New Fotolia announcement

Fotolia has just advised their contributors by email of their intention to adopt the subscription system already in place at some of their competitors. 23 – 30 credit according to your rank would be the contributor's earning for each photo sold.

Rapid Response

The response on the Fotolia forums has been pretty rapid with mainly indignation at the discount strategy. Three main reactions appear on the forums (based on fotolia's UK and France forum):
- some contributers are indecisive, give the benefit of the doubt and are willing to try on the short term,
- others refuse categorically and will not accept their photos to be included in the subscription scheme, and
- some are talking about withdrawing altogether of the site like Andres Rodriguez (sapphire contributer).
Even a moderator of the UK forum admitted her disappointment

International Confusions

On both UK and French forums there are confusions about what will really be applied. On the US forum however, a moderator stepped in to give some precisions on the the new scheme: subscription downloads will be limited to the L standard license (why not say that in the email?)
The independent forums have rapidly growing threads of anger on the subject with people who sometimes already pulled out altogether of Fotolia. Maybe a bit hasty if you take into consideration the chronic bad communication Fotolia has shown in the past. On the other hand, there has been complaints piling up quite high.

Search Changes

Indeed, the contributors have been complaining about changes to the searches and subsequent loss of income, along with an increased rate of rejection as part of Fotolia's strategy to raise the quality of the photos on the site. Prior to that the introduction of the infinite collection annoyed the smaller contributors in that these pictures have a better exposure, are sold more expensively and are sometimes (often?) of very poor quality (see examples: http://en.fotolia.com/id/6547687 or http://en.fotolia.com/id/6533055). If other contributors than these agencies would submit these photos via the normal route, they would be rejected without a doubt.
Fotolia also came up with new licences early this year which was more than welcomed by the contributors.

Anger Among Contributors?

What angers contributors the most is probably the raise of quality followed by a discount. This will certainly not help with the bad press microstock has with part of the professional photographers.

In the same announcement Fotolia introduces the API Reseller scheme which allows a reseller to sell the photos under their own brand at a different price (not lower than the Fotolia price). We have to suppose they wanted to tell us a bad news and good news. Another testimony to Fotolia's poor communication since hardly anyone is mentioning it in the forums (only seen in the french forum so far)...