We appreciate the points raised here and in Lee's article.  Thanks for your patience in hearing our reply.  

First on the $3.00 - $0.10 per download:  

When designing our subscription royalty model we did not want to follow the approach of other subscription sites that pay a fixed royalty per download, because of the imbalance of what the company earns versus what the contributor earns.  Let's say a subscription site pays $0.25 per download, their customers pay $250 for a 31 day subscription, amounting to a daily spend of $8.06.  An estimated average of nine downloads per day means $2.25 royalty is paid to contributors (who's images were downloaded by a customer) and $5.81 is kept by the site.  For four downloads, the site pays $1.00 in royalties and keeps $7.06.  One download per day, the site pays $0.25 in royalty and keeps $7.81 - that's a 3% royalty to the contributor.

So we decided to do things differently and create a more balanced royalty model for Veer subscription.  Unlike other sites, Veer offers a guaranteed "royalty pool" of $3.00 per day, per image-downloading customer.  Whether a customer downloads thirty images or just one image per day, we pay out the full $3.00 to contributors.  Compared to the previous example, if a Veer customer downloads one image, the contributor gets $3.00 (the other site would pay only $0.25).  Four downloads, Veer pays $0.75 per image.  Nine downloads, $0.33 per image royalty.  I won't give away our pricing yet but I can say it's less than $250 per month.

As Lee points out, most customers don't use their full quotas, and so $0.10 per image is an outlier.  With a typical range of five to fifteen downloads per day, the typical Veer subscription royalty per image is between $0.20 to $0.60, which is consistent - and in many cases better - than other subscription sites.

Veer's subscription model is different than other sites by paying out the full share of $3.00 per image-downloading customer per day regardless of the number of downloads.  In a few cases, we acknowledge that Veer contributors will earn less per download than other sites but in many cases, contributors will earn much more per image than other sites.  We believe the law of averages is on side with contributors in Veer's subscription royalty model.

Regarding the extended license royalty, we aligned our extended license rate to what we found in our market research of daily download subscriptions.  Veer needs to be on par with the playing field and so we've designed our extended license royalties to be, in our view, a standard price for this type of subscription (to be presented at launch).  We're by no means trying to insult our contributors and we appreciate everyone's concern.  As always, Veer is committed to openness and transparency with our community.

As part of this commitment we have given our existing contributors the option to opt-out, but that said, we believe our offer is competitive with the current market and we are glad to offer this new subscription revenue stream to our contributors.  We hope you join us.

Aaron

I appreciate a Veer representative coming in to try and explain what's planned, but I just don't buy the view of how things will work that they're trying to sell.

It's not as if this is the first subscription plan, and it's not the first to try something other than a fixed download per sale. When Inmagine started up 123rf they briefly tried this 50% of the royalty pool approach, but the low amounts per download had contributors very unhappy and they ended up implementing a floor amount.

iStock's subscription plan has a pool notion, with a floor amount. Even if we ignored the EL issue (and I have no idea what comparable sites you can be looking at that you think what Veer is proposing fits what other sites offer - outside of Photodune, no one else is offering extra rights that cheap), experience says that your idea of 9 downloads a day just isn't how it will work and that contributors will see a lot of those "outlier" royalties.

What makes Veer think that their 9 downloads a day number is realistic? And if you sincerely believe it is, then gamble your money, not ours, on that being true and make the floor amount based on that average. The only way you'll lose on that is if you're wrong about the average number of downloads.  I don't see why you would expect contributors to bear the burden of you being wrong about that.

Thanks for coming on here to try to explain things.

Although the average of 9 dl/day might be right for a subs plan. I am guessing there are many 0 download days (weekends spring to mind). In those cases Veer gets 100% - that is fine, except that means that the days that there are a download, there will likely be more - so the actual payment for DL will be lower for the contributors. I wonder how many places either download most of their quota or 0 pictures. From my brief analysis of my sales under the IS subs plan that might actually be the case.

Now if the price for the sub is significantly below 250/month that does make the % paid to contributors higher, but it also undercuts sites that pay more for subs to the contributors which isn't exactly a good thing for the industry or contributors.

3.75 to .13 cents for extended licenses is just crazy talk.

If you didn't have the EL subs and offered .30 or more per DL I bet most would opt in. As it is, I bet most who hear about this will opt out. Sorry.
Thank you for the option to opt out. That is definitely appreciated by me. In general I have been pleased w/ Veer and I'd hate to have to pull my port over this.
(I just spent quite some time deleting half my port from IS because of their new ASA and I'll be back for most of the rest tomorrow,  don't even get me started about what Ft has been up to lately, but you won't find my images for sale there).