This article caught my attention. With my image archive growing to over 12,000 images, I am accumulating quite a large resource that has some commercial value. I license my images for free use for non-profit purposes but typically retain the commercial rights. I had written to Google urging them to roll out a service within Flickr that would enable those of us that wished to engage in commercial sales to sell commercial rights with built-in links to Paypal for payment but I hadn't heard anything back from them. Maybe Microsoft/Corbis' entry into the market will nudge them in that direction. In the meantime, I set up an account on SnapVillage and as an experiment uploaded five quality images to see how things work out with them.
Recognizing the growing market for inexpensive online photographs, Corbis, the online stock photo company founded and owned by Bill Gates, plans today to introduce a Web site that allows anyone to upload photographs for sale.
Called SnapVillage, the site is the latest entrant into the realm of so-called microstock agencies.
Microstock sites take advantage of a phenomenon known as crowd sourcing, whereby thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers submit pictures and charge as little as $1 an image. Unlike some other microstock sites, SnapVillage will allow its contributors to set their own prices, ranging from $1 to $50 an image.
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