30 Apr 2008 This Month in Microstock – April 2008

What a month for microstock! Everything that can possibly happen happened this month. Here’s the long list of microstock news for April 2008.

The biggest news of the month was the announcement from LuckyOliver, the microstock agency with personality, that it was shutting down on May 15 due to funding shortfalls.

Dreamstime introduced a feature which enables contributors to assess the sales success of portions of their portfolio using lightboxes. They also partnered with ImageClick to make their images available in Korea.

Crestock introduced the photography industry to linkbait by announcing they’d bought Corbis on April 1. The gag did much for Crestock’s brand awareness and traffic levels, and got an extra boost when Corbis threatened legal action. Later in the month Crestock launched their referral program.

iStockphoto announced their first non-exclusive contributor iStockalypse event, to be held in Malta. They released some financial figures and then announced they would be implementing subscriptions. They also signed a deal to supply images to budget newspaper ad creation service CreateAds.com and their database hit 3 million images. Busy months for iStockphoto!

123rf owner Inmagine launched the first open submission facility for a macrostock agency. 123rf themselves later launched a new invitation-only collection titled EVO.

StockXpert held their first contributor conference in Moscow with Ron Chapple and Lev Dolgachov presenting. All reports indicate it went extremely well.