Bigstock Subscription Sales

This week, Bigstock emailed contributors to announce that the platform has added functionality to enable subscription image sales, with the rollout starting in February 2013.

Translated email from Bigstock about introducing subscriptions:

As you know, we already offer buyers on Bigstock the ability to prepay with credits. Starting next week, we’ll provide another highly popular way to purchase images — subscriptions.

How will this affect contributor earnings?

Subscriptions can drive more downloads, which should increase Bigstock earnings. Here’s how subscription royalties will be calculated on Bigstock:
• Each time an image is downloaded via a subscription, the contributor earns a royalty.
• The more subscription downloads you’ve had in the previous 12 months, the higher your royalty per download, up to a maximum of $0.38 per download.
Here’s the scale mapping subscription download levels to royalty amounts:

Downloads in the previous 12 months		Royalty per download
From	To	USD
1	199	$0.25
200	999	$0.27
1,000	1,999	$0.29
2,000	9,999	$0.31
10,000	19,999	$0.33
20,000	49,999	$0.35
50,000+		$0.38

• Any download counts toward your royalty tier, regardless of the license used to purchase the image.
• Royalties for credit purchases and partner programs remain unchanged.
• Extended licenses cannot be purchased via subscription — only standard RF. The extended license royalty remains up to $29.70.

Anything else new?

Yes. We’ve set a print run limit of 250,000 copies under the standard RF license. We believe this will increase extended license sales, which should raise contributor earnings on Bigstock.

We’ve also simplified the standard RF license terms to better align Bigstock with industry norms.

We’ll see how this plays out. As far as I recall, when Shutterstock acquired Bigstock, one advantage they highlighted was Bigstock’s focus on pay‑per‑download sales. That created a form of diversification: Bigstock for single purchases; Shutterstock primarily for subscription sales.

It’s interesting how many contributors will actually reach 50,000+ subscription downloads to earn the maximum royalty. Personally, I see about 300–350 downloads a year on this site, and some otherwise successful contributors on other agencies report even fewer.
Time will tell.