Pure Reviews

So Bigstock has announced that they are going to start doing subscription sales this year.  Joining what seems to be a new industry standard they are setting their royalty base at only $0.25.  Sadly this seems to be more and more common ( Fotolia , iStock , 123RF , etc).  The odd part of this announcement is that Bigstock was bought by Shutterstock so they could have pay as you go style site.  So this begs the question of why start moving your site to the SS formula with lower royalties.  How do you feel about the changes, comment below. 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: Eve...

Below is the chart featuring the commission numbers for the month of May.  The three top stock sites this month where Dreamstime , Shutterstock , 123RF .  The chart only features sites I had a sale with and for a full list of stock sites my work is at see the right column of the screen.

April was very close to March as far as sales and earnings go.  The top three sites this month are: 123RF , Shutterstock , Dreamstime .  Above is the full chart breakdown of all the sites I had earnings this month at.  For a full list of sites I have content with see the right side of the blog.

Dreamstime adds another element to your profile known as "Photographer Genre".  You can select up to five genre's that classify you as a personal photographer and your portfolio.  This will allow clients to search a type of photographer instead/or in addition to the standard Keyword or category search.  So head over to your profile and give it an update.  New to Dreamstime , join here as its one of the top stock agencies.

So another month of 2012 is in the record books.  Below is the chart for February sales and this month was a great one.  I had a huge increase from last month and also a couple of EL sales at CanStockPhotos .  Other big leaders where Dreamstime , 123RF , Photodune and Depositphotos .  Like always, if I didn't have a sale on the site this month then they aren't listed.  Full list of sites I upload to is on the right of the blog.

Shutterstock launches a sensitive use license that will allow an increase of sales of up to $75 per image.  Unlike several other companies, SS is going to let you opt out of this feature which will keep your models from being featured in sensitive ads for healthcare or other topics.  This is a great new revenue stream and also gives photographers great control of how their photos should be used. To Our Valued Contributors, We would like to tell you about an important update with great potential to increase sales for you. We are updating our Contributor Terms of Service (“TOS”) to enable new sales with a royalty of up to $75 per image download. Shutterstock services both small and large buyers. In addition to our standard and enhanced licenses, we provide custom licenses to buyers such as large advertising agencies. These agencies require more rights and some flexibility in how an image might ultimately be used. That flexibility may include "sensitive uses." ...

Mostphotos CEO takes a look at the year 2011 and gives us a peek at what the year 2012 will hold for photographers and buyers alike.  Last year sounded like it was the year of getting things running better and this year will be the year of improving and fine tuning.  If you are new to Mostphotos you can sign up here . 2011 was the year when we started our first marketing campaign, kicking off with the Swedish market. The reception has been great, and our customers are even happier than we could ever have anticipated. This past year, as we entered the market, we decided to put a lot of effort into creating functionalities that would benefit our users. Among other things, we improved the online shopping experience with international invoice support, and introduced more attractive bundle options such as the ‘monthly’ and ‘download’ packages. In addition, we now have organisation support and collections, and we also have the request feature that was created during...

As 2011 is now at a close, its time to reflect on the past year.  Several things have changed over the last year in the stock photography industry.  Everything from the several pay cuts/ changes at Fotolia , user fall out at iStock , to the new up and coming sites like PhotoDune and DepositPhotos .  Over all the year was down for me compared to last year, but I continue to grow that image count on several sites.  Hopefully 2012 will be a big year of uploading as I have several images backlogged from several trips.  So here is to 2012 everyone and let the charts begin. Actual dollars received (does not reflect money still locked in accounts due to payout minimums) compared to 2010. Snap shot of sales through the last 12 months, December was the lowest month of the year. Total percentage of sales per sites for the last 12 months.  The top sites that ranked for the last year is as follows: Dreamstime (22% or 34% if you include referrals), ...

We brought you the word that VEER would be launching subscriptions last month.  Well as of this week that Subscription service is now live on Veer's website.  You will now be able to buy high quality commercial images for your needs via their subscription services.  To see the breakdown of pricing or to sign up at Veer click here .  This is another step in bring Veer into line with standard micro-stock practices and further way for the older legacy stock site ways.  A few months ago, we let you know that we’d be launching a new subscription offering for customers this winter. That time has come, and we’re pleased to announce that Veer Subscriptions , featuring your high-quality commercial images, is now live and open for business. Veer was already making it easier to be creative by offering customers an uncomplicated shopping experience using cash or prepaid credits. Now buyers also have the option to use convenient monthly or yearly subscription plans to ...

Shutterstock has officially launched their brand new iPad app. which is available for download now at iTunes.  The application will not only allow you to search images in a mosaic type view, but you will also be able to save them to your account for quick downloads.  Also part of the application is the ability to share via email or social media sites like Twitter.  Check out the write up below from the Shutterstock team.  To sign up for Shutterstock, click here . As head of the Mobile team at Shutterstock, I’m excited to announce Shutterstock for iPad is officially live in the iTunes App store. (You can download it for free, here .) After six months of researching, planning, developing, a nd fine-tuning, we hope customers find this application makes browsing for images a more seamless and beautiful experience than ever. With the simple swipe of the finger, you can: Scroll through thousands of images, seamlessly tiled together in a unique Mosaic View th...

Crestock is boosting royalty rates up to a 40% rate from a 30% rate.  See the chart below to see how things might change for your sales.  Below is the press release directly from the CEO, enjoy. Increasing Royalty Rates & Revenue Channels for Artists To Crestock's Contributing Artists: Since Masterfile Corporation acquired Crestock in July 2010, a lot of changes have taken place. We've added stability to the business and its website, provided you with reliable payments and brought responsive people on board to provide support and answer your questions. But there is still much room for improvement – most importantly in overall sales and the return on investment for you, our contributors. We're working on that too. We're launching two important initiatives that should benefit all of our contributors as outlined below. These changes have been detailed in the revised Crestock Artist Image Upload Agreement . 1. WE ARE INCREASING...

YayMicro is going through growing pains as it site is back up and running again.  They had to shut down FTP uploading and have had a slower site then normal the last few month.  Traffic has increased 10 fold with more then 650,000 unique visitors.  Below if a formal letter from the CTO of YayMicro talking about the new servers and future improvement that will be coming to the site.  All this is great news and we look forward to the growing success at company.  Sign up for YayMicro here . YES, uploading is now up and running again! :) You can upload by FTP ( ftp.yaymicro.com ) or use the web interface. Recently we have experienced a huge increase in traffic to our site. We had 650.000 unique visitors in August, which is a decuple (yes, its a word and means 10x) since January. In August we also started our corporation with ddp images in Germany which opened our database to huge amount of searches from photo buyers all over Europe. In mid September...

Dreamstime launches a student promo.  If you are a student and need some great stock photo's all you need is your student ID to get a discount of 25% off any plans.  Also they are giving away 5 ipads also, which 2 are will to go to student who buy images during this campaign.  5 more ipads will be open to student or regular members who refer any members.  New to Dreamstime, join here . Are you a STUDENT? 25% OFF for all images! Need A+ images for school? We know all about your sleepless study nights, scrambling to prepare presentations, pre-exam headaches and tight budgets. Your projects deserve the best visual support. We can't write the term paper for you, however we can certainly take the image prices down making it easier for you to produce quality work! We've got all images you need at 25% OFF, and you can win one of five iPad 2s! Any registered student will get 25% off all images and image packages for the month of September. Registr...

Fotolia rolled out their new website layout.  Shortly after announcing their price drop in royalties coming with the new site.  The site does have a cleaner and more user friendly look, which several buyers and contributors should both like.  Some of the new features include refined searching, which now lets you search by price point.  Also they have changed their subscription plans for buyers.  So log in and check it out . ...

Depositphoto's is rolling out more marketing features to bag some large profile contributors.  Very similar to when they launched their site they are offering features to help bring over your images to their platform.  One of these feature is getting a $0.10 per image, up to 500 images.  Also something I am not as thrilled about is higher positions in search results for large clients.  This is something I am sure several companies do, its just not something advertised.  If you are interested in joining Depositphotos click here.  Personal ranking of the site for me is between 3rd and 5th when it comes to earnings. Depositphotos offers individualized collaborative terms for those photographers who have a large portfolio and would like to upload it to our site. If you are a skilled and talented photographer or illustrator working with different stock photo agencies, and you have a large portfolio ready to upload to our site but no time to spare, we are ...

Stock photography sites continue to race to the bottom when it comes to royalty rates.  Fotolia has announced they are working hard to lower your earnings by dropping the royalty rates.  They are now aligning themselves with iStock , which had a large number of complaints when they lowered their royalties and became one of the more hates sites.  However iStock did not see the large fallout that was talked about and it appears that Fotolia has noticed that.  The biggest hit was to vectors, who royalties dropped almost 80%.  This also marks the second time in one year for contributors to drop in royalties at Fotolia , as they changed their ranking settings in the spring, which dropped several users down on earnings. We've been hard at work for the last few months adding features to make the site more convenient for both contributors and artists. With this latest release, we're also revising our subscription plans to align with what's happening in the marketplac...

123RF has launched a few new features on their site over the past month.  First off they now allow you to log in through your existing facebook or google accounts.  Second up they now offer a auto suggest feature, which shaves seconds off your searching and helps with spelling.  After all, we know a lot of us can use help in that department.  Other things they have improved is better algorithms for image searches, a subject cluster which allows better organize the images you are searching for.  Finally they announced changes to their rewards and loyalty program will be forth coming on August 18th of this year.  New to 123RF, Join Here

iStock did some minor tweaking to their site and added some new features.  First up you can now search by price range.  The fewer the dots the cheaper the images and this will make it easier for buyer to get exactly what they need for the price point they have in their mind.  Second you can now filter out editorial images or creative images...allowing you more tailored licensed content.  Final features, you can refine your searches by color, copyspace and image orientation.  So go checkout the new features and happy searching.  Join iStock here .

123RF if making uploading your editorial shots even easier.  Now instead of make sure they are uploaded via a different link you can upload as normal and all images will be reviewed as editorial potential.  This will increase 123RF editorial contact and keep photographers from accidentally sending the images to the wrong place.  Read the office press release below and sign up for 123RF here . As you may already know, we have implemented a new feature on our site, the Checkbox "If my submissions are unfit for RF, I agree to allow them to be accepted into the Editorial Section provided they are deemed to be newsworthy." is now apparent when you submit images to be processed. We implemented this because we understand that contributors are (at times) unable to obtain/acquire releases for street photography and other images. Therefore, in order to save your time to re-uploading to the Editorial section, we're going to shunt these into Editorials for you. ...

  Fotolia is going to be relaunch a new website very soon.  Some of the new features will include searching by image size, color, and categories.  They are also adding drop down menus and smoother experience.  Can't wait to see what is in store for us and will let you know as soon as it launches.  To join Fotolia click here .  Below is sample write up of what is to come from the Fotolia crew:       Eagerly anticipated. Long awaited. A new version of Fotolia.com is on the way! You'll love our new design: clear, simple & efficient, everything has been redesigned to deliver a smooth and fluid experience. But it's not just skin-deep. There's a new site structure that translates into more intuitive navigation.  Special attention has been paid to the little things that customers need quick and frequent access to - for instance, we've added your shopping cart, credit counts and subscription status to every page.