Fotolia, Credits and Commissions – what’s all the fuss about?

If you have been following the microstock industry the past week, this will be old news.  If not – this should get you up to speed.  There has been a lot of discussion both on the MicrostockGroup forum as well as the Fotolia forum about credit prices on Fotolia.

MicrostockGroup Threads: first here, then here, and here, etc etc
Fotolia Threads : first here, then here

So what is all the fuss about?

Commission Pricing

Fotolia recently updated their pricing structure to charge $1.20 / credit for the most expensive credit packages, with other currencies also being respectively updated.   When the buyer makes a purchase with those credits, the photographer is given a % of the credits spent and not the purchase price.  So if the buyer purchases 10 credits for $12.00, then buys a photo for 10 credits (spending his $12.00 worth of credits); a white ranked photographer whose commission level is 25% will earn $2.50 (10 credits * 25%), as apposed to $3.00 ($12.00 * 25%).  This essentially gives the photographer a 21% cut of the sale instead of the 25% described in the contract.

In Fotolia’s defense, they also offer credit packages for $0.75/credit, yet still pay the photographer commissions on a full credit.  Whether the photographer is getting a good or bad deal depends on which packages Fotolia sells most of.

Exchange Rates

As if the pricing confusion wasn’t enough, the whole issue has raised an old sore spot many photographers have had with the way Fotolia handles currencies.  Depending on when and where you first signed up as a photographer, you were assigned a currency which your account is associated with.  Photographers earn ‘credits’ on the Fotolia site, then when requesting payout convert those credits to cash.  Fotolia’s ‘exchange rate’ is currently 1 Credit = 1 USD = 1 Euro = .75 GBP. For those photographers who are lucky enough to have signed up with the Euro currency, they are currently earning 37% (1 Euro = 1.36562 USD, Feb 8 2010) more than photographers with a USD Fotolia account.

In terms of image sales; if a buyer purchases credits with Euro, then spends them licensing a photographers images who gets paid in USD, a white ranked photographer could earn as little as 16% of the actual credit sale price.  On the flip side if the photographer gets paid in Euro and the buyer pays in USD and purchases the largest package, Fotolia pays out a 46% commission. (see table below)

Given these variables there is quite a large variance in the actual commissions photographers are getting for each sale.

Below are two tables.  The first table assumes the photographer gets paid in USD and is a white level photographer.  The table gives the commission levels from buyers paying in three different currencies and buying either the most or least expensive packages.  The second table is the same as the first table except the photographer is paid out in Euro.  Currency exchange rates were calculated 5 Feb 2010.

White ranked photographer paid in USD

-

White ranked photographer paid in Euro

It is pretty clear that having photographers paid in Euro is costing Fotolia a lot more than photographers paid in USD.   What commissions Fotolia is actually paying out is almost impossible to know.  Alexa claims 63% of Fotolia’s traffic heads to the German site with another 6.3% heading to Fotolia France.  Using these numbers we could assume the majority of Fotolia’s buyers are from Europe and are paying in Euro while the majority of photographers appear to be paid in USD.

How other sites deal with the problem

All microstock sites have credit packages which sell at different prices – so how to they deal with the problem?  The most common method, used by both Dreamstime and iStock for example, gives photographers a % of the actual price of the credit.  This method may be more complicated when first looking at your earnings report but provides a more transparent commission structure, which if nothing else keeps photographers happy.

Lastly, photographers seem to be upset due to a lack of response from Fotolia.  Fotolia has not made an official comment on the situation, save a small post from Chad on their forum.

Good evening everyone,

On behalf of the Fotolia team, I want to thank each of you for your patience and support while we roll-out new purchase incentives and commission structures. Rest assured, our payout averages continue to be amongst the highest in the industry. Fotolia understands and appreciates the investment contributors make in creating their material. We welcome and value your feedback. Should you have questions about Fotolia’s new program, please contact Customer Service directly and we would be happy to chat with you.

Fotolia Management

Help, my image has been stolen! What next…

I’m Innocent, Really!

© Hartphotography Dreamstime.com

There seems to be a never ending supply of threads where people find their images stolen or being given away for free.  Our first line of defense should be to contact the infringing party directly.  There is still a lot of education to be done regarding proper licensing and many people do not know how to license an image, or that stock photography even exists at all.  If we inform the offending party – we not only stop them misusing our images, but have the chance of gaining a new microstock customer.  Make use of a good referral link when you notify them and you will not only profit from the sale of another image but from the referral income as well.   Shutterstock recently contacted an offending party, who purchased the wrong license for their image use, which resulted in multiple extended license downloads for many members on MicrostockGroup.  Most people are honest and want to do what is right – we need to help them know what is right.

Maybe Not So Innocent

Ok, I’ll admit that sometimes people aren’t so innocent and outright steal images to give away, sell, or build up a portfolio on flickr or some other photo sharing site.  If you get no response from first contacting the infringing party – it is time to get more serious.

Microstock Sites

If the images are being sold on a microstock site, contact the site directly and explain the situation.  Give links to both your own, and the offending images.  Most sites have a link on the bottom of every page labeled ‘contact’ or ’support’ which you can use to send them a message.  The microstock sites are quick to take down infringing photos and deal harshly with users who upload infringing content.

Flickr

Most photo sharing website are more than willing to remove infringing content from their site, and flickr is no exception.  A quote from the flickr guidelines:

Copyright Infringement
If you see photos or videos that you’ve created in another member’s photostream, don’t panic. This is probably just a misunderstanding and not malicious. A good first step is to contact them and politely ask them to remove it. If that doesn’t work, please file a Notice of Infringement with the Yahoo! Copyright Team who will take it from there.

You may be tempted to post an entry on your photostream or in our public forum about what’s happening, but that’s not the best way to resolve a possible copyright problem. We don’t encourage singling out individuals like this on Flickr.

[Flickr Guidelines]

If flickr agrees that the image is infringing on your copyright, and generally they will, flickr will remove the image from their  website.  If the member’s portfolio is primarily made up of infringing content, the entire account will be deleted.

For a form letter you can send to flickr, along with addresses and further information, check out this information from Kevin Hulsey

[flickr copyright and intellectual property policy]

Google

If a website is hosting your content, one recourse is to report it to Google.  This won’t get the site or the image removed from the internet but it will remove the site from the Google search results and should drastically decrease the amount of traffic the site receives.  For addresses and information on contacting Google, as well as a form letter check out Kevin Hulsey’s page again.

Web Host

Most websites are hosted at a web host.  You can find which webhost a website is using with a simple ‘who is’ search.  Once you have found the website, send them a form letter informing them of the infringement.  All web hosts will have different policies regarding copyright infringement but if a site is hosting your content, they should take steps towards getting it removed.  Also, remember that the host must receive a “reasonable amount of time” to remove the content.

Do you have any other suggestions for protecting your intellectual property?  Let’s hear them in the comments.

[In the Forum: MicrostockGroup Image Sleuths]

Microstock in Technicolor – A comparison of image prices and sizing

New Pricing

Since the new year Fotolia, iStock and Dreamstime all have updated their pricing. I did a review of the iStock update here.  Getting your head around the various image sizes each site is offering as well as what they are charging for the credit packages they sell and lastly the variety of price levels the images can have – is confusing to say the least.

The Table

To try make sense of some of the information and see how the agencies compare, I have put the information for the top 6 microstock sites in a table.

The table shows what each site is currently selling images for at their cheapest and most expensive offering. To calculate the most expensive price I took the cost of the most expensive credit sold and calculated what the cost of the most expensive type of image would be. On iStock for example this would mean buying a package of 12 credits then buying an exclusive image, for Dreamstime it would be a level 5 image etc. The cheapest image was calculated from using the most expensive credit package purchase (giving the cheapest price per credit) and buying the cheapest type of image.

The ‘high end’ collections, such as iStock Vetta, 123RF Evo etc., that some of the sites offer, have not been included in the table.

The table is color coded to hopefully help give a clearer picture of how things compare. Each image size has a color, if there is no pricing for a given image size for a site – the higher price (color) is used because that is what the buyer would need to buy if they needed that size. For example, if I needed a 3mp image and I were buying it from iStock, you can see that the 3mp cell for iStock is colored the same as it is for the 5mp image which means you would have to pay $9.50-$22.80.

Observations

So what does the table show us? Excluding Shutterstock for a second, it is interesting to see that the three most popular sites offer the widest range of prices.  It appears to be working for them.  Certain buyers are willing to part with “big” money in order to purchase desirable files, while the agencies still provide cheaper priced images for to those buyers who want them.

Shutterstock is primarily a subscription site, so it is almost unfair to include them in this table, but they do offer credit purchases and at surprisingly cheap prices.  Shutterstock, 123RF and StockXpert haven’t updated their prices for 2010 yet, so lets hope they have something good in store for photographers.

[Discuss on Microstockgroup]

iSyndica – Like Magic

I have been testing iSyndica for a little over a month now and would describe the service as no less than ‘magical’.

If you aren’t familiar with iSyndica, it works like this.

• You upload your photos / video / vectors to iSyndica via FTP or online uploader
• You click a couple buttons on the iSyndica website
• Your images are immediately available on 35+ websites, ready for submission

That description may be a little simplified, but it is essentially what happens.  Want more info?  Here is the breakdown…

Getting your files onto iSyndica

This is the only spot in the workflow where you have to sit and wait.  I found uploading via FTP the simplest, and comparable to uploading to any other website.  Once the files had finished uploading they were immediately avaible for editing for syndication on my iSyndica control panel.

Last minute editing

If you don’t keyword your images before uploading, iSyndica provides a nice user interface to add keywords to your images.  The UI has made great use of AJAX, letting you edit the keywords on all your files without the page ever having to reload.

What sites does iSyndica Support?

I think it would be simpler to list the sites iSyndica DOESN’T support, but quite frankly I couldn’t find one.  The current list of supported photography sites is at 35.  That is more than enough to satisfy even the most ‘band wagon hopping’ prolific microstockers.  If you do manage to find a site that iSyndica doesn’t support, perhaps a site of your own or the ‘next big start up’ you can enter the settings as a generic FTP account.

Entering your account information for the various microstock sites is straight forward with the iSyndica double checking the credentials immediately, letting you know if you made a mistake.

As an additional feature, iSyndica also support a number of ‘promotional’ sites where you might want to upload part of your portfolio to generate traffic or advertise yourself.  These sites include facebook, twitter, Flickr, Picassa etc…

Sending the files out – the magic happens

Now the magic starts!  I have a fast internet connection, but a 500mb video file still takes around 2 hours to get online via FTP.   Photos can be uploaded quicker but a folder of 50 images can easily take close to an hour.  Once the images are online with iSyndica however – you simply select the images you want to syndicate, then start selecting the sites you want those images sent to.  Seconds later the files are ready for editing at the microstock site.  If you are used to having to wait 10 hours to upload a folder of images to 10 sites, or 20 hours for 2 videos to 5 sites, you are in for a treat. This is where you will go wow.  With iSyndica you are uploading your image once but getting your images online everywhere.

So what’s the catch?

So with all these great features, what is the catch?  Well none, really – except maybe that it isn’t totally free.  They do have a free trial account however, and if you are hobby photographer, that may be all you need.

Pricing is based on a credit system.  In the trial account you are given 100 free credits to use each month.  That means you can upload 100 images to 1 site, or 20 images to 5 sites.  One upload to one site costs 1 credit.  Full pricing info here.

For hobby photographers, iSyndica ends up being quite cheep, if not free.  For full time microstock photographers, the costs start adding up.  I have a fairly low production level for someone doing microstock full time, but I still try to upload 200 images / month.  I upload these images to around 15 sites.  To accomplish this through iSyndica, would cost me 3000 credits (200 images x 15 sites), which come at a cost of $40 ( the largest package which includes 1200 credits/month) + $18 (1800 additional credits) = $58/month.  $58/month isn’t really a big deal when making a full time income from microstock, and for someone with a slow internet connection this would be very tempting.  iSyndica is up against stiff competition however as their main competitor is ftp uploading from your computer to each site individually.  This method takes 15x longer in my case, and requires a dose of patience, but it is also free.

Added Value

iSyndica offers a few things, general FTP uploading does not.

In the ‘Syndicate’ panel, you are given a clear overview of which images are uploaded to which sites.  This list can include all your files, only images from organized groups, or by upload batch.  For those with poor organization skills – this could be very usefull

iSyndica also provides pretty graphs of your earnings from the majority of the sites.  The graphs can be displayed in a variety of ways – daily / yearly, sales / downloads, including / excluding certain sites etc.

If you are paranoid about hard drive failure, iSyndica has that covered too.  With everything but the free account, you can download your files from their site – providing you with a great backup resource.

Another interesting feature is their downsizing option.  If you want to re-size your images before uploading them to a certain website, you can automatically set this in your settings.

What I miss

After using iSyndica for a few weeks there are a few things I miss.

When selecting a number of photos I would really like to see how many images are selected.  Having such powerful tools can make for powerful mistakes.  If I select all images in a group, I would like a note that I have selected, for example, 50 images.  I often know how many images ’should’ be in a group, so this would also give me confirmation that everything got into that group correctly.

I would like to see reporting of earnings by group.  Being able to see how much a given shoot has earned is very important information which can be difficult to glean from the microstock sites themselves.   iSyndica doesn’t do this yet but I see it is in the ‘planned’ features.

[iSyndica Forum Discussion]

iStock 2010 Changes and What They Mean

Nearly a week ago (Dec. 8, 2009) Kelly Thompson made an announcement on the iStock forum about a number of changes iStock would be making in early 2010.  The response to these changes have extremely varied, both positive and negative, from exclusive and non exclusive photographers alike.  The announcement thread on iStock has already attained enough posts to be considered a short novel (2300 posts and counting) while the thread on MicrostockGroup, which is slightly more manageable, has some 200 posts to work through.

What are the changes?

There are 4 main changes announced.  iStock will introduce Tiered Collections, make a small adjustment to their credit prices, adjust the needed sales for each canister level and make some front end improvements.

Tiered collections

(starting January 7, 2010)

The Main Collection

The main collection will be built from non-exclusive images.  All pricing will stay as it currently is, except for the two largest photo sizes, where we will see a price cut.

Current Pricing – photos

New Pricing – photos

iStock Exclusive Collection

iStock exclusive images will be seeing a significant increase in their sale prices.  Prices will increase anywhere from 7%-100%.

Current Pricing – photos

New Pricing – photos

Current Pricing – vector

New Pricing – vector

Note: All Exclusive elaborate files are currently in Vetta

Exclusive Plus Collection

(will launch later than the other collections)

iStock exclusives will be able put 20% of their portoflio into the Exclusive Plus Collection.  Pricing for this collection is not yet set (and neither is the name), but will be somewhere between Exclusive and Vetta.

Vetta collection

The vetta collection currently represents around 1% of the total iStock database.  iStock will continue on with this successful collection, keeping pricing unchanged.

Current (and future) pricing

2010 Credit Price Changes

(starting January 7, 2010)

There will be a very small adjustment to the price of a credit.

Canister Level Changes

(starting February 24, 2010)

Current contributors will be grandfathered in to their existing levels.
Update: Kelly Thompson just announced that Exclusive contributors will be grandfathered into the levels for one additional step.  If you are a gold photographer on Feb. 24, you will only need 25,000 sales to reach diamond.  The next level, Black Diamond, would then be at the new levels and take 400,000 sales. [Announced 18 Dec. 2009] [Discuss]

Site updates

iStock also mentions they are constantly making updates to the backend of the site, but coming soon – they will be making improvements to the front end as well.

How does this affect the seller?

What we know!

• iStock hasn’t mentioned if they are going to shuffle the search results again, but they have stated that the Exclusive and Main collection will be shown together, in a similar manner as exclusive and non-exclusive files are currently shown.
• Exclusive photographers will receive 12.5%-20% less commissions for each sale when they reach the level that would have put them into the next canister level.
  Let’s say we have an exclusive contributor with 2000 downloads right now – lets call him Thor.   Thor is currently a Bronze contributor earning 25% commissions.  Thor won’t make it to silver before February when they change the canister system.  In March Thor reaches 2500 downloads.  With the new system however, he stays at Bronze canister level (25% commission) instead of getting silver and 30% commission.  So from march 2010 onwards, iStock is getting 5% more of Thor’s earnings than they would have without the change.  That 5% would have been a 20% increase in earnings for Thor (5/20 = 20%).
  make sense?  iStock are taking a higher percentage of the sale whenever someone SHOULD have reached the next canister but didn’t because of the change.
• iStock exclusives will see an increase in sale prices from 7%-100%.  Medium sized images will be selling for 67% more.  Despite the ‘earnings cut’ they receive due to canister changes, exclusives should see an overall increase in earnings due to the increase in prices.
• Currently, iStock is making more money from a non-exclusive sale compared to a sale from an exclusive photographer.  Once the changes take place, iStock will be making more money from an exclusive sale.  Using a medium file as an example.
  

  Canister Level	iStock’s Share - Current pricing @ 6 credits for all sales	iStock’s Share - new pricing @ 6 credits non-exclusive sale 10 credits exclusive sale
  non-exclusive	4.8 credits	4.8 credits
  Bronze	4.5 credits	7.5 credits
  Silver	4.2 credits	7 credits
  Gold	3.9 credits	6.5 credits
  Diamond	3.6 credits	6 credits
  Black Diamond	3.6 credits	6 credits

What we like to think we know!

• There have been rumors about iStock offering non-exclusive photographers the opportunity to upload exclusives files.  This rumor is totally unfounded, but comes from Kelly making this statement.
  We’re also hoping to encourage the strongest talents in stock today to consider bringing their best work to iStock exclusively.
  The fact that Kelly used the word ‘also’ makes it seem like there is something more than just the regular exclusive deal.  Time will tell.
• As mentioned earlier, iStock is currently making the most income per sale from non-exclusive sales.  In the future iStock will make significantly more from exclusive sales.  Many people are suggesting that iStock may decrease the non-exclusive presence in the already heavily exclusive-biased search results.
• Non-exclusive files may gain a slight advantage on iStock in regards to price sensative buyers.  For buyers who have a strict budget of a few dollars, they may choose a cheaper non-exclusive image, over a similar, more expensive exclusive image.
• With Vetta, Exclusive Plus, and higher overall commissions for exclusive photographers, iStock seems to be tempting a lot of non-exclusive photographers to put on an exclusive crown.  In the MSG thread there is a lot of discussion and anticipation about how the other microstock sites will compete to keep their photographers.

Have I forgotten anything?  Are there ways the industry will be affected that I haven’t touched on?

Post your comments in the blog, or get in the discussion:

Discussion on MicrostockGroup
Announcement thread on iStock Photo