Author: Amos Struck

The Envato group, as known from their sites like PhotoDune or GraphicRiver, has recently announced a new collection of non-traditional stock images, called Unstock. The collection contains authentic images and is being offered at a flat price of $5 with a standard RF license, and the potential to win $500 on each of ten named topics. Reward for all images accepted for Unstock As part of the launch and their willingness to quickly extend the collection, Envato is offering contributors a reward of $5 for each images accepted into the Unstock collection. Images need to be uploaded to the PhotoDune…

iStock has announced a raise for contributors for the new small monthly subscription packages they started offering in August in small markets. Non-exclusive contributors will receive $1 per download compared to the $0.28 that are paid for large subscription packages. As iStock had apparently found a new main setup for their target markets, introducing “one size fits all” credit prices and competitive subscription packages last year, they now started experimenting with new offers in the market. One of them launched in August was the “small monthly subscription” packages, covering ten images to be downloaded within a month. The offer is available in…

Mobile and online sharing community EyeEm has announced their 2015 winners of the EyeEm Awards. The New York based photographer shows remote corners of Asia in his portfolio. Last year’s award had been awarded to a Belgian teenager. Besides the overall winner, ten further images were rewarding as winning in their respective categories. From architecture through travel and portraits to photojournalism, the awards highlight the wide variety of photographers who share their images, portfolios and stories through the platform that once started as a mobile community but evolved into a full blow photographer community with an attached licensing market. In August, EyeEm had…

Remember all the excitement from the last Microstock Expo 2013 in Berlin? A fellow photographer just reminded me about all the great content in the 24+ hours of MEXPO video. This gave me the idea to give something back to this great microstock community which made that event so great. So I spoke with my co-creator of the conference, Lee Torrens of Microstock Diaries, and minutes later the videos from both conferences (2011 and 2013) are no longer €199. (with a registration!) You’re welcome. 😉 Some highlights: 36h of high-quality videos covering both entire events Learn from the best stock photographers…

I just had the chance to talk to the new head of content at Adobe, Scott Braut, formerly VP of content at Shutterstock. I have met Scott Braut on our last Microstock Expo, where he have had a blast in the interview with Yuri Arcurs and Bruce Livingstone. You can also read the full transcript here on StockPhotoSecrets.

Stock Performer, the best analytics software according to our test here, has just announced a major re-design and upgrade. It will be available for all customers on the 26th July. Serving the most successful stock artists Stock Performer claims to serve the the most successful stock artists in the business, such as Andres Rodriguez, Monkey Business, Uberstock, Wavebreak, Pixdeluxe and many others, as well as agencies like Stocksy and Westend61. The new update has been created based on their very valuable feedback. This upgrade’s major new features With this new version, Stock Performer will continue to be the tool of choice of today’s most…

In an email and their Terms of Service (ToS), microstock agency Shutterstock has announced changes to their Terms of Service (ToS) for contributors which will take effect on July 29th, 2015. Lowered payout threshold to $35 The headline of the changes as highlighted by Shutterstock is a reduction in the minimum they require for the monthly payout: Until now, contributors needed to have earned at least $75 to receive a payout in the following month. This will now be lowered to $35. Great for contributors which are not earning a lot on Shutterstock. BigStock (owned by Shutterstock as well) already has a request…

Yesterday, Adobe has announced major changes to its Creative Cloud solutions, among those is the introduction of the Adobe Stock platform, based on the image library of microstock platform Fotolia. The announcement doesn’t come as a surprise after Adobe’s acquisition of Fotolia late last year. What are the main changes for contributors? Adobe Stock contains all images published on the Fotolia platform – with the exception of the premium collection Fotolia Infinite which is priced at a premium level – and there is no Opt-In/Opt-Out for this. The sales are being processed through the Fotolia platform and will be shown live as if…

As the video and still image agency Pond5 announced, a new feature is supposed to make contributor’s life a bit easier: Auto-tagging will suggest keywords based on the content of an image. According to Pond5, the feature is using “Artificial Neural Networks” to find the relevant keywords based on the structure of the images and videos. It is supposed to have a learning curve that will improve over time when using it on a regular basis. “We’re always looking for ways to make our contributors’ lives easier. With auto-tagging, we’re helping them make more money while eliminating the most tedious part…

The market leading microstock agency Shutterstock has just published its annual contributor earnings report. The overall earnings have grown by about a third compared to 2013 and reached an amount of $83 million last year. They are going into some details on where their most successful contributors are located: A rather surprising high percentage of contributor payments are being paid to European members who cashed in $59 million or almost three quarters of the total payout. Asian contributors with $12 million in royalties have overtaken the Americas (more than $10 millions are being paid to there) while Africa and Oceania combined…