Hi all,

Just some thoughts I posted allready elsewhere (not only) regarding the database cleanup of dreamstime, but the situation in general....I prefer to stay anonymous but am a contributor since 5 years.

I welcome the step of dreamstime to delete old, unsold images.

However, I don`t think it`s enough. We have to go one or more steps further in Microstock.

When we continue like this the database faces an extreme dilatation and inflation to the value of our images. Our sales will go down and some actually are already going down. At some point the revenue per image won`t justify professional Stock photography anymore.
Professional contributors will step out. This will cause an decrease in quality and quantity, which is bad for the Company too.
(off course all this is speculative :-) )

Deleting images with no sales doesn`t help to improve our sales, since they haven`t been in competition ... with zero downloads. The amount of money in the market is the same. So I see it more as an advantage for the dreamstime servers than for contributors.

My solution would be even more radical:
- After three years: delete every image with 0 sales
- After four Years: delete every image with 1 sale
- After five Years: delete every image with 3 sales or lower
- After six years: delete every image below 10 sales.
- As exeptions you can exclude certain images of e.g. niche markets etc. from the removal.
- Old images with real value are staying in the database forever.

Results:
- A constantly high image quality of the Database. Many old Images just doesn`t match current standards anymore, even if they have generated one or two sales in the past.
- Active contributors have the chance to maintain a certain level of sales due to the removal of older files which actualy had been in competition. Inactive contributors lose sales over the years.
- It keeps profitable to produce high quality images for the stock market, which assures a certain quality level.

I know that NO artist is very pleased seeing his work deleted from an (commercial) database, but I`m not only an Artist, I`m a business man too.

Thanks for listening....