Possibly I've not been paying sufficient attention, but when I looked at Pixmac after receiving a sale e-mail, I realized that I don't understand their pricing.

After the merger, I mentally figured that everything would end up at one site - Pond 5 - so I didn't keep tabs on Pixmac. What I noticed today is that there are at least two different pricing levels - 1, 3, 4 & 7 credits and 2, 4, 6 and 10 credits. Extended licenses are the same for both.

Here are two of mine as examples.

Cheap:
http://www.pixmac.com/picture/black+cat+by+the+stairs/000083327483

Less Cheap:
http://www.pixmac.com/picture/black+cat+by+the+stairs/000083327483

Pixmac has always rated things and I wondered if that was the pricing discrepancy, but it's not. The cheaper one is rated higher than the more expensive one. I also have cheap files that are 1, 3, 4, 8 (versus 7) - perhaps because it's bigger or 1, 3, 4, 6 (a 20D image that's smaller than my 5D Mk II) for the "Full Size"?

And one of the 1,3,4, 6 priced images has an extended license for 80 credits, not 40 - cheap standard license and double the price on extended?

http://www.pixmac.com/picture/christmas+living+room/000083859743

None of this makes any sense to me - I'm not sure I like random images priced at random amounts, none of which I can control. Feels too much like Getty's "we know what's best and you have no say in the matter".

Does anyone else have multiple prices? Anyone know why?



I also thought that we were supposed to get 50% royalties now (post-merger) but I have an extended license (which is 40 credits) which netted me 11.23 credits (which I think just means US dollars and cents).

I was finally able to receive payment from Pixmac this week, and this morning received the PayPal payment which had a $2.37 fee deducted from the $53 I was owed.

The amount doesn't match the 2.9% + 30 cents a transaction for debit cards or the outside the US fees (.5% to 2% for bank account funded amounts and 3.4% to 3.9% for debit/credit card funded). The deduction is 4.47% of the total.

Is this how payments from Pixmac typically are? I think if there are fees they should pay them, but as this is a first and last transaction for me (I'm trying to get my portfolio onto Pond5 as review time allows), I'll just take the loss and be done with them if it's always this way.

As you know, we already offer Bigstock customers the flexibility of pre-paying with credits. Next week, we�ll be offering our customers an increasingly popular way to buy images: subscriptions.

How will this affect me?

Subscriptions can generate higher download volumes, which can increase your total earnings from Bigstock. Here�s how you will earn royalties from Bigstock subscriptions:

Every time one of your images is downloaded using a subscription, you will earn a royalty.
 
The more downloads you�ve acquired in the previous 12 months, the higher your royalty will be, up to $0.38USD per download.

Here are the details:

(see screenshot attached below)
 
Any Bigstock download will be counted to determine which royalty tier is applied, regardless of how our customers license the image.
Credit and partner royalties will remain unchanged.
Extended licenses cannot be purchased using a subscription, and will continue to generate a royalty of up to $29.70.
Are there any other updates?

Yes. We have put in place a 250,000 print run limitation on our Standard License. We believe this will increase demand for Extended Licenses, generating higher royalties for you from Bigstock.

We are also simplifying our Standard Image License terms to bring Bigstock more closely in line with industry standards for royalty-free licenses.

What if I have questions?

If you have any questions, just reply to this email. We're here to help.

Cheers,
Ben Pfeifer,
GM, Bigstock


The thing that gives me the shivvers is the 12-month totals for qualifying for subscription payment levels. If they do the RC-like system there, is it going to spread to the mother ship?

Here's the blog post on what license changes they've made and some background on why.

I have to read through and see if any of this makes a difference for extended licenses for Photo Dune for me (I'm currently opted out as they gave away the store for a pittance, IMO), and whether there are any hidden gotchas. In today's climate, I am very circumspect - and worry that changes probably mean something bad

I received e-mail from 123rf this morning about their new Corporate + program

I guess it's a sign of the times that I now read things like this looking to see how they're going to hose contributors - once I'd have been interested in a new marketing initiative that might increase our earnings.

I wasn't thrilled to see:

"Stretch your content budget by receiving exclusive corporate pricing discounts."

"Improve your workflow by sharing content and collaborating in groups."

"License and re-license content on demand for each client. Ask us about how to use Corporate+ to help you save in the long run."

So on top of the already huge discounts we see (and which affect our royalties) they want to offer more. No multi-seat licenses needed for multiple people to use the content.

Just when you think the introduction of the miserable RC system is the bottom of the barrel, the "agency" manages to outdo themselves.

And is there any communication with contributors - here's what this means for you and why it's a good thing long run? I might not believe a word that comes out of their mouths anyway (how can you tell if they're lying goes the old joke; his mouth was open) but at least they could do us the courtesy of pretending that they give a sh*t about contributors.

I got a sale this morning where the price was listed as $4, with my royalty at 33% coming to $1.32

However none of my images, including that one, have anything listed for $4 - it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 on all of them.

Is this some promotional deal and does anyone else have any of these? I've written to support but they generally take a few days to respond, so I thought I'd ask. I'll post here when I hear back

I can deal with pretty much any payment system, as long as it's predictable and reasonable.

I wasn't thrilled with PhotoDune's payment system which seemed to be the worst of both worlds - you have to request a payment, unlike SS or 123rf, but when you do, you have to wait until the 15th of the following month to collect your cash.

Imagine my delight to discover today, following a painfully slow exchange of e-mails with support, that when they say "the end of the month", making a request on November 30th - according to their clock in Melbourne - isn't soon enough to qualify.

"We manage our affairs according to time at our headquarters (AEST), which is based in Melbourne, Australia. Withdrawals are processed on the last day of each month, which was November 30th, and on that same day (but after the withdrawals were processed) we also made those deposits for the bundle warnings to the authors."


I had two sales on November 30th after the bundle deposit that he refers to, so I assume they wouldn't count either for the payment to be made December 15th. (I think he means bundle earnings, not bundle warnings).

With SS it's so simple. What you earn up until midnight their time (Eastern Standard) is paid out a week or so later. No rubbish about processing payments on the last day of the month so you don't get that money for another month.

The bundle sales ran from November 13th to 20th, so processing them before the end of the month should have been no problem.

I post this so anyone else who thinks that they can make a request to be paid on the last day of the month won't be fooled as I was by this insane definition of the "end of the month".

And Merry Christmas to me from Envato...

Alamy shows prices in $ for royalty free sales, but when I get a sale, the price shown in my sales report has (so far) never matched the displayed prices? Why is that?

So today I got a sale for the maximum size of an image for $200 (gross) but the site says it should cost $315. A few weeks ago, I sold something listed at $190 but the sale was for $152 (from which their 60.80 commission is deducted)

Do they just discount images for big customers? I thought that distributor sales would be shown as such and there's nothing indicating that was the case here. The amounts are too large to be currency issues.

Perhaps someone who has sold royalty free there for longer than me (I was just RM while exclusive) can explain how this works...

It's November 10th and I'm pleased, if somewhat surprised, to see the PP sales for October start to get added to my balance this morning. How nice to see something happening there in a timely manner

I don't know why this would be - I haven't deactivated anything on IS - but for the second time, my portfolio on Thinkstock has shrunk.

I haven't deleted anything, deactivated anything or, as far as I know, had anything deactivated by IS. I checked the annual CSV file which shows 0 deactivations.

I had been watching portfolio numbers to see how much had made it over, and had been seeing an increase up until about a week ago to a high water mark of 2,014. I had been very surprised a few weeks back to see new approvals show up at TS the day they were approved on IS too, so things seemed to be improving in getting files moved over.

About a week ago I saw the 2,014 drop to 2,008 and then this morning it went to 2,007. I have no idea what files are gone though; and recent approvals are no longer showing up right away.

Nothing to be done, but has anyone else seen their numbers drop for no obvious reason?

Seeing a couple of comments in the iStock help forums and some odd results in a search I did, I think iStock has done something to break its search parsing for multi-word terms.

I typed tropical beach into the top box, photos only, and  I get in the results (many of which are beaches) a beer bottle, bunch of grapes and a dog, all isolated, all with no obvious connection to what I searched for.

Grapes, dog, beer

slobo had reported seeing a bit of grungy paper in a search for car repair, which may be the same thing. A help forum post (without examples) in the search thread mentioned this type of thing too.

Anyone else seeing this? Perhaps if we can give IS some more examples they can get it fixed faster.

Veer's parent company, Corbis, recently purchased a celebrity photo agency called Splash. The Seattle Times ran a story about it on Wednesday. The article wasn't about Veer, but did contain the following lovely paragraph:

"In 2007, it bought a company called Veer that handles content from amateur photographers, a growing business now that so many people carry cellphones that take pictures and video."

This could just be truly sad reporting and editing on the part of the Seattle Times and Melissa Allison, rather than something Veer or Corbis said to them, but what an accomplishment to get both the market for stock photography and the type of contributor completely wrong in just one sentence!

The quotes in the article are from Gary Shenk (Corbis CEO) who had some real doozies from when CrapHamlet SnapVillage was launched in 2007, including from this Seattle PI article, and this in About the Image,  the following gem:

"We're excited about also using SnapVillage as a farm club to find great photographers who can sell their photographs on Corbis"

There are also some wonderful quotes about microstock from him in a 2009 article in the British Journal of Photography, including:

"Shenk, who took over as CEO from Steve Davis in April 2007, doesn't believe microstock is the answer, and has instead been focusing on corporate customers."

"Today microstock represents a small part of Corbis' revenues - less than 1% according to Shenk. 'We give customers a choice, but the vast majority of our revenues come from great photography and rights-clearance,' he says. In fact, over the past three months, Corbis has started to see an overall decline in the growth rate of microstock photography across the market.
...
'We believe that editorial and rights-managed photography has the most value,' Shenk continues. 'In the creative segment so much can be recreated by amateur photographers. The key is to focus on stuff that cannot be replicated. The value grows over time.' "

Corbis' negative attitude towards microstock - seeing it only in terms of what it can do for the other parts of their business that they really care about - can't be good for any microstock enterprise under its umbrella. The StockPhotoTalk blog had comments on Shenk's view of microstock growth - thinking he was incorrect about the industry as a whole.

So now I'm off to upload 50 cell phone shots to Veer...