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Featurepics pays the highest commission for your image sales plus they are the most helpful ones when it comes to the nitty-gritty details of promoting your own images. And did I mention that you can set your own price and the type of license you want to sell? Check it out today! SY
So Lucky Oliver is closing down, another microstock site bites the dust ;-(
In case you are one of many, many people that are dreaming to open up their one microstock sites, do us all a favour and don’t commit the following mistakes:
Accept every image submitted just to get images, buyers are not attracted by crap.
Fight key word spamming/ bad key wording from the beginning, buyers want to find their dream image fast and not wade through tons of images that have nothing at all to do with their search.
Make your site slick and fast loading, time is money, especially on the internet.
Keep your site on line at all cost, a site that is down one time, is one time too often down, the buyer will never come back.
Keeping your artists happy is fine, but they are the happiest if they have sales. So make the buyer’s happiness your utmost priority and everything else follows.
Market your site, this is why we the contributors give you a share in our commissions, not for image hosting without results=sales. For this we can use flickr and the like.
Have a nice day, and in case you want still to start your own microstock site / project don’t hesitate to contact me I am available for consultancy, alpha and beta-testing for new microstock venues 
Have a nice day, SY
Oh, and btw bnpsworldwide closed also earlier this month, who is next?
Here the original link and here our forum discussion. So what? Gettys is up for sale? Better said for auction, but not on ebay! Anybody having 1.5 billion $$$$$$ to spare? Personally I am more concerned about Istock’s future then about Gettys itself, aren’t I am selfish My personal guess is that the whole lot is bought up by Bill Gates’ imperium that includes corbis and craphamlet, pardon me, wanted to say Snapvillage already. Boys and Girls we are up for interesting times with this one! SY
as I just started my “real” photographicfreedom project at http://photographicfreedom.co.uk
I hope to develop that site to a resource for micro stock photographers. So far I have a blog (the Homepage) and a forum http://photographicfreedom.co.uk/forum up and crawling Needs still a lot of love but if anybody here is interested please come and visit us and join or start a discussion, SY
The message below was displayed today in the Shutterstock Forum:
Dear Shutterstock Submitters,
We wanted to let you know that we will be shutting down Photosights as of November 11, 2007. While we aim to offer as many options to our users as possible, our great strength is the subscription model. We have decided that we can serve our customers best by devoting all our resources to continuously improving and enhancing the subscription service at Shutterstock.
At 6pm on November 11, all traffic will be redirected to Shutterstock. Sometime after that date, the Photosights column in your stats page will be removed as well. All earnings will be paid out as usual.
We thank you for your understanding as we work through this transition. Please contact support@shutterstock.com with any questions or concerns.
Regards, Jon Oringer
Founder & CEO
Shutterstock
Bearing in mind that I had only one per photo sale in my whole time at Shutterstock I can’t say that I am surprised… 123rf seems to be the only site that manages to do subscription and credit (per photo) sales well. SY
Finally finished one of my many projects and put a web site together about “where to get the best free images”, check it out here: The One Stop Guide to Free Images
If you are into blogging or have one or more web sites, free images are a pretty nifty resource to have! SY
I like to join new sites, I give them a year and if they haven’t taken off I am gone. So I joined Albumo today, my short experience so far: US based site, registration is easy, they don’t ask for copies of documents etc, choice of three upload methods: web-based (5 images), java (max 150mb) and ftp (max 1GB), min requirement 800px and a max limit per image of 150mb (brilliant for some of my fractals), approval time was around 6h (love it!) and my approval ratio so far is 100% (love it even more!). They pay for uploading: 250-999 images uploaded $25 and then for each image 10cents. No categories (there are optional ones, but I ignored them), java and ftp work smoothly and fast and it reads meta data. From upload queue you have the possibility to batch edited things if you want and push all images at once into the approval queue, pretty straightforward and easy. So, tonight I will set Filezilla to work and upload my whole portfolio 
Here the link to my Portfolio SY
Disclaimer: The writer of this blog is German, so please don’t hold my slight “accent” against me 
After quiting the day job I can now concentrate on Stock Photography and other photographic adventures. I started this blog to keep track of all my ideas and projects and to share them with whomever is interested. My main income I make now by selling my pictures on line, ShutterStock is the agency that provides a big part of my income. So I hope you enjoy this blog and come back soon. SY
