Quote from: Pixart on May 01, 2014, 13:24

For me there is one fact.  TWENTY FIVE CENTS.

I am a supplier.  I am supposed to set the prices.  What other wacked market lets the "stores" decide what they are going to pay their suppliers?  Do you think Walmart says "I'll pay you 25 cents for each pillowcase in the box" and then in 6 months say "I changed our arrangement - I've raised the price on the pillowcases, but I've actually cut your wholesale price to 10 cents".  And furthermore, they have not paid for my content so they should not be able to share it with their partners, take a cut, change licenses and make any decisions.

Rant over.

I think Walmart actually does things like this when they can get away with it, but that doesn't make it right.  In fact it's a good comparison - it shows what happens when a market becomes controlled by a small number of middlemen and producers have lost all leverage.

Unfortunately we, as contributors, have a real supply & demand issue that has been building for some time. SS are now up to nearly 300K new images approved each week and that number is still steadily increasing. Whenever there's a massive imbalance between supply and demand it usually results in the price changing.

You can bet the other agencies will be examining FT's move very carefully indeed. Judging by the monthly sales reports IS appear to have been haemorrhaging customers by the bucket-load for over 2 years now. At what point will they be tempted to try a 'new business model' if they have little left to lose with their existing model?

Re FT DPC
can't we just get onto as many sites as poss (FB, FBfanclub, Steve's digicams etc) and point out that one way FT manages to do well is by paying contributors extremely low rates - even for the microstock industry? And push Fair Trade type ideas?
Just a thought, probably way too simplistic......and such tactics don't seem to deter shoppers from Primark etc in the UK......

Walmart:
http://m.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

27,935,717

Congratulations to all involved.

Could someone of the native speaker here write a short generic text that we could send directly to contributors which still have their images in the Dollar Photo Club, to let them know there is a option out for it and about the foul game Fotolia is playing?
I've found some important contributors that I already researched for contact address and would love to write them a message about this.

Keep pounding them until you see    00,000,000 and a 'RIP' Sign on the front page than the mission is fully completed...

If you mean native English speaker, how about this.

Earlier in 2014, Fotolia introduced the Dollar Photo Club, a stock site with all Fotolia's photos and illustrations but with very different pricing. Although Fotolia is presenting this site as exclusive and targeted at high volume buyers, the reality is that for just $10 a month you can sign up for a 10-image "subscription" - $1 per  image, all sizes. Anyone can sign up - and some contributors who had never purchased a single image were sent the offer e-mail!

And the contributor makes a subscription royalty for each sale. Subscription prices without a requirement for the buyer to commit to a high volume of purchases is very very bad news for contributor income.

Contributors were not notified about the drastically different pricing and were initially told there was no way to opt out of this sales channel - except by leaving Fotolia. With the encouragement of a group of contributors pledging to remove their files if things didn't change, Fotolia has relented and provided an option to opt-out of sales at Dollar Photo Club (referred to as DPC in the Contributor Profile)

You can read Fotolia's intentions in their own words in this TechCrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

"In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US." and "It�s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players..."

If Dollar Photo Club succeeds, what will get disrupted is contributor income - this is replacing higher royalties with lower, not opening new markets or finding new buyers (and early responses on Twitter and Facebook indicate that's exactly what's happening).

So for your own sake, at a minimum opt out of Dollar Photo Club - on Fotolia, when logged in, it's in Profile, then Contributor Parameters. You could also consider whether or not it makes sense to support an agency that treats its contributors so shabbily. Remember, the opt out only became available as people started deleting work from Fotolia.

It was 28 million plus images; today, it's 27 million and falling.

Couple small edits but, I borrowed this for

Hi Robert,

I'm not sure if you've heard the news about quite a number of us microstockers boycotting Fotolia because of the "Dollar Photo Club" launched earlier this year. We've already dropped somewhere around 500,000 images at the time of writing off of Fotolia including many accounts that have been entirely deactivated. The protest started in Russia and as such many other countries didn't catch wind of it until just a few days ago. In an effort to help expand our approach and brighten the outcome of a relatively successful deactivation day I thought I'd contact you, as you and your sites are influential in the microstock community.

Just in case you haden't heard about it yet,


Earlier in 2014, Fotolia introduced the Dollar Photo Club, a stock site with all Fotolia's photos and illustrations but with very different pricing. Although Fotolia is presenting this site as exclusive and targeted at high volume buyers, the reality is that for just $10 a month you can sign up for a 10-image "subscription" - $1 per  image, all sizes. Anyone can sign up - and some contributors who had never purchased a single image were sent the offer e-mail!

The contributor makes a subscription royalty for each sale. Subscription prices without a requirement for the buyer to commit to a high volume of purchases is very very bad news for contributor income.

Contributors were not notified about the drastically different pricing and were initially told there was no way to opt out of this sales channel - except by leaving Fotolia. With the encouragement of a group of contributors pledging to remove their files if things didn't change, Fotolia has relented and provided an option to opt-out of sales at Dollar Photo Club (referred to as DPC in the Contributor Profile)

You can read Fotolia's intentions in their own words in this TechCrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

"In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US." and "It�s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players..."

If Dollar Photo Club succeeds, what will get disrupted is contributor income - this is replacing higher royalties with lower, not opening new markets or finding new buyers (and early responses on Twitter and Facebook indicate that's exactly what's happening).

If there is anything you can/or are willing to do to assist us in our efforts it would be greatly appreciated. You can find out more and read the arguments of the community at
http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/fotolia-d-day-(deactivation-day)-may-1

http://boycottfotolia.org/en/answer.html#.U2LxiPldV8H

If you mean native English speaker, how about this.

Earlier in 2014, Fotolia introduced the Dollar Photo Club, a stock site with all Fotolia's photos and illustrations but with very different pricing. Although Fotolia is presenting this site as exclusive and targeted at high volume buyers, the reality is that for just $10 a month you can sign up for a 10-image "subscription" - $1 per  image, all sizes. Anyone can sign up - and some contributors who had never purchased a single image were sent the offer e-mail!

And the contributor makes a subscription royalty for each sale. Subscription prices without a requirement for the buyer to commit to a high volume of purchases is very very bad news for contributor income.

Contributors were not notified about the drastically different pricing and were initially told there was no way to opt out of this sales channel - except by leaving Fotolia. With the encouragement of a group of contributors pledging to remove their files if things didn't change, Fotolia has relented and provided an option to opt-out of sales at Dollar Photo Club (referred to as DPC in the Contributor Profile)

You can read Fotolia's intentions in their own words in this TechCrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/

"In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US." and "It�s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players..."

If Dollar Photo Club succeeds, what will get disrupted is contributor income - this is replacing higher royalties with lower, not opening new markets or finding new buyers (and early responses on Twitter and Facebook indicate that's exactly what's happening).

So for your own sake, at a minimum opt out of Dollar Photo Club - on Fotolia, when logged in, it's in Profile, then Contributor Parameters. You could also consider whether or not it makes sense to support an agency that treats its contributors so shabbily. Remember, the opt out only became available as people started deleting work from Fotolia.

It was 28 million plus images; today, it's 27 million and falling.

Is this to share? Do I need to credit you or post it as orphaned article?

I trust that everybody has noticed the contradiction between the claim that the DFC is aimed at high-volume photo users and the official statement Fotolia provided for photoarchive news
"First of all, I would like to clarify our intention here. Our aim has always been to democritize this market and it�s now to take microstock to the next level: going after the millions of companies around the world who don�t purchase yet any license for the images they use, especially in new markets. "
Of course, the claim that it is targeting entirely new users also contradicts the claim that it is acting to "disrupt the business model" of SS and iStock.
If you fit it all together they appear to be claiming to want to disrupt iStock and SS by gaining customers who steal large volumes of images from somewhere.

It's fine to share. Perhaps just link back to this post in the thread as the source?

perfect. Thanks.