Hi all.. thanks for your interest in what's happening at BigStock.  I'll help clarify:

We are beta testing a Premium Pricing feature whereby the contributor can price their own images.  We will slowly open this to some of the contributors with highest quality images, based on sales and other criteria. Fotolia and others are doing this too as you saw. How successful will it be? Not sure yet. It's just another way to try working with the community. Some shooters have premium work that tends towards Rights Managed and they are looking for other higher return avenues. Microstock is a changing dynamic beast, so we try it and see what happens. I can guarantee there will other changes as things mature.

Regarding how fast did we reply to an inquiry, we try hard to do it as quickly as we can but sometimes there are a host of other issues in the pipeline that delay a reply for a few days, if the answer has to come from me especially.

P.S.  we've worked really hard to make our Approval Queue faster and it's worked.. your images will get approved REALLY fast right now if you have submissions ready :-)

Also - BTW - GREAT GREAT job to all shooters: over the last couple years the quality of micro images has just blown through the roof, so keep up the good work. Really encouraging stuff!

Best wishes to all, thanks much.

Tim Donahue
Founder, BigStockPhoto