He is a good illustrator, but I didn't really examine if his work is original or not. That was last year. I tried to find some examples to show you guys, but StockXpert is closed, and IS rejected him. I tried to find some of his illustration on SS, but I am not even sure if he submits there, so I gave up. I remember there was some tree with swirls, and some illustration of few leaves in a glass sphere. Of course there are many illustrations with these concepts, but the ones he showed me were obviously copied. They looked almost the same. And for these two examples his illustrations were almost a year older than the same illustrations of another guy, but.... maybe IS found some of his illustrations that were newer than some others... So, anyway, what I wanted to point is that ye there are many, many similar images, but I guess agencies (at least Istock) tries to keep an eye on this problem. I honestly doubt this can be stopped. We have to live with this because it's that kind of a business.

Hello All,

I read some of the responses yesterday right before I went to bed and was tempted to draft out a reply but after re-reading my draft, I found it to highly personal in nature and would prove to be highly embarrassing if I were to post it.  After sleeping on it I believe I'm in the right frame of mind to write my response in a more logical light.

Let's consider the scenarios:

Scenario 1:
Customer purchases 5 credit version from us. They employ their own 3rd party agency for the enlargement, for which they'll be charged at around the same price.

Your earnings: Max $2.50
Our earnings: Max $2.50
How much did you earn from the enlargement process: $0.00

Scenario 2:
Customer A purchases 5 credit version from us. They employ their own 3rd party agency for the enlargement, for which they'll be charged at around the same price. Customer B purchases the SAME image, also goes and employs the same 3rd party agency for the enlargement...

Your earnings: 2 x Max $2.50
Our earnings: 2 x Max $2.50
How much did you earn from the enlargement process: $0.00

Question: Do you think Customer B will get the enlargement for FREE when the same agency has done the enlargement before?

Scenario 3
Agency purchases your image on behalf of a client, creates an entire ad campaign for the client, edits the image a little and puts in some copy.

Your earnings: Max $2.50
Our earnings: Max $2.50

Question: Can you ask for all 3 parties (Agency, Contributor - You and 123RF) to share the earnings to be split in 1/3 shares?

Scenario 4
I purchase some anti-virus, say AVG. I go over to my client's place, and clean up their PC and perform an installation of AVG. I later billed the client, with the cost of AVG purchase built into my invoice.

Question: Can Grisoft request for 1/2 of what I earn with their Anti-virus?

Scenario 5
A plumber purchases a stop-cog and goes to a client's place to replace a faulty stop-cog. He charges whatever he wishes to charge at a level that the customer can accept.

Question: Is the plumber then, obligated to share his earnings with the stop-cog manufacturer apart from the price of the stop-cog itself?

Coming back, I hope this puts things into a clearer picture for everyone. Please stop looking at 13.3% as being unfair because under a free economy, ANYONE can add on value to your product and charge 100% for that service and leave you out of the loop entirely. I believe with 13.3% we have been equitable as we have built in asset management, infrastructure, bandwidth and a market place for which these transactions can take place.

As for the questions that Thomas has posed:

1. How much is 123RF making, the answer is simple:
We make 25% - 13.3% = 11.7% from the transaction. Why we come up with 13.3% for you and be happy with a smaller cut? Because it's easier for us to calculate earnings and we do treat you as equal business partners.

2. Why should an image get charged again and again for the same blow up.
Because it's easier that way to view it as a request on the client's behalf. At the moment, these downloads are very sporadic, we receive at most 3 per day, and 1 per day on average. The likelihood of another enlargement occurring on the exact same image, at the same size is remote. Therefore, for the sake of simplicity we simplified things further in this manner.

3. We have (wrongly apparently) thought that we have done everyone a great favor by introducing this as no matter how we cut things, everyone seems to benefit, hence, opting out, was not built in. I would like to ask you this question now: If you'd like to opt out, kindly let me know and we will try to build an opt out mechanism for those who wish to opt out. I am sure that some of you here are programmers and don't like to have lots and lots of if...then....elses.

Now for the question "Why does 123RF seem to think this is a piece of GOOD NEWS?"
Wise men say, "13.3% of something is always better than 100% (or 50% or 33.3%) of N-O-T-H-I-N-G!" We'd honestly thought that our share of 11.7% is good, because we got nothing previously, and your share of 13.3% is a little better than ours. So everyone should 'technically' be happier!

Thank you, if you have any further questions, do let me know.

Alex
for 123RF.com

Quote from: gostwyck on March 06, 2010, 02:45

They closed on 11th Feb and all business has been transferred to IS. Why would you expect the site to be 'up'?

I thought they said they were going to maintain the site for access to account information.