Fotolia´s Infinite Collection and early quality concerns

More on Fotolia´s Infinite Collection from Chad Bridwell, Fotolia´s Director of US Operations:

The last few years we have learned a lot from our buyers. Even though Fotolia offers images as low as $1 some buyers still shop elsewhere. As a result Fotolia started to think how we may bring in those same images that attract buyers at other sites thus also attracting buyers that are still not Fotolia customers. This is how the idea of the Infinite Collection started.

In concern to quality I must admit that some of the infinite images are not as great as anticipated but these agencies are taking a risk with us and it is hard to convince them to sell only their best images 10 times cheaper than normal. That being said we will correct that and we will have only the best images from the best agencies and artists.

With the introduction of the Infinite Collection we have added one more privilege to the ranking system by allowing Emerald and higher ranked artists to submit images to the Infinite Collection.

We are only trying to offer a balanced solution that raises the long term price/earnings of contributors and provides great value to buyers without proposing, for example, a micro subscription model that pulls down prices to 25 cents an image, decreases the overall business and only provides short term sales benefits.

People who bought images for 25 cents per image will not buy the same ones for 1 to 10 dollars.

 

[Yahoo Micropayment Group message, requires registration, posted yesterday,
abbreviated and compiled]

Chad received some heat for his message. As usually with these discussion groups, it´s hard to tell whether these reactions were partially biased or not. At least one of the six major microstock agencies is well-known for spam comments and posting biased articles in discussion groups.

 

Related:

• Fotolia launches The Infinite Collection (Dec. 20, 2007)

• Fotolia announces "The Infinite Collection" (Dec. 20, 2007)

 

Comments

[john]

where did the majority of the images come from in the Infinite Collection (i like the name at least)? It looks like some came from ImageSource. Did they let their contributors know that I wonder? I will be really interested to see how this works.