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bruce livingstone

Stocksy aims to bring the soul back into stock photography

Bruce Livingstone, founder of the iStockphoto site that grew from a small stock-art community to a multimedia juggernaut, is launching a competitor called Stocksy United today that he hopes will bring the business back to its roots.

Stocksy is a startup, but it won't attract venture capital, won't be acquired by a larger rival, and doesn't have an exit strategy. Instead, it's a cooperative run by its own photographers who get paid a relatively high percentage of the royalties generated by each image sale: 50 percent. On top of that, photographers split the profits left over … Read more

iStockphoto founder re-enters the market with Stocksy

Bruce Livingstone, who founded microstock powerhouse iStockphoto more than a decade ago and left it in 2009, is trying again with a new stock-art sales venture called Stocksy.

And he's doing it at a time when iStock is, if not necessarily vulnerable, the target of criticisms that it's out of touch with the army of photographers who contribute the imagery it licenses. To succeed, a microstock needs lots of customers licensing its photos, videos, and other works, and it needs a lot of contributors supplying a steady stream of fresh material.

It's these contributors Livingstone appears to … Read more