Company registers boycott-related domain names.
What is stock photo company Shutterstock (NYSE: SSTK) so worried about?
The company recently made a number of defensive domain name registrations related to boycotts and three of its brands. All of the domains included the brands preceded by “boycott”, e.g. BoycottBigstock.com, BoycottBigStockPhoto.com, BoycottOffset.com and BoycottShutterstock.com.
A brief Google search didn’t pull up any discussion about boycotting the sites. In fact, Google’s search results are chock full of Shutterstock images related to boycotts available for purchase.
[Update: competitor GettyImages has also registered similar domains.]
There are two sides to stock photo sites: the buyers and the contributors. The latter are usually paid commissions.
As a stock photo buyer, I can say that prices have gone up significantly at many stock photo sites ever since Getty Images bought Shutterstock rival iStockPhoto. $1 photos are a thing of the past. That said, I imagine any boycott would come from the contributor side.
It’s possible Shutterstock is getting ready to make a change that will affect photographers. Or it could just be playing it safe by registering these domain names. [Update: apparently there’s a call by photographers for a boycott of stock photo site Fotolia, which may be the impetus for these registrations.]
Phil McKegney says
If you use stock photos you might find this interesting:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/29/dollarphotoclub-expands-into-more-markets-hits-11000-users/
Alena Rozova says
yes, you are right. I assume it is because of Fotolia’s boycott.
Fotolia opened a new nano-stock Dollar Photo Club and uploaded their whole image base there. But they never asked if contributors wanted to sell their works for such a low prices, especially if it can (and most possibly will) reflect on their sales on other microstocks.
By now contributors are mass deleting their portfolios from Dollar Photo Club, so their image base is getting smaller each day.
But a lot of contributors are deleting their works from Fotolia also, as there have been enough problems with Fotolia already. The last one is, that they have some special subscription plan, when customer pays $5 for image, but the contributor gets only 0.27…
Lu says
Slavery work, when you give your talent, skills, pay for equipment, education, upgrading your skills, spend time on keywording and promotion and in exchange we only get $0,1