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It’s with great disappointment that we have decided to shut down LuckyOliver on May 15th. All Olivers who purchased tokens must use them to license images before May 15th, 2008. Please note that the user agreement will continue to be valid. Any Carny images that are waiting in the queue for Bouncers will not be reviewed. Carnies who have reached the minimum payout must request payout by May 15th. Carnies who have not reached the minimum payout can convert their earnings to tokens by contacting support.

Working with the creative minds that make up LuckyOliver has been a rewarding experience- two years went by fast. I want to thank our talented staff for working through long nights, our investors for giving us a shot at growing a business, our legal and business advisers for lending an ear, our customers for their positive encouragement, and our contributors who provided us with a wealth of knowledge and tough criticisms. We really appreciate all the hard work Carnies put into making LuckyOliver a special place for people to find great imagery. On a personal note, I would also like to thank my family for letting me pursue a passion that often went beyond reason.

As a leader and entrepreneur, it’s tough to see something you have put so much time into not materialize into a successful business. We spent the last year looking for the funds to grow LuckyOliver because, without the addition of significant capital, the return on investment for LuckyOliver and its contributors would not be satisfactory. After reviewing the options, the investment team decided that it was in the best interest of all stakeholders to shut the company down.

Please email me if you have any comments (..and give me some time to respond). Thanks again for giving LuckyOliver a shot.

iStock collection continues to expand and now we can find more then 3 million of images. The perfect relationship between contributors, customers, inspectors, admins and everyone at HQ creates a perfectly mutual symbiosis. The collection continues to expand at a jaw dropping rate with over a quarter of a million files uploaded last month alone. (Read the article)

We all love to make digital photos and sometimes it would be nice to print them and store inside albums so we can watch them later with our friends or family. In this blog post I would like to introduce to you a very interesting and well designed web site. (Read the article)

We all know (I believe you know) how to find a good and quality digital images, but what if we want to see a famous painting as a high quality computer wallpaper? Well, you won’t have a lot of options. Before you give up from searching, please read the next article. I will present a very nice and usable web site where you can find more than 10.000 free fine art wallpapers. (Read the article)

April 07th 2008 | Posted in Blog | Comments(1)

Before you decide about your status at iStockphoto subscription model, please read next few questions and answers.

Is there a minimum payout?
Yes. We’ll guarantee the same minimum payout as we do today on the Pay-as-you-go side. So right now, the lowest priced (non-sale) credit is 96¢. You receive 20 to 40% of that. Clear canisters will receive a minimum 19¢ and Diamonds will receive a minimum 38¢. And yes, this means that sometimes iStock will be paying out more than we take in per credit.

What’s the maximum payout available?
Contributors stand to make more per file than they’ve ever made before from iStock. Here are two examples of what a non-exclusive can make off subscriptions:
- If a subscriber with a daily credit limit of 480 uses only 10 credits that day, all on one of your files, you’d earn 480 × 20% × $130*. That means a payout of about $26 for your single file.
- If a subscriber with a daily credit limit of 30 uses only 10 credits that day, including 5 credits on your image, you’d earn (30/2) × 20% × $10*. A payout of about $1.

* These values are ‘Credit Package Value per Day’, and have not been set yet. They are for illustrative purposes only.

Who gets the money when no credits are used on a day?
iStock does. This will offset the times where iStock will be paying out more in royalties than was paid for the credit, because of the guaranteed minimum on these days.

Why are you doing it this way?
This way we share in the risk and reward with the contributors, and still guarantee no less than what’s currently paid out.

Will there be cannibalization of Pay-as-you-go?
Some clients will migrate to the new model, but we think we’ll have lots of new customers that couldn’t use our services before. Remember, this was one of the most requested features by people who wanted to become customers.

How often will stats be udpated?
Because Subscription credits expire daily, we’ll update them once per day after everything has been tallied (i.e. after midnight for the day before).

Is this royalty structure set in stone?
We’ve modeled the subscription plan on a number of assumptions. If after we have a few months data, we find we were off on our assumptions, we’ll revisit the royalty structure.

For more info, please visit iStockphoto