There are some pretty large changes going on with istock… again.  This afternoon istockphoto dropped the bad news of pay cuts to all contributors.  The parent company, Getty, definitely likes to stir the microstock “pot”.  Your canister level won’t mean a thing anymore (other than how many images you can submit each week) and neither do your all time download totals.  Now they are going to pay us according to how many credit sales we have made/sold from the prior year.

The new royalty rates chart:

More info and discussions here:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=251812&page=1

http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=861

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-changing-royalty-structure/

So basically, another example of frustration to the world community of microstock photographers.  I can’t see how any microstock contributor, whether exclusive or non-exclusive would be happy over this change.  I’m projecting at least a 4 figure loss in income from my istock earnings for next year.  That’s a loss of 3% commission on every single sale.  Like 20% wasn’t low enough (pretty much the industry low) now I am expecting to fall under the 17% range.  Great.  That top tier of earning 20% is just set up there as a tease, I don’t think any one contributor even earns that many annual redeemed credit sales.

Responses are looking terrible across the board.  What a big surprise!  This is just like a slap in the face to every one of the contributors who helped istock and Getty grow over the years.  I feel bad for exclusive contributors who have all of their eggs in one basket.  This is the exact reason why I will never be able to allow myself to go exclusive with any one given company.

If a lot of exclusives jump ship, there’s definitely going to be an influx of new quality work on the remainder of the big 6 agencies.  I feel bad for them though – a lot more work for probably still, less pay.  It takes a while to build steam in a portfolio.  Images that were indexed and ranked in agency search engines from 3-5 years ago are what has helped us long time microstockers stick around through all of the chaos.  It’s not as easy when you just dump a bunch of images into a collection.  Momentum of uploads is key to success in this business.

Here is what I think and hope actually happens.  Established contributors (both exclusives and non-exclusives) should be grandfathered in to the minimum royalty rate they’re already earning. Let these changes go to the new ones that join, if at all. Other agencies have structured it that way, and it doesn’t cause mass chaos or letdown like this ridiculousness has.