Shutterstock introduces Footage Subscriptions

Shutterstock has announced today the availability of a new way of buying footage through their site.
Like with photos and vectors, you're now able to buy footage subscriptions, being intitled to a certain number of downloads within a defined period of time for a fixed price.

The new product is available immediately.

Here's a link to the press release with the available plans of subscription and prices.

As for submitters, each HD download via subscription will receive a $13.25 comission and each non-HD download will receive a $8.00 comission.

LuckyOliver Closing Down

LuckyOliver is shutting down on May, 15th.

It's sad when someone that plays fair doesn't succeed. I'm sorry to see Lucky Oliver go, even if they aren't one of my top earners.

They will allow "carnies" to cash-out and/or spend their credits.

Here's the full announcement:

http://www.luckyoliver.com/blog/328/closing-the-doors

Crestock Announces Affiliate Program

Crestock has announced today it's affiliate program. Like every other microstock agency, they'll offer a percentage to members referring new buyers and/or submitters. The terms, as communicated by their newsletter are:

Recruit new customers to Crestock and we'll give you 50% of all the money they spend for the first 6 months of their membership.

When you recruit new contributors you'll get 10% commission on their sales for 6 months.

Affiliate earnings are combined with earnings from image sales, making it easy to cash in your earnings if you're also selling images at Crestock.

It's a bit disapointing that a referral plan is limited to a 6 months period. That's usually the time a portfolio takes to get some serious results. In comparison, we have Shutterstock with Unlimited Time, Fotolia with a 5 years period and Dreamstime with a 3 years time frame.

YAY Micro

A new site is coming to the microstock scene. It's name is YAY Micro and it's based in Norway.

It's already accepting images but will only be open to sales in June.

It has FTP and IPTC read. The upload process is rather simple and the site is really fast and clean. I uploaded around 500 images in little time.

They will pay in Euros and will have subsctiption as well as credit sales. They accept editorial and commercial photography as well as vectors.

Comissions will be of 1€ for each subscription download and 1€ to 30€ for credit sales so it's more of a midstock site. The team seems to have come from trad agencies and seem to have a well planned strategy for the site. If it's worth the upload as of now, only you can tell.

More info : YAY Micro

iStockPhoto to announce Subscriptions

iStockPhoto has announced in their forums they're going to offer subscritpion plans. After StockXpert and Dreamstime, iStock will enter the subscription game and offer plans starting at 96$ a month.

Here's a link to the announcement on their forum.

96$/month means about 3$ a day. This will most likely correspond to 5 to 10 downloads a day (even though at this time, this is pure speculation). This corresponds to a value per download of 30 to 60 cents. Being an independent (i.e. non-exclusive) you get a 20% comission, which means 6 to 12 cents a download. Fortunately, you can opt-out of subscription sales (even on a "per image" base).

UPDATE: Actually, iStock's solution seems to be rather interesting, as they seem to guarantee a minimum comission value equal to the "pay as you go" sales. iStock is implementing a "subscription for credits" comission table, where a subscriber is intitled to a certain number of credits (instead of a certain number of images) and different image sizes will be purchased for a different number of credits.

Unlike other subscription plans, iStock will actually reward submitters depending on the size of image purchased. I defend this kind of approach for a long time and it's good to know someone finally decided to put it to work. Kudos for that!

Also, if a buyer spends a partial number of his credits with a single user, iStock will credit the comission of the full number of credits to the user. Example: if a buyer is intitled to 20 credits a day and in one day spends only 5 credits with one of your images, you'll get comission for those 20 credits. Sounds good!

IS seems to be willing to take Shutterstock. For agencies, this is a win-win solution. For us, contributors, not so much...

I'll update this thread with more info as it becomes available.