When Yuri was on shutterstock, it said his location was South Africa.  I'm wondering if he incorporated his business there to avoid taxes?  Since he is from Denmark, I suspect it would be too expensive to run a profitable company there because of labor costs.  In fact, when I look at where the big time contributors are (like 50,000-250,000) they are usually from Estonia or South Africa, etc.  I've never seen a big time contributor in the U.S.  Is it because the costs are so prohibitive?  I imagine just finding someone to help retouch could cost $20/hr in the U.S.  I wonder if you wanted to really scale up, would you have to be in a country where labor costs are super cheap or could you somehow do it in the U.S.?  Anyone have any thoughts?

It's true that it's difficult to expand your business in a country like Denmark. In Denmark a skilled retoucher needs at least $25/hr. At PeopleImages.com the starting salary for a retoucher is $3,8/hr. So in South Africa you get 6-7 retouchers for the price of one in Denmark.

Giving an agency virtually all the money, 96.3% of it, should put people off but unfortunately it doesn't.  There's a minimum wage in lots of countries, I think there should be a minimum percentage that agencies have to pay.  20% with istock felt like the minimum I was willing to accept, when they had higher sales volume.  When they went below 20%, my enthusiasm for them was destroyed.  When we see that sites like Pond5 can do very well paying 50%, there's really no excuse for the sites paying a fraction of that.

Somebody should create a union of stock photographers who made a list of "approved" agencies that provides fair conditions for the contributors.

Today Colourbox was removed from my list of images, which I submit images for. Here is why:

For some time I have been monitoring the average payment per download on all the 13 agencies I submit images for. The average payment per download is about 0,69 USD for these 13 agencies. Colourbox was among these agencies and only pays $ 0,26 per download (0,20 Euro). By far the lowest payment per download among all the agencies. The second-lowest (Deposit Photos) pays $ 0,56 per download. For some time I believed that the easy upload system could compensate for the low payment per sale. But....

As I'm trying to make a serious business of my work I started looking at the big picture. I came to realize that I was actually supporting a company that was pushing the limit for how low you can pay the photographers in this business. Colourbox sells single downloads for as much as 9,5 Euro and pays the photographer 0,20 Euro. So they keep 98% of the sale price!

As I was looking at the numbers I realized that Colourbox is raking in money on selling our images and leaving pennies for the photographers.

Back in January 2013 I decided to contact Colourbox and hear about their royalty structure. I was corresponding with the CEO Esben Darling Meng. He wrote me a mail explaining how Colourbox was offering photo contests and fame as one of the benefits of being a contributor at Colourbox. Furthermore he wrote, that the they in March (2013) would start to pay "good photographers" as much as 50% more per sale. I decided to stay to see the changes in commissions.

I waited until April and there was no news from Colourbox. I contacted them again and CEO Esben Darling Meng wrote, that they would implement the new commission structure within a couple of months.

Today I had a phonecall with Esben Darling Meng from Colourbox. We had a 25 minute conversation. He told me that they had been busy employing new people and expanding their business. Therefore they hadn't had time for implementing a new royalty-structure and he couldn't promise me when they would do this.

This made me decide to remove my 1100 images from Colourbox. I hope that other Colourbox contributors will think about this and that selling your images for  0,20 euro (with up to 98% commission for the agency) does to the business of selling stock images. It helps them to create an agency that compete with e.g. Shutterstock, iStockPhoto and other more sustainable agencies and in the end forcing other agencies to lower their commissions. I decided that I didn't want to support that.

Finally i discovered why!