PDN news

The lastest stock news from PDN. I have extracted the microstock news and a full link is at the bottom:

Stock Tips: News From Photo Agencies
The latest on the stock photo business

ShutterStock CEO Not Sweating SnapVillage Pricing
In the crowded arena of micropayment stock photography,Shutterstock has differentiated itself – and won some respect, in fact – by standing by its unique pricing scheme. Rather than selling images one at a time, ShutterStock uses a subscription model. A one-month subscription costs $199 for 25 downloads a day, up to 750 images total.

So when Corbis's micropayment site SnapVillage went live last week, it was obvious where it looked for inspiration for its subscription pricing. Its monthly subscription is identical to Shutterstock  in every detail: $199 for 30 days, 25 downloads a day, up to 750 images totalShutterstock CEO Jon Oringer sounds diplomatic about his rival's lack of originality in their subscription pricing model. "I guess they realize it was a successful one," Oringer says.

Transparency Cuts Both Ways For Fotolia
Mircopayment stock sites pride themselves on having open community forums where contributors can talk about their work and the site. It's great when things are running well, but when things go wrong...

Take a look at Fotolia. On June 18 Fotolia;relaunched its Web site as FotoliaV2, sprucing up the site to improve performance and user experience.

Unfortunately, the upgrade was marred by serious bugs. One problem disabled the site's image upload feature for several days (as detailed on the Fotolia blog). Another problem shut down the site's system of paying photographers.

The whole ugly ordeal played out on the company's own publicly accessible message boards. Photographers took to the boards en masse to vent their frustrations. Fotolia staff tried to keep order. It was clear nerves were fraying.

"I have probably deleted around 300 posts from this thread," wrote one Fotolia moderator, referring to duplicate or irrelevant posts. "If I have deleted this many, just think how many more posts Support are getting and having to try to deal with every day on top of their usual workloads and please try and be patient whilst you wait for a response."

Sounds like a headache for all involved.

More deals, launches and upgrades

Getty Images's iStockphoto undertook a significant site upgrade this month, adding support for additional video formats and six new languages: Japanese, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Russian. The site also improved its advanced search tool.

Fotolia announced a partnership with everystockphoto.com, a search engine that searches free images. Fotolia's paid images will now be available through the site. Fotolia says it hopes to forge more partnerships through its public Application Programming Interface

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