Vincent Laforet's Take On The Closure Of PhotoShelter

As readers of this blog may be aware, I recently decided to discontinue my short-lived microstock experiment in favor of submitting to Alamy and PhotoShelter. After the experience, I questioned why anyone would want to sell their images for $0.25 to $1.50 per download. Unfortunately, PhotoShelter, which I was particularly attracted to because of their active and vocal stand against microstock agencies (70% to the photographer and no images allowed that were also being sold on the micros), has shut their doors.

What really concerns me is that this closure has the feel of microstock 'winning'. There really were only two non-micro stock agencies that I know of that were:

Willing to accept new, unproven photographers purely based on image quality
Willing to accept photographers that have 50 images as well as those with 5000
Not Microstock
Offerings not limited to mainly lifestyle shots

Interestingly, when I posted this on the new Stock Imaging Forum, someone responded that the fact that the older, more classic stock agencies had been unwilling to accept photographers based purely on image quality and not on their being established or having thousand of images may have also played a significant role in the current situation and allowed microstock to rise. There was no place else for people to go. Surely that is not the only precipitant, but it probably didn't help matters any.

At any rate, here is Vincent Lafforet's take on the situation at PhotoShelter.