I have full faith and confidence in FT doing the right thing by giving us a sizeable chunk of every partner sale, since they are so concerned that we get a good deal on other sites.



 

That's great, are you going to start marketing now? I'm starting to give up on you guys.

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+1.  Great that you've hit this milestone, but I've been holding off uploading more content since I'm getting a better return on my time submitting elsewhere.  Hopefully that will change.

Hi everybody,
We've seen a lot of guesswork going on in this thread as to what's happening, and we'd like to make it absolutely clear that we are not part of any sort of arrangement with Fotolia to keep prices in the industry at a certain level.
That being said, it is true that we here at Yuri Arcurs Photography, as many other photographers, have contacted amongst others Deposit Photos to make them aware of where the industry will be heading in a short time if they continue to drop prices. This has resulted in Deposit Photos having raised their prices. We encourage every photographer to engage in negotiations with whatever agency they submit images to in order to get a fair commission. The agencies cannot and should not agree on prices amongst them, so Fotolia will never negotiate any deals with Deposit Photos, but the photographers who submit images to the agencies can and should do so.

I hope this clarifies some of the questions which have been raised in this thread.

Best
Alessa
Yuri's personal assistant

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for the record

Anyone?  Sean?  Its your image that I found.

They have lots of Istock images that you can put onto canvas.  Did I miss when this was announced?

http://www.wallartcanvasprints.com/catalog/category/view/order/price/dir/asc/limit/all/id/3/?imageId=1390819&imageTitle=Cheerful%20Home%20Seller

http://www.wallartcanvasprints.com/searchresults?submit=&searchText=business+woman&premium=on&didsearch=yes

Folks,

After carefully considering your feedback, we've decided to focus on retail pricing rather than commissions. Most of the photographers that we have spoken to agree that destructive retail pricing is not good for the industry. We have worked with industry leaders such as Yuri Arcurs and Mark Butler (Monkey Business) to convince agencies like deposit photos to sell at sustainable prices reflected by the current online market leaders. We applaud their recent success and hope the trend will continue. We encourage all photographers with portfolios on this and similar sites to do the same.

Based on your feedback, we've modified our rule to allow Fotolia to decrease retail pricing to the lowest tier, if a photographer's images are being sold on other sites for significantly less, **without** modifying the royalty levels.

Please note that this rule only applies to Emerald, Ruby, and Sapphire ranked images that are non-exclusive, and selling at prices above the standard XS price. No changes will occur without prior communications with the artist.

Chad Bridwell
Director of Operations
Fotolia.com

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Reposting for posterity

Should I answer yes if the only images I have on TS are those forced through the recent changes?  I don't know if they are currently on TS, so choosing option 1 may not be currently correct.

"If you are selling images at prices much lower than the top 4 microstock sites then you might want to
review your options."

Chad Bridwell
Director of Operations
Fotolia.com

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Destined to be a true classic. 

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http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=334953&page=1

"Greetings from iStockalypse Milan.

There was a time when things were relatively simple & linear around here, from a Content perspective: we would grow the collection exponentially on a monthly basis, we would inspect those files from our contributor base & welcome them into our corpus. End of story, frankly.

The rules were simple, for all file types: if the technical quality was up to our evolving standards & if those assets were safe from an Intellectual Property perspective, they were coming in. That simple yet effective system enabled us to transform stock photography & create what progressively became one of the very best royalty-free corpus in the entire industry.

Now, to ensure that we fully support all efforts related to International Development at iStockphoto & sync with Marketing initiatives in a much more structured fashion, it is time for Content to readdress a thing or two as to how we interact with our ever growing community of artists.

For months now, we have been working on a string of initiatives aimed at assisting our community of contributing artists. I will be sharing more, way more from that front in the upcoming weeks. Let's just state that we are on a mission to simplify the ingestion process as well as the inspection process, enrich our collections with fantastic files that are fully relevant to Key Regions needs as well as making sure that we cover major markets as never before.

Creative Research & information sharing will be key to make this happen... in order to make sure that we reach the next level of our evolution.

We need a voice that speaks to the needs of our artists: a voice dedicated to our next challenge as a community.

Within this context, it is my pleasure to announce the nomination of Andrew Wedderburn, as Manager, Creative Resources, Content, effective immediately.

In this new position at iStock, Andrew's mandate is to increase strategic information flow and streamline content communication... as well as to assist both iStockphoto and Getty Images Content management teams (all file types) with Creative Research initiatives.

The power of this community is fascinating... and this is a bold day, people.

Please join me in welcoming Andrew to Content... and thank you so very much indeed."
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��to ensure that we fully� sync with Marketing initiatives in a much more structured fashion, it is time for Content to readdress a thing or two as to how we interact with our ever growing community of artists� scares me.  Does this mean in part that they will start to reject/disfavor new content that previously was easily accepted and sold well because it does not now �fully sync� with the prevailing winds/whims?  Maybe it means that they will publically ID certain types of content that they feel are lacking and give priority inspection or better best match placement to content that fills that void?

�we are on a mission to simplify� the inspection process�  Inspector layoffs possible as part of simplification?  Inspection must be a significant overhead on a per file basis and cutting overhead is an �easy� way to grow the bottom line without needing to growing the top line, just like cutting commissions is.

�enrich our collections with fantastic files that are fully relevant to Key Regions needs as well as making sure that we cover major markets as never before�  Wonder what they think the �Key Regions� are?  Guess they could be potentially big markets where Getty does not sell much currently, since they are different then �major markets�.  China?  India?  Certainly opportunities are there, but lots of problems including smaller budgets and higher IP theft.  Maybe lower prices/commissions for images sold to �key regions� to match smaller local budgets? 

I think they also throw in several randomizer elements to disguise the basic building blocks of the best match keep it ever moving so that lagereek's complete computer genius friend from Thomas-Knoll and Adobe can't ID any factors that contributors can manipulate. 

Something like files that end in an odd number get a best match boost on odd numbered days and not on evens.  Or files accepted in April get best match boost for 3 days then files from January get a best match boost for 5. 

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