When Getty Images set up its contributor agreement with Flickr in 2008 to allow Flickr users to sell their photos, I enabled the feature. While not a professional photographer, I had been approached a couple of times in the past about licensing some of my shots and thought the opportunity to sell through Getty Images could formalize this process.
500px just shut down its Marketplace stock photo platform in favor of selling photos directly through Getty Images and VCG, as the company announced a month ago. And as part of the major change, 500px has wiped out over 1 million of the Creative Commons photos photographers had uploaded to the service.
500px has announced that it will be winding down its Marketplace for premium royalty-free stock photos and will instead be selling its users photos exclusively through Visual China Group (its parent company) in China and through Getty Images across the rest of the world.
500px is cutting its royalty rates for photographers selling photos through the company's marketplace, and it seems that many of those photographers aren't happy about the change.