Very interesting discussion Re: Veer contributors images on Alamy under 'Alamy Creativity' pseud. But worth noting that the 'Alamy Creativity' pseud does not only contain Veer images! If you look closely and dig around a bit you'll see that there are lots of other Microstock agencies work in that pseud too - the most obvious being 123RF. Maybe that's why the count keeps rising? It's not Veer images it's images from loads of other Microstock sites . Check it out!

How did you decide that there was other agency's work in that group - do you have images of your own that are not on Veer and are only on 123rf that were included? The count has stayed stable again this morning, so for the moment, it appears someone has halted uploads.

I would check things out if I knew how you were identifying other agency work there.

Exactly then size does make a difference.  I'm not defending 9 cent royalties for XS images at all I'm just saying that 38 cents for an XXXL is worse.  They are both too low.

You're comparing subscription with pay as you go and that just isn't apples to apples. For a variety of reasons, subscription buyers download more - I suspect they don't use all they download, bu unlike PAYG, they don't seek a refund when it turns out they didn't use it. Given they have a use it or loose it situation each day, lots of buyers will download rather than not.

So the net is that my download total at a subs site like SS - all the others just have never managed to do the volume thing right, so subs have been more of a pain in the butt - is much, much higher than for a PAYG site like IS. The total income each month, even back in the days before SS had all the single image sales, might be about the same, but the DL total would be a ton higher from the subs site.

I think if you consider that there are n buyers spending y dollars on photos each month for their projects, from the seller's point of view, it doesn't much matter how they spend their dollars beyond what cut of it we get (share of total sales and then what the agencies hand over out of that). It's a mistake to think that if the buyers didn't have subscriptions, you'd get PAYG sales on a 1-for-1 basis instead - they'd buy, but probably fewer images.

The number hasn't grown over the weekend - but it hasn't gone down either. I am having a hard time coming up with  a scenario where this kind of delay could be possible (where delay isn't even really accurate as the numbers grew by 50% after Veer said they'd halt uploading) if this was really a priority for Veer and they had reasonable control over their IT systems.

And I'm also not happy that having done a "mea culpa" over poor communications with contributors, Brian has been absent and silent since. I think a reasonable person might have thought that "More details to come" meant within a few days - and if you can't get all the answers right away, you at least come here and say that. You'd be surprised how far an explanation and apology will go - we're reasonable folk.

Over a week's silence is just plain rude.

Welcome. I'd suggest that you get accepted to the rest of the top 4 sites if you're interested in making money selling your images.

BigStock used to be a smaller but reasonably reliable seller, but for new work, I think it's close to dead. I have been selling via microstock since 2004 and started with BigStock in 2005. I was "away" (exclusive with iStock) from 2008-11 and so uploaded as a "newbie" to BigStock last June. Sales have been just about non-existent, and I know my work sells as it does everywhere else it's uploaded to.

Another contributor said that only older files were selling for them at BigStock, so that may be the issue.

Click on the top of the sales column to resort

Up to 918,070 this morning - Brian, can you please explain what's going on?

This is largely fun trivia, but when I looked at the my_uploads page this evening I noticed that in my last 20 sales I had every year I'd been submitting to iStock represented - 2004 through 2012. It does mean that a pretty broad range of things is selling given the current best match settings, which is good (at least it's good if you have material from many different eras anyway). This doesn't happen all that often in part because I don't have many 2004 images online (I started in September 2004).

Nope

Marianne - thanks for posting. It seems as the new site has some good things going for it - the CEO has a track record in the stock business, the pricing, payout level and contributor royalty schedule look reasonable. Not sure what to make of the exclusive iPhone/Android images - but as I'm not sure any of the other agencies would take them anyway, there'd be little to loose by trying some out.

It'd be great if you'd post here when you're interested in having some of the smaller fry upload to your site (I have 2,500 in my portfolio, for example - a drop in the bucket compared to the factories you're currently getting onto the site).

Oh, and if you're accepting funding from H&F or Bain or KKR, post that too

Indeed, the count this morning for Alamy Creativity is 901,435 - it's grown by almost 50% since yesterday

For me,  the images in the Alamy Creativity Collection have been reduced by half so far.

I just checked, and the total count for the collection is 678,268, which is the same as it was this morning. Here's a link to check periodically to see if it's going down on up.

If you don't mind, can I ask you or anyone else who know this.  Have you ever had a case where a buyer purchased a standard license and then exceeds the run? 

I've heard of this only once, at SS - heard about Getty lawsuits over unauthorized uses, but not from the micros.

Given the really poor state of reporting of finances to us, overall, if it had happened, it's not clear we'd know. Once, while I was exclusive, I received a payment from SS for some usage that had apparently "exceeded the circulation limits" and the settlement was to purchase the EL for all the images it used too many times. SS passed on the EL royalties in full (the letter said that rather than deducting legal and admin expenses they'd chosen to pay in full, but I thought the legal and admin expenses of operating the business were part of their take in the first place). This happened in early 2010.