Here at YAY we believe that all of us can make a difference in our world. One way to do this is to support humanitarian organizations. As a company we have chosen to support Kiva. Kiva is “a person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe”. This is known as microfinance of entrepreneurs, and the aim is to fight poverty by empowering people. You can lend as little as $25 dollars, and when the money is re-paid you can withdraw it, or re-lend it. At YAY we always re-lend the money. If you don’t have any extra money to help other people, maybe you could donate some of your time to volunteer work or to promote important causes?

Linda

If you want to join Kiva – click here!

Other humanitarian organizations:

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

http://www.oxfam.org

http://www.redcross.org/

http://www.savethechildren.org/

http://www.unicef.org/

-

One of our photographers, Todd (graficallyminded), has done an interview with us at YAY in his blog Arenacreative.com/blog. The interview’s mainly about YAY, our background  as well as how we perceive the stock photo business and the future of the stock photo industry. If you have any viewpoints or further questions we’d love to hear from you – just leave a comment!

In 2008, a new microstock agency popped up that caught a lot of our attention. The site’s design was so simple, yet visually pleasing and easy to navigate. Even the back end for contributors was designed for speed and ease of use. I’ve been personally selling my images from them from the start, and recently I had an opportunity to interview the team. I’m sure many will be interested in getting some insight from Yay Micro coming directly from it’s founders and employees.

Read the rest of the interview…

Linda

I’m happy to say that we’ve received the results from third party sales for Q3 and the money should arrive late next week! Results are on average a bit lower per image for Q3 than Q2, which of course is because of summer months and also because of changes in currency. Not all images we sent over has been admitted to the third party sales, that means that some of the newcomers will be represented with only a few images. In addition to this the new images were added gradually over the quarter, which means that sales for all newcomers will increase significantly in the next quarter. All participants will receive an email when the commission has been paid.

It is obvious that third party sales is a good addition in income for our contributors and we are working hard to increase the amount of images and also looking into other partners that can redistribute our images.

Jan

Beautiful photo from photographer Binski.

Linda

We have finally received all data on third party sales from second quarter and are sending out emails to contributing contributors at this moment. We are quite happy with the results from this quarter – and some of you will get a nice surprise.

As these results are from the second quarter they will not include images from the latest batch. That means that contributors who was added to the third party deal in May/June will have to patiently wait until next quarter.

As we’ve said earlier are we also working on other third party deals, as this is a nice addition to the income of our top contributors.

Jan.

Macro images can impress. This close-up by cascoly of a wisteria leaf has beautiful colours and a fascinating, almost fractal, pattern.

Jan

This is a classical good stock photo the way we like it. The models are smiling, the colours are bright and you get a good feeling inside when looking at it. The usage for the image is versatile. Check out linus‘ small but high quality portfolio.

Jan

Every time we get images from the Antarctica I can’t help smiling. When we started YAY we were told by other people in the photo industry that “microstock would never have images from Antarctica, or images of a tree frog“. As all of our fellow microstockers and our customers know, they were wrong.

These adorable penguins and blue ice cave from photographer GentooMultimedia.

Emperor penguins on the sea ice in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

Small ice cave on Antarctica

You’ll even get more variety in a microstock agency than in a traditional stock agency, in addition to user friendly sites and lower prices.

Linda

It’s been a rainy day here in Oslo and kamchatka’s great shot fits perfectly. The sun brings hope for a better tomorrow

Bjorn

In this image Gorgev has presented milk with a wow factor. Great timing and nice image editing makes this a great stock photo. I want to pour myself a cold glass of milk when I look at it.

Jan