Quote from: cclapper on November 04, 2009, 07:09

It will be interesting to see where SS and BigStock end up in the race.

The most interesting thing will be to see how they handle 2 competing products (OD-EL) under one roof. The same problem that Getty has with iStock and StockXpert. Will they cannibalize one site to make the original workhorse stronger? Hardly a good strategy since it would waste the digital assets of BigStock and just build traffic. A hostile buyout seems not likely since BigStock has no subscriptions. In the long run SS and BigStock have to be streamlined to work together with a scale and market advantage, and that will be very interesting to watch.

For now, Getty still seems not have made their mind up about StockXpert, since it's business as usual there, with still photos.com sales.

I've probably pointed this out, in the soft drink market, Coke has 450 different brands of products. Pepsi has less, but both are selling carbonated, colored, flavored, water. There's no reason why Getty can't have all their multiple sites and ways to sell images and no reason why Corbis won't continue with multiple sites selling the same type of product under different names. It's all about branding, not necessarily about having a different or the same products.

Some people estimate that 80% of all the microstock photos are the same across most of the sites. (iStock is the one that's different) So if you go to SS, DT, FT, BigStock, CS, StockXpert Etc. and on and on, you'll get mostly the same photos being offered. In the case of the smaller sites, you'll get photos that the big ones rejected. I don't see that as some advantage that they offer lower quality, less desirable images.

The whole point of selling products and brands where one may compete with their main line, is market share! It's that simple. If Corbis/SS had 40% of the microstock market and BigStock has 5% (made those number up) Now SS has 45% of the market. Getty owns so many brands and agencies, it's difficult to define them for what market they are actually addressing in some cases. But there's no doubt that they compete with themselves in many areas.

Big agencies don't buy smaller agencies to shut them down. They buy them for a bigger piece of the pie.  

Quote from: KB on November 04, 2009, 13:19

Quote from: dzain on November 04, 2009, 05:49

What a big crap! Even if they copy our portfolio's to BS, when SS drops the OD-program and managed to send buyers to BS for OD's we'll lose big time, because OD's at SS are worth 2,85 and on BS only a louzy 1,50.

Did BigStock change their commission structure recently?

According to the info I keep, BigStock's commission for a 4-5MP image is $2. For 11MP and bigger, the commission is $3.

I read that on the SS forums, so I assumed those prices I mentioned were correct, but I can be wrong.

I just went to BigStock and looked up by last 50 sales. It is definitely size-based, and ranges from $0.50 - $3.00.

10 of my last 10 sales were all for $0.50.  But at least they are getting a fairly small size for that commission (about 0.6MP), so I have no problem with that.

Here's the complete breakdown for my last 50 BigStock sales:

50% $0.50
26% $1.00
22% $2.00
02% $3.00

By comparison, here's the breakdown of my last 50 SS sales:
92% $0.33
02% $1.07
06% $2.48

So from those figures alone, I'm much better off at BigStock than SS. But there's one thing missing from those results -- time:

My last 50 BigStock sales goes all the way back to July 22; for SS, that's Oct 30 (3 days after my most recent BigStock sale!).

Here is the Bigstock pricing

Smaller images, 900px = 1 credit
Medium images, 1600px = 2 credits
Large images, 2800px = 4 credits
Extra large images & vector files, 3800px = 6 credits

1 credit costs anywhere from $1.00 - $2.50 depending how many credits are purchased.
We get $.50 for every credit spent.