Thanks for all your feedback! We have taken them in and modified our program. We are still in beta and always open to suggestions. We will be adjusting the Unlimited program so payouts are now 15c, not 10c and will be limiting downloads to small resolution image files only. We also plan to introduce a new 25-per-day download plan shortly.

1. Unlimited plan - (Unlimited downloads per day)
15c credit to photographer per unique download ~ small image downloads only (under 1000px width)

2. Freedom Plan (25 images per day)
30c to 50c credit to photographer per unique download ~ full image size downloads

Rates will be:
30c - under $10,000 lifetime earning
40c - over $10,001 lifetime earning
45c - over $25,000 lifetime earning
50c - over $50,000 lifetime earning

You are assuming the 10c rate per subscription download will stay this low forever, this is not the case. You may remember that Shutterstock raised their download payout from 20c to 25c in 2006 and increased this as years pass by. We will be doing the same.

Furthermore, some of you get paid 25-38c depending on how many downloads you achieve at Shutterstock and other similar stock sites, we will be introducing a similar program in the future. Is it worth noting that our subscription service permits only "Medium" image resolutions to be downloaded. Sites such as Shutterstock allow full size image downloads. We feel if customers want to purchase large image resolutions they should buy your images with credits ($4 an image with 50% commission going to you) and not pay just 25c-38c for a full size resolution.  

Hello Everyone!

I am an account rep from DreamStock.com I just wanted to chime in and say that our rates are lower than others because we are approaching stock photography in a different way, as a result our rates must stay competitive. Since we are offering an unlimited download plan, customers will tend to download more often, which means a photographer's earning power will actually increase! While we pay 10c per download via our unlimited download plan (medium images), we pay 50% commission rate when a customer purchases single images via our credit based system (extended licenses, bigger image sizes etc).

DreamStock is still in beta but we will be aggressively promoting it in the coming months as we are well financed from some big investors/banks. Those who upload to sites such iStock or Shutterstock know these sites get thousands of submissions per day, some of these sites have grown from 1-2 million images to well over 10+ million images in such a short period of time. We are inviting premium photographers to submit their images now so they get premium placement "First come, first serve". Of course if you didn't get an invite but have great looking images, you're welcome to join!

Those who join early will generally get a competitive edge over their competitors because their download counts are usually higher and as a result their images will feature more prominently near the first page of results. This is because we will be sorting our images by "Most Popular" by default.

We're just starting out but so far we've had a huge response!! We currently have thousands of photos waiting for approval and more are being added every week. We hope to surpass 1 million images within 16 months.

Quote from: pancaketom on June 17, 2010, 01:10
I wonder how tight the fine print is, as even I could make money downloading an unlimited number of my own images for 10 cents a pop. (or maybe we could just make a microstockgroup account that buys one of each of our images every day. I'm sure I have 100 crap rejects somewhere on my hard drive...

This is against our terms of service. While we welcome genuine downloads, we have strict policies against those who register accounts to artificially inflate download numbers for their associate photographers. Accounts/photographers involved in this scheme will be removed from our service.

If you have any other questions, feel free to visit us, we're generally on live chat.