First my account was blocked, then yesterday it disappeared. Today it reappeared again. No response via email from support, so I called. "Diego" says his supervisor has to call me back to determine why my account was blocked. In the meantime, I can see they owe me $70.97. I want my money sent and my account deleted.

Mine was blocked per request. So far I haven't seen or heard about them sending me any portion of the $5.25. lol. They have sent two messages through their support since deactivating my account, not like I can read them though. lol

yes there is no need for big mass agencies in future. I also think apart from Symbiostock will that thinking going forward.
Why do we need agencies today?

1. They make the billing for us.
2. They resolve for us the technical problems to run our own website.
3. They make promotion and generate buyers (The new promoter in future is Google not an Agency).

But these three points are less important in future cause it will be easier to do it yourself.

Specialized agencies will be always exist in my opinion. Cause they take it down to a specific theme to find the buyers rare pictures.
And these buyers, it does not come so much on the price.

I think in a different dimension the current version of the stock market could have worked forever. As a graphic designer primarily, I know that all designers love imagery, and good imagery is even better. Most businesses don't have the means to produce their own. But, ALL businesses need it. Yeah, some steal it, actually many ... As do many graphic artists. Which is why it's increasingly important to have all of the watchful eyes here that we do.

If we'd have spun this around ... Maybe, when web browsers could start displaying images(or when people started painting in caves). Made people more aware that many things are the property of someone else ... and combined that with the simple idea that cheaper isn't generally better ... crap runs downhill ...

If you mean native English speaker, how about this.

Earlier in 2014, Fotolia introduced the Dollar Photo Club, a stock site with all Fotolia's photos and illustrations but with very different pricing. Although Fotolia is presenting this site as exclusive and targeted at high volume buyers, the reality is that for just $10 a month you can sign up for a 10-image "subscription" - $1 per  image, all sizes. Anyone can sign up - and some contributors who had never purchased a single image were sent the offer e-mail!

And the contributor makes a subscription royalty for each sale. Subscription prices without a requirement for the buyer to commit to a high volume of purchases is very very bad news for contributor income.

Contributors were not notified about the drastically different pricing and were initially told there was no way to opt out of this sales channel - except by leaving Fotolia. With the encouragement of a group of contributors pledging to remove their files if things didn't change, Fotolia has relented and provided an option to opt-out of sales at Dollar Photo Club (referred to as DPC in the Contributor Profile)

You can read Fotolia's intentions in their own words in this TechCrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

"In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US." and "It�s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players..."

If Dollar Photo Club succeeds, what will get disrupted is contributor income - this is replacing higher royalties with lower, not opening new markets or finding new buyers (and early responses on Twitter and Facebook indicate that's exactly what's happening).

So for your own sake, at a minimum opt out of Dollar Photo Club - on Fotolia, when logged in, it's in Profile, then Contributor Parameters. You could also consider whether or not it makes sense to support an agency that treats its contributors so shabbily. Remember, the opt out only became available as people started deleting work from Fotolia.

It was 28 million plus images; today, it's 27 million and falling.

Couple small edits but, I borrowed this for

Hi Robert,

I'm not sure if you've heard the news about quite a number of us microstockers boycotting Fotolia because of the "Dollar Photo Club" launched earlier this year. We've already dropped somewhere around 500,000 images at the time of writing off of Fotolia including many accounts that have been entirely deactivated. The protest started in Russia and as such many other countries didn't catch wind of it until just a few days ago. In an effort to help expand our approach and brighten the outcome of a relatively successful deactivation day I thought I'd contact you, as you and your sites are influential in the microstock community.

Just in case you haden't heard about it yet,


Earlier in 2014, Fotolia introduced the Dollar Photo Club, a stock site with all Fotolia's photos and illustrations but with very different pricing. Although Fotolia is presenting this site as exclusive and targeted at high volume buyers, the reality is that for just $10 a month you can sign up for a 10-image "subscription" - $1 per  image, all sizes. Anyone can sign up - and some contributors who had never purchased a single image were sent the offer e-mail!

The contributor makes a subscription royalty for each sale. Subscription prices without a requirement for the buyer to commit to a high volume of purchases is very very bad news for contributor income.

Contributors were not notified about the drastically different pricing and were initially told there was no way to opt out of this sales channel - except by leaving Fotolia. With the encouragement of a group of contributors pledging to remove their files if things didn't change, Fotolia has relented and provided an option to opt-out of sales at Dollar Photo Club (referred to as DPC in the Contributor Profile)

You can read Fotolia's intentions in their own words in this TechCrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

"In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US." and "It�s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players..."

If Dollar Photo Club succeeds, what will get disrupted is contributor income - this is replacing higher royalties with lower, not opening new markets or finding new buyers (and early responses on Twitter and Facebook indicate that's exactly what's happening).

If there is anything you can/or are willing to do to assist us in our efforts it would be greatly appreciated. You can find out more and read the arguments of the community at
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/fotolia-d-day-(deactivation-day)-may-1

http://boycottfotolia.org/en/answer.html#.U2LxiPldV8H

Officially watching from the sidelines

Quote from: bolsher on May 01, 2014, 11:05

Quote from: outdoorfreak on May 01, 2014, 11:03

Hello Guys,
I think until now d-day is really big success for all of us - but what will happen afterwards?
One idea from me - somebody of the russian initiatores should write a press release about this initiative ... then we should translate it into the most important languages and send it to all media we can, especially online-media and spezialized press. This could give our initiative a lot of more power ...
Thanks to all for participating in d-day!

I think its a great idea. But we must do something more.Maybe we msut talk with the other agencies and ask them to work TOGETHER against this rubbish.

In one post in another forum there was the idea to make a youtube video and viral marketing to get in contact with the other contributors

I was deleting mine during an "On Air" hangout last night if that counts ...

However, pulling my images from Fotolia would not make much sense for me, because then I would loose several thousand dollar a month.

I actually kind of wonder if it matters at all ... In fact, hopefully customers catch wind of this crap and move from ft to maybe .... Dreamstime, that'd be grand.

Quote from: EmberMike on April 29, 2014, 18:15

Quote from: MatHayward on April 29, 2014, 12:34

Quote from: EmberMike on April 28, 2014, 22:46

Are you employed by Fotolia?

Yes, after volunteering as a moderator in the Fotolia forum for many years I made the decision to leave the restaurant business I had been in for more than 25 years and turn my focus to my true passion of photography.  The timing was fortuitous as an opening came available on the Customer Service team at Fotolia that I happily accepted this past September...

Thanks for the clarification, Mat. I hope you realize that this was misleading, though, by earlier emphasizing the point that you are a contributor but never mentioning that you are an employee as well.

I also hope you realize that misrepresenting yourself only adds to the mistrust we already feel towards many agencies these days. Since you are a contributor, you know as well as all of us that it isn't easy being in the microstock business, especially recently. Many companies look to exploit every angle and opportunity to get the most profit from our work while paying us the least amount possible.

So you coming in here acting like a regular joe, hawking the DPC product and expecting us to buy into it all while under the employ of the very company that sells the product is pretty shady.

Frankly, it doesn't speak well to what Fotolia is about today. We need more honesty in this business, not less. I'm opted out of DPC, not just because I think it's a bad deal for artists but also because I'm concerned about the direction Fotolia seems to be going in. If you are truly intent on doing a good job for Fotolia and representing the company here and as a customer service rep in a positive way, I hope we can expect to see some better contributor relations going forward. That needs to include some real transparency and disclosure.

Fair enough Mike, thanks for the feedback.  The truth is, this forum is very hostile.  Yes, my employment status has changed in recent months, but sharing that here was not something I felt compelled to do.  It's not about being "shady" it's simply an unpleasant place to attempt a reasonable discussion/debate or to share news.  How many times have we seen agency representatives attempt to engage in a discussion here only to get the digital equivalent of an angry mob with pitchforks and torches?  I've been a member of this forum a lot longer than I've been an employee at Fotolia and I know how this place works. 

My offer stands, I've shared my email address [email protected].  Feel free to write to me directly if you have any questions, (reasonable) comments or concerns and I will do my best to respond as quickly as possible.

Kind regards,

Mat

+1 This place is quite negative. I didn't see any offer but, can you schedule my portfolio for deletion and take any portion of the $5.25 I've earned and keep it or send it to paypal? Thanks Mat.

Quote from: marthamarks on April 29, 2014, 14:42

Quote from: R2D2 on April 29, 2014, 13:43

we should make these greedy and destructive agencies superfluous.

SYMBIOSTOCK!!!!!

I wouldnt recommend Symbiostock at this point either, and you know why.

Hey Ron,
I think I got mine working ok. http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1449&p=13405#p13405

But, there are a herd of e-commerce applications available that let you sell digital goods. To be quite honest though, without paying for one and the support involved you'll be running into more problems anyway. The support of the Symbiostock community is probably one of a kind, I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

Increadible - nearly every new posting gives us more arguments to fight against DPC!!!

I almost don't even care, I'll probably delete my portfolio anyway. Getting those .13 sales is pretty depressing, and add on the fact that I'm getting 0 traffic and that the jerks want to try and pull a maneuver like this, without even taking our opinions into account ... If contributors aren't worth anything to them then we might as well be elsewhere anyway.

I've been trying to submit for about an hour, you can't submit eps files on their web uploader .. FTP is acting terrible, and the stupid content editor keeps kicking out one of the 10 needed to submit so frustrated.

I suppose the illustration world at fotolia is a little different, I rarely get rejections ... and to think, I was contemplating buying a new slr
SS on the other hand, I can not get accepted for the life of me. lol

wull shoot, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong ... I drag the widgets over there but I'm not getting any response from it no matter where I put them.