From what I’ve gathered, they’ve been bought out by Istockphoto and they have chosen to shut down operations. Meaning, no more sales, no more uploading. Stockxpert recommends opening an account with Istockphoto for uploading new images. This will happen on Feb. 11, 2010.
Existing photos on Stockxpert will be moved to ThinkStock and will be available for purchase there. The revenue from ThinkStock will go into your Stockxpert account. This will only happen if you have checked the “opt-in” checkbox within your options in Stockxpert.
Alternatively, you can request a payout from Stockxpert OR you can request your revenues transferred over to Istockphoto. If you do that, you will have to open an account at Istockphoto.
As a contributor there is much to think about but in the end, it’s pretty simple. Your images are still online and available for sale so there’s no loss there. The only “loss” is there is one less site to upload to. You can overcome that by signing up as a contributor on IStockPhoto. Keep in mind that they are known to be very stringent on their acceptance policy. Even the 3 image “sample” for acceptance. I suggest you read their guide first because if they don’t like your first 3 images, it could take a month before they let you submit again. There are a lot of other Microstock sites available as well. Have a look at some of the ones I am submitting to here. There’s also 2 more in the works, will update later.
Other than that, you only need to keep your account open on Stockxpert so that your earnings from ThinkStock can be credited to you. Unless you choose to delete all your images from Stockxpert, which to me is a waste of time since you took the time to get them up for sale in the first place and all this fuss doesn’t change that…your images are still up for sale, just not on Stockxpert. The price may be a little lower tho but still within the range of other microstock sites.
Hope that helps.
