http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

That's laying it all out pretty clearly. Fotolia appears to be pursuing a scorched earth policy - I don't know how they think they can "win" even if they succeed with this.

Even if the big fish don't want to leave Fotolia, please consider opting out of DPC.

Off to tweet this link and I hope keep letting contributors know they need to protect themselves from this latest assault on their earnings.

If I use the mobile site (on an iphone admittedly) there is no captcha.

Is getting the captcha a new thing or it not working a new thing? Perhaps the neat mobile site is only for Android and IOS?

I think somehow, this is a historic day - the first time that Fotolia responds to the wishes of contributors

It's the second (that I know of). When they first introduced subscriptions (I think in 2006 but I'm not certain of the date) the deal was crap in terms of royalty and the subs sales did not count towards your silver/gold/emerald level. A number of us withheld uploads as a protest - subscriptions live on a a steady stream of new content or people don't renew.

Fotolia upped the royalty and made 4 subs downloads count as one credit download for level purposes.

The only bad news about them making a change this time is it seems to signal they're not in a great position financially (if they thought they were strong they'd tell contributors to stuff it).

Now that the limit is set to 500.000 like the standard Fotolia license, what are the other disadvantages compared to the normal Fotolia subscription?

That you can buy into the cheap image program at so low a level of investment.

The reason subscriptions work at all (from the contributor side of things) is that the buyer commits to a large volume of purchases in order to get the cheap prices. When you let a buyer get in the door for as little as $10 - versus $249 for a month a Shutterstock - you're getting the worst of both worlds.

Matt's comments on this have not been consistent, starting out by saying this was an API partner not Fotolia. I think it's unclear whether he!s just a contributor or a spokesperson. He should get a badge if he's official.

It should be done within an hour or two at most. I'd contact support.

Just to remind people that the PR spin emnating from the nether regions of Fotolia is what you'd expect from those regions...

"Dollar Photo Club is not aimed for one-time image purchases, on the contrary, it is aimed for serious buyers, who need large numbers of images and need them often."

It's not for high volume buyers - see this contributor who was offered the membership. Someone who had never purchased a single image from Fotolia

http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/fotolia-launches-dollar-photo-club/msg365559/#msg365559

"For now the license sold via Dollar Photo Club is a Standard license and will be limited to 500.000 copies as well. "

They've taken the text about unlimited print runs off the front page this morning (it was there last night), but if you click to see the pricing details, they're still saying unlimited print runs:



They have all the credibility that DepositPhotos has - which is to say none at all.

Press release from Fotolia saying they're expanding to other countries because of this stinker's success

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/112677.html

http://www.canstockphoto.com/about.php

I may be imagining it, but I think CanStock might have increased the cash prices (versus credit prices) for images.

What I see now is that a large is $7 cash and 4 credits. I tried to look at the wayback machine to see old versions of the site but got a message saying that the site couldn't be crawled because of its robots.txt file...

So I don't know that CanStock promises 50% (a long time ago I think it did). For Fotosearch sales I think it's 20%. For sales on the site, you would get $1 for a large sale that was credit based and $2 if it was paid with cash (you'll see Regular and Instant in your sales list.

If the price for a large sold for cash is now $7 - and I would have sworn it was $5 until recently - then we get 28% of the sale versus with credits (4 could cost from $2.40 to $1.76, giving us from 41.6% to 56.8%). Even if you account for PayPal fees on a cash purchase (I pay 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction on sales from my own site), that would be $1.083. Our percentage of the net ($5.917) is 33.8%

So CanStock does much better out of a cash sale any way you look at it.

Does anyone have any old price data to see if the cash prices went up without us getting an increased royalty?

For example, reply to tweets like this with a link to a web site explaining the boycott to get the word out

https://twitter.com/AzraelGroup/status/459761389897142272

... I hope they'll develop more of the non-sub license sales, and I like Offset.

My experience with Shutterstock since returning to being independent (June 2011) is that the proportion of my monthly income that is not subs has been growing steadily. In August 2011, subscriptions were 48% of the monthly total and in March 2014 it was 36%.

...  Also waiting on Xmas images.

I sell Christmas images year round - daily, for the most part, even at this time of year. It isn't the same volume as Sept-Dec, but I think I uploaded lots of the ones now selling well in June 2011 (when I quit exclusivity) and it hasn't seemed to hamper them.

YMMV - I have no clue as to whether you'd do better building up some exposure ahead of the rush versus trying to hit the peak season and build up more exposure in a short period (but when you're competing with the established best sellers)

None of these things are easy comparisons for all the reasons noted above. In my case, I have a few from my iStock top 20 that are also in my Shutterstock top 20. In a couple of cases the download numbers are about comparable (two were 500-ish on istock) but the money total is much better for iStock.

But that isn't the whole story - iStock is (IMO) on a downward trajectory and SS upward, so although it would have been nice if iStock had continued as they were when those files were earning so well, that wasn't happening, which was a big reason for me leaving exclusivity. 6 of my SS top 20 are images created since I left iStock, so I don't have anything comparable.

I no longer upload to iStock, but as an indie, the returns are now so low that SS would be beating it easily.

The other thing looking at SS sellers, is that I have a couple in the top 20 that were there from my earlier stint as an indie and the lower $$ totals for a given number of downloads is striking compared to newer files (that have benefitted from the shift away from subscriptions at SS).