This is taken from a mail sent to contributors by Crestock. I think it spells positive things for this embattled agency.
Increasing Royalty Rates & Revenue Channels for Artists
To Crestock's Contributing Artists:
Since Masterfile Corporation acquired Crestock in July 2010, a lot of changes have taken place. We've added stability to the business and its website, provided you with reliable payments and brought responsive people on board to provide support and answer your questions. But there is still much room for improvement – most importantly in overall sales and the return on investment for you, our contributors. We're working on that too.
We're launching two important initiatives that should benefit all of our contributors as outlined below. These changes have been detailed in the revised Crestock
Artist Image Upload Agreement.
1. WE ARE INCREASING ROYALTY RATES.
The new rates will be calculated on a progressive scale, based on your total number of images sold since joining Crestock, as follows:
• Prior to this change, royalties were capped at 30% and $0.25.• Important: We also changed the calculation of the aggregate download count to include subscription downloads so you can reach royalty thresholds more quickly. Previously, your eligibility for an increase was only calculated based on single image licenses and did not include subscription downloads. 2. WE ARE ADDING THE CRESTOCK COLLECTION TO MASTERFILE.COM
The Crestock collection went live on
Masterfile.com on November 9. This is a trial to see if Crestock images can produce sales growth at Masterfile while increasing royalties for Crestock's contributors. Meanwhile, we're continuing to build and promote Crestock.com. By offering all your images through two licensing platforms, we expect to multiply your sales opportunities as a contributor to Crestock.
Founded in 1981, Masterfile is a well-established licensor of premium royalty-free and rights-managed stock images with offices in Toronto, Düsseldorf, London, Milan & Paris, plus independent distributors in more than 100 countries. The Masterfile website is searchable in 6 languages - English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese - and it transacts in multiple currencies. Masterfile's business comes principally from direct relationships with advertising agencies, graphic designers, corporate marketing departments and editorial publishers. Masterfile is not a microstock business: it earns most of its revenue through direct contact between clients and sales people using invoicing arrangements rather than on-line credit card transactions. It's a business that involves a high level of personal service. However, there is no denying the popularity of microstock – even with its largest clients – and Masterfile always wants to accommodate all its clients.
During the trial phase, we are offering the Crestock collection on Masterfile.com only in low resolution suitable for websites and mobile applications. Larger file sizes will be supplied to clients by Masterfile upon request.
Every Crestock contributor's images will be included in the Crestock collection on Masterfile. The Crestock collection is searchable on Masterfile.com under a separate tab, called "$10 RF" (or equivalent in other currencies) -
and it looks very good indeed! As of this writing, about 1 million Crestock images have been added to Masterfile.com with the remainder to follow by the beginning of December. From then on, Masterfile.com will be updated with Crestock images about one month after the images appear on the Crestock website. Masterfile does not add images to its website in real time: to optimize the speed of search results and provide powerful features such as SimSearch, Image Upload, Visual Pairing, and Colour Search, the Masterfile site is updated through an offline batch process, with new images normally going live every two weeks. Crestock images will not be offered as part of Masterfile subscriptions at this time.
Please note: for the moment, artists' names do not appear with the enlarged versions of the Crestock images on the Masterfile website. This will be corrected in Masterfile's next content update in about one month.
Your royalty will be calculated on Masterfile's selling price to the client - and Masterfile's rates will generally be higher than those of Crestock. Any revenue sharing between Masterfile, its affiliates, distributors and Crestock will not affect the royalty to Crestock artists.
Example: If you have a 30% royalty rate and:
(a) Masterfile licenses one of your images for US $10.00, then you will be paid US $3.00 by Crestock.
(b) If a Masterfile distributor licenses your image for 7 Euros, then the selling price will be converted to US Dollars and you will be paid 30% of the converted amount by Crestock.
And the best part about these changes: You don't have to do anything extra – the changes are automatic. Just keep uploading images to Crestock and we'll do the rest for you!
