good, but better small JPEG than the vectors. DT does issue refunds for fraud, so you'll know soon enough if that's what this was. I didn't see anything unusual at DT, but perhaps other illustrators might be the ones to check with

Fingers crossed it's legit

I'm still hosting my site, but the number of sites and images in the network is steadily shrinking. And it's been a while since I had a sale - but I think a couple of the illustrators have been doing OK.

http://symbiostock.info/

It was 175+ and about 290K images before the guy who started the project walked away. Leo Blanchette is the author of the pro plugin (it was $75; not sure what the current deal is); you'd need to get it from him, I think. But I'm honestly not sure that it's a great idea to start a new site given where things are at the moment.

I did a search for office and got three images - the closest to an office was a phone receiver dangling against an outdoor scene.

I searched for Aruba and got pictures of dogs (none of which had the keyword Aruba, so the problem isn't spam)

If buyers can't find anything useful when they search, we don't even get to the discussion of terms, royalties, payments, etc. You don't appear to be ready to even ask for contributors to upload.

I'm reading this thread, and is making me afraid of opening the form....because this interview is sounding so much more complicated than filling a regular W9 form if you are in the USA?   Is this form a catch all sort of thing for people worldwide??

With a regular W9 form is pretty straight forward...

I'm a US taxpayer and it wasn't hard to fill out - once you identify as a US resident (I think it asked about citizenship too, but I don't remember) - it's as straightforward as filling out a W-9.

http://www.insightpartners.com/about/

...Remember the Getty deal where the venture capitalists wanted their $500M and Getty went into deep debt to do it? This is the same thing. ...

Just a point of order Venture Capitalists and Private Equity companies are both sources of financing, but are very, very different beasts IMO.

Generally, venture capitalists help get a business started (cash in return for an equity stake in the company) and "get out" once it has gone public by selling their stock - so they can go invest in some other startups.

Private Equity firms buy up businesses in some sort of fiscal weak state (in Getty's case it was a falling stock price) and then split them up, or try somehow to spiffy them up so they can sell in 3-5 years. They are more like vultures than any sort of helper. Hellman & Friedman couldn't get out of Getty and so did this awful thing called dividend recapitalization where they saddled Getty with masses of debt so they could get their "dividend". They did that twice, I think.

I don't see anything amiss about the VCs who invested in SS before it went public selling to move on to other things. SS isn't a startup any more.

My original question above, which apparently offended the OP, was only seeking some wisdom (I'm largely ignorant of the ins and outs of this stuff) as to whether this was something special or unexpected. Ron wanted to know the same thing. Seems a reasonable question.