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Once upon a time there was an independant web site called Stockxpert.com, owned by HAAP Media.

This web site attracted the attention of a bigger company, Jupiter Images, who decided to purchase the web site, and its sister web site sxc.hu.

This take over attracted the attention of an even bigger company, Getty Images, who decided to purchase Jupiter Images, which now included Stockxpert.com, sxc.hu, photos.com, and jiunlimited.com.

It’s like monopoly right! Or like a monopoly? I can’t decide. So, all of the images on stockxpert.com (or at least a huge majority), are shared across the Jupiter Images web sites, which apparantly has been hugely succesful for the company (even though they did run themselves into debt and get swallowed up by Getty for a v.cheap price, but anyway let’s pretend!), now, Getty is going to share all of the Istock.com images (or the vast majority), across the Jupiter Images web sites it has aqquired also.

They have also removed the ‘opt-out’ for subscription licencing, which seems to be included in the mix as an after thought, perhaps they are hoping it will go un-noticed? And every time our images get shared across web sites like this, they are at a lower price than the current site, and at a lower commission back to us.

Anyway, bottom line, they can now make themselves billionaires (or at least there are a few new multi-millionaires walking around today as a result of these deals on our images), and they are doing all they can to achieve a monopoly on the microstock market by putting subscription web sites out of business. So yeah, I’m almost done with microstock, just waiting to see if the people will give a little squeak this time, or just roll over and die!

istock discussion thread

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