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“Hello,

Thank you for voicing your concerns on the forum and for participating in our first ever Town Hall conference call last Thursday. We want you to know that we heard (and read) your concerns.

As stated on the call, we want to apologize for how this policy change and its communication were handled. We have taken your concerns seriously and decided to step back and review our initial plan. There will be no changes in your ability to control where your content is distributed. All three opt-out options will remain fully functional.

If you are not familiar with these options, as a contributor to Stockxpert you can earn more by:

Choosing to include your content in subscriptions on Stockxpert and other Jupiterimages sites;
Choosing to include your content with unrelated third parties Jupiterimages does business with, and/or;
Choosing to sell extended rights for your content enabling it to be used in products and services which are sold.

Please review your opt-in selections in your account profile to confirm your selected licensing options.

Based on three factors in the market, we believed the time was right to make all content on Stockxpert automatically available via these three opportunities. First, these options used to be opt-in, not opt-out. We discovered earlier in the year that most contributors wanted to be included in these programs but did not realize they had to opt-in. In response, for contributor convenience and customer benefit we made these options opt-out. Very few contributors opt-out which tells us that these revenue opportunities are viewed positively by virtually the entire Stockxpert community.

Second, the amount of revenue earned through extended licenses was negligible. If you earn a lot of money from extended licenses, you are among an elite few. We thought we could differentiate our community by offering customers a more simplified licensing option while increasing the value of using Stockxpert without taking anything away from contributors.

And finally, the customers on Stockxpert who license your content were expressing confusion over content that was available in the Stockxpert subscription versus content that was only available for single image sales. To adopt a highly customer centric approach, we wanted to have content consistency across any product or service which includes Stockxpert content.

These issues and challenges are real, and as a community, we need to figure out how we’re going to address them so that we remain competitive and deliver the best experience for the customer. But as contributors you are customers too and we let you down in how we chose to discuss these issues and in how we decided to bring changes to the community.

While we take a step back to re-assess these issues and how we can have a constructive dialog with the community about them, Jupiterimages will be actively experimenting with the unique opportunities we have to expand your exposure throughout our Jupiterimages properties and worldwide distribution channels. Across all of our businesses we license more than $100 million worth of content annually. We want to leverage this traffic for the benefit of Stockxpert contributors and all our customers. Some of these experiments will be successful, others won’t be. But we’re not standing still.

To that end, shortly we will be launching two new opportunities for contributors to earn additional revenue. These opportunities are linked to your subscriptions opt-in selection and they are completely optional and you may easily opt-out (if you’re not familiar on how to do this, directions will follow).

The first opportunity is the coming launch of our Photos.com Plus subscription plan. This opportunity is automatically available to you if you are opted-in to subscriptions. The Photos.com Plus plan is based on Photos.com, one of the oldest and most used photo subscriptions on the Internet. The content in Photos.com is what we call wholly-owned. That means we own it and don’t pay any royalties on it. We will be adding a new subscription level for Photos.com customers (Photos.com Plus), and in this we are proactively including Stockxpert contributors in a multi-million dollar revenue stream. Why? Our customers want the fresh, stylized images that you’re producing and selling on Stockxpert.

Your images will not only be exposed to thousands more customers and downloads on one of the leading stock photo sites in the industry, but you will also have the opportunity to sell your images at higher price points with the pay-per-download option that is available. On the regular Photos.com subscription, the two highest resolutions are not included. As part of this experiment, we’ve adopted the same approach for Photos.com Plus and we’re excited to see if we can sell microstock images at traditional royalty-free prices, yielding more revenue for everyone.

Another subscription plan where you will earn additional revenue is coming in the near future, the Jupiterimages Unlimited Plus subscription, or JIU+. We have heard you in the forums and we want to let you know about these options ahead of time so that you can make your choice. Again, the Photos.com Plus opportunity and this Jupiterimages Unlimited Plus opportunity are automatically available to you only if you are opted-in to subscriptions. Jupiterimages Unlimited is one of the fastest growing subscription businesses at Jupiterimages and we’re excited to add the fresh, stylized images of Stockxpert to the collection for all the same reasons we’re doing so for Photos.com Plus.

Experimenting with these new offerings is fairly complex as we’re trying to balance the needs and expectations of our customers and those of our Stockxpert contributors. The best source of new subscription sales for both new offerings are from our installed base of existing subscribers so we need to try to match what they’re used to without giving away too much value. We’re doing our best but it’s a bit tricky. The End User License Agreements (EULAs) for Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited, for instance, are different from the EULA for the Stockxpert subscription. So we’re making compromises in both as we prepare to bring Photos.com Plus and JIU+ to market. To make this clear, we have created a special web page to help clarify these areas for you. Please visit http://www.stockxpert.com/lpages/contributor/ to read more.

While we think Photos.com Plus and JIU+ are great opportunities for you to earn more revenue from your images, we also understand and respect that you may not want to be part of these new subscription opportunities. If that is the case, please be sure to visit your account profile and deselect the checkbox under “Number 7 Subscription to Stockxpert.com” by August 15 to be removed. If you are already opted-out of subscriptions, then you don’t need to do anything. Understandably, we cannot create opt-outs for each new subscription offering, so if you opt-out of subscriptions, your Stockxpert content will not be available in any subscription on Stockxpert, Photos.com Plus, Jupiterimages Unlimited Plus or any future Jupiterimages subscription offering. For those of you who are interested in being a part of this exciting new subscription, please double check to make sure you are opted in.

Thank you for staying involved. We’ve definitely learned an important and valuable lesson in how we need to engage with you in the future. While we will continue testing and being an innovative leader in this field, we know we need to be sure to include the community in all future initiatives.

Again, for a better understanding of the Photos.com Plus and JIU+ opportunities, please visit http://www.stockxpert.com/lpages/contrib .. and remember to opt-in (or out) by August 15.

Please feel free to contact us if you still have questions and thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,
The Stockxpert Team”

More back-pedalling here!

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