iStockphoto Royalty Changes
Posted on Sep 8, 2010 | 1 comment
Yesterday iStockphoto.com announced some pretty big changes to their royalty program for contributors, along with more changes to collections (Vetta, Getty, etc.) and a few other things that will affect buyers as well. A friend and fellow iStockphoto contributor Sean Locke wrote up a detailed blog post about the changes … take a look at his post over on his blog.
I won’t get into the details of how this will affect me other than I’m fairly confident that I won’t see a change in my own royalty percentage. There is, however, a big uproar in the iStock forums from some very unhappy contributors (check it out here).
Yeah, I am one of those very unhappy people… I am not nearly as successful as you, and only topped 100 downloads today, after 7 months there.
I add 18 new images each week, of which about 12-14 are accepted. I had hoped to reach that magic 250 in the next 6 months, but if they reset me each year, I can pretty much kiss off hitting the higher levels… :-(
Meanwhile, Shutterstock outsells iStock for me by a good bit anyway. In the same 6 months, I have close to 600 downloads. Of course, I only get 25 cents on most of those, but that still means more $$ from SS than IS so far.