Hi guys,

The streaming option is, as I mentioned, a great way for bloggers and small businesses to get into image licensing. Most of our customers who use this option are not professional image users. These are people who have never before licensed an image, and their budgets are very limited. There are absolutely no customers who sign up for the streaming plan and use thousands of images. We also have an active program to get streaming customers to upgrade to our other plans. These plans also pay 50 % commission to contributors, which means that earnings for these sales can reach up to $49.50 for a single image. 50 % commission is fair, and we aim to among the agencies that pay a fair commission.

We will look into getting more editorial content onto YAY Images as well. So far editorial has not been in big demand, so it hasn't had priority. In addition our editorial collection must be curated better in order to be it's own category of images.

You can still keep your images even though you are opted-out of YAY Images / streaming. Your images will still be available on our partner sites. We will not automatically opt you in if you are opted-out.

If you are having trouble getting an answer from us, please feel free to contact me directly at [email protected] and I'll look into what has happend. We are not ignoring any requests, but we do have quite a lot to do with too few resources, so sometimes we might need some time to get back to you.

There's not much drama in this. We're closing yaymicro, as we've migrated most customers to yayimages.com. We're still keeping yaymicro as our photographer portal, and even though it is still competitive in regards to how easy it is to upload - it is in dire need of an upgrade. To keep the website running for the few remaining customers is just not worth it.

Yayimages.com on the other hand has an excellent search, awesome UI and features our main competitors still don't have. We're putting all our eggs in that basket now. We will focus on innovating and build a stock photo platform that is easy, affordable and fair.

Contributors get 50 % of earnings. I see some of you are concerned about the unlimited streaming option and earnings. So far the average earning per streaming image is $0.27. Which means that customers using streaming on average have a low image usage. These are typically bloggers or small businesses that need a few images per month.

We're confident that the growth we're seeing on yayimages.com will continue, and that earnings should pick up over the next few months. Still, we're a small agency, so bare with us.

We are very much still alive. Though all of our efforts now are put into our subscription website, yayimages.com. Today we announced that we are shutting down yaymicro for customer sales. You can still access it as a photographer, upload images and request payouts. We hope to refurnish the photographer pages and relaunch them at a later stage.

The subscription site is getting good traction now, and as a contributor you should see sales picking up over the next months.

Of course, we are still a rather small agency, compared to the top earners. But we are not giving up! With yayimages.com we're ahead of our competitors when it comes to user experience, search and features. We will continue to work on that and are confident that our good customer experience will lead to more customers, which again generates more earnings to our contributors.

Hi guys,

No need to worry, this was caused by a glitch in the newest version of the software responsible for generating previews and thumbs. It has been fixed now, and we will reprocess all the images that are too dark. Sorry for the inconvenience. No need to sue

//Jan
YAY Team

Hi guys,

I just want to give a little more explanation on our thoughts here.

First of all: We are not cutting any provisions. They will stay at the same level that they always have.

With these new products (small and medium sized image deals) we are reaching out to a whole new market, namely web users. Today there are really no good offers for people who use a lot of images on their blogs, websites, homepages or social media accounts. Research has shown that 85 % of image use online is actually unlicensed and illegal. This is an untapped market with huge potential. There are over 160 million blogs and 649 million websites in the world. That is the market we want to sell these images to.

The commission we offer has the same ratio as our image deals and subscriptions have had for the last 5 years. It varies according the the size of the deal, but average is 35 % which is still above most of our competitors. I certainly understand that it looks like pennies when we pay a commission of €0.10 (USD 0.13) for a small image, but please consider that this image is less than 1/20th the size of the high-res. One of the largest microstock sites in the world pays $0.25 for a high-res download on the basic level. Our commission for high-res images bought through an image deal is 520 % (!) higher.

We hope that by reaching these new markets we can raise earnings for all photographers. We aim to be a righteous marketplace, and we will not undercut our photographers like our competitors.

This is all about volume, so you'll have to look past the low earnings per sale and have confidence that it is a lot better with 1000 sales paying €0.10 than 10 sales paying €1.

Jan
COO / Partner
YAY Images Team

Hi Guys,

We've received some email about this as well, so I think it is time for a more comprehensive explanation.

ImageClick sells subscriptions and the earnings from each sub is divided on the photographers that a specific customer has downloaded. On this payout €0.15 (~USD 0.19) was the lowest commission paid, coming from their popular high-volume web-sized subscriptions. So, taking into account that these were for images with a web-license I actually don't think it is bad at all. Shutterstock's base commission is USD 0.25 for a high-res. According the size, that is a lot lower. Ufortunately our sales statistics page isn't quite up-to-date, so the sizes sold are not shown. This will be fixed in an update later this year.

Either way the photographers receive 25 % of the amount the customer has paid. Considering that these are third party sales, that is pretty decent. Commission will vary, however, depending on how many images has been downloaded by the specific customer.

The image licensing market in South Korea is also different from what we are used to here. It is all about high-volume subscriptions. None of the larger microstock agencies have a good grip on this market. It is nascent, demanding, but also growing nicely. While customers generally download only the images they need (more or less) - it is different in South Korea. You'll see that customers often download a whole range of very similar images, and then decide which one they'll use after they've downloaded them. This, of course, means that all downloaded images will get the same commission. That is the customer's privelige when having a subscriptions service with a high volume.

I believe that the average payout will be higher from ImageClick than it has been so far, as they get more customers who purchase high-res and not only web-sized images. It is also a growing market for higher-resolution images that are used on a web, as screen resolution grows. These are images that will earn photographers more money, than traditional web-sized images.

I hope this gives you better insight into how the commission earnings from ImageClick works.

Oh, and thanks for the positive feedback on our partner program. It is growing quite nicely, so this is something we are putting more and more effort into. We will also expand the information on each partner, so that it will become more user friendly and contain more information than now.

Jan
YAY Images Team

Quote from: LivingLife on March 01, 2011, 17:20
Okay, this new information says a port of minimum 500 pics. I don't think it was that high when I was accepted back in the beginning. So, Linda, I'm "assuming" the oldies get grandfathered in regardless of number of pics in their port?

Now, this second question is not to stir the "ugly" pot, but I'm just curious. The 3rd party info says that most of the images would probably be distributed to clients on CD or DVD because of where the clients are and because they haven't moved into the technological age we are presently in. It said it is nearly impossible to get an accurate record of the sales. So how do you (YAY) know exactly how many of our images have been sold by them to be able to give photogs (and you) proper credit if there is no way to really track it? I'm just wondering how accounting can actually be done if it can't really be tracked? :-)

Yes, the oldies were lucky enough to be included even with smaller ports. Basically we had to limit the number of applications from small contributors since it involves a fair bit of manual work.

When it comes to sales from CDs and DVDs it is done the way it was done before the spread of the internet and instant downloads. Every contributor who has images on a specific release (CD/DVD) gets paid for that image, regardless of what images are actually used/printed. Say a CD is produced with 1000 images and sold for $200. A 50 % commission to the photographers, means that every image earns $0.10 for every CD sold.

Quote from: gaja on January 06, 2011, 16:31
Have you included any more photographers in the program? How can you tell if you have been included?

We're adding new photographers whenever we make new collections. All photographers who are included will receive an email with more information. If you have applied to the program and haven't received an answer, please send us an email at [email protected] and ask us to check that status.

Jan from YAY Micro here. Though I'd just give you a short update on the 3rd party sales for third quarter.

Basically we've been adding a couple of more partners since last time and this has led to a delay in receiving payment. This is unfortunate, and we're working on both getting all results from Q3, as well as making sure we can receive payment earlier next time. Hopefully we'll be able to roll out the Q3 results soon. I'm sorry for the delay. Thanks.