Hi Everyone,
 
I�ve got exciting news to share with you!  Fotolia has changed the commission structure for monthly subscription downloads for all contributors. 
 
The changes have taken effect as of today so you may have noticed some differences already.  From now on, all  contributors that are opted in to Dollar Photo Club will receive 25% of the price paid for a subscription download.  For example, a $25 monthly subscription provides 5 XXL images resulting in a $5 price per image.  Your commission on that sale will now be $1.25 instead of the flat rate it has been.  In some cases this change can result in more than a 500% increase in commissions. 
 
As subscription quantities increase, the cost per photo goes down.  The good news is that your commission will never go under what it is now .  In other words, the minimum commission you will receive is the same commission as it has always been.  This change can only affect you positively.
 
The 25% rate is for those opted IN to DPC. If you choose to opt out of DPC, Fotolia will still pay a 20% commission for subscription sales at Fotolia which in some case is a 400% increase for existing sub commissions.
 
Some more news will come soon regarding the Extended license at Dollar Photo Club.


Cheers!

Mat

And thanks Svetlana - it could be a ton shorter than the above, but it would be a whole lot ruder

May I suggest that if people are going to write, we need to keep track of who has been contacted? I don't have time to manage that right now though.

And that before you write you are sure that the contributor is (a) still on Fotolia and (b) still opted in to DPC (if you click on one of their images in a DPC search and you don't see the larger preview, it means they've opted out but it hasn't yet gone from search)? We don't want to contact the same people multiple times or badger those already opted out.

PhotoBomb contacted me with a list he'd assembled with some contributors and e-mail addresses. I started checking portfolios last night and found several were already opted out (Danny Smythe/rimglow and Daniel Dash). I have already contacted keeweeboy (opted out) PhotoEuphoria (no reply) Leah-Anne Thompson and Ljupco (not aware of DPC and will look into it).  We can't put people's e-mail addresses into a public forum, so I won't post the list, but if it's OK with him, I can post a link to the spreadsheet with the information that's in my dropbox folder.

admin edit: removed quote as requested by quotee

Second, I understand that there are improvements to the program that are imminent and should alleviate a lot of the concern about cannibalization of credit sales.  [/

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.

FYI:  The license agreement has changed to limit the print run to 500K as it is at Fotolia.  "Run limit: The Member may not cause or allow any given Work (including modifications thereof) to be reproduced more than 500,000 times"

Quote from: PhotoBomb on April 04, 2014, 10:53

And your assumption that SS sells images to make money is wrong. They sell subscriptions and other packages - Hoping & Knowing you won't use the entire allotment - that's how they make money. Actually every time someone downloads an image they lose money actually make less money.

Ok, that is another way of looking at it and has some "logic" that could be used to come up with ideas... but to achieve that kind of "success" they would have to hide all content that the customer might download, making it impossible to find something matching the customers needs. They don't win by hiding "image1" if the result is a download for "image2". And in the end the overall experience needs to be good enough to make customers renew their subscriptions if possible, right?

So I still go with "we don't care which image gets the download, we only care if the customers gets what he wants in the shortest time possible" as the most reasonable goal for any agency and how they structure their search results.

There has been often speculation about iStockphoto and their searches. Because iStock pays different percentages to different people there is some reasonable explanation why it would happen. Though I never bought into any of those speculation because in the bigger picture it doesn't make sense. The main target of all selling companies is to make customers buy something, and to deliberately keep a product hidden that they might want to buy to "save" money just doesn't make sense.

It makes even less sense for Shutterstock as they don't have different collections and even the difference between the top three of their four earning levels is less than 20%. Saving 5 cents by excluding an image that might otherwise sell would be rather stupid.