Eight differences between Rgbstock.com and SXC.hu
A few years ago, SXC.hu, the largest free stock photo site in the world was sold to Getty Images. Getty currently is using SXC.hu as a free portal to attract people to go to istockphoto.com. Istockphoto.com is Getty's well known payed micro-stock photo site. This is an old and proven concept that still works. Visitors are attracted by the free stock photos and will easily switch to the payed site, looking for better quality.
Many of the photographers SXC.hu did not feel comfortable with this new concept and they felt ‘used' by Getty. Some of those photographers took action, quilted SXC and created a new site. A completely independent site was born: www.rgbstock.com.
What are the differences between SXC.hu and Rgbstock.com? Below is an short overview.
1. Independent
SXC.hu is part of the Getty family. Rgbstock.com is an independent organization. Many amateur and semi-pro photographers do not like the idea to be part of a commercial company like Getty. They feel more at ease with a non commercial site like Rgbstock.
2. Number of photos
SXC is at least five times bigger as Rgbstock. SXC has about 400.000 photos online. Rgbstock has only 90,000 photos on line. Size does matter, and you can find much more high quality photos on SXC then on Rgbstock. Most of the photos on SXC are old though. Rgbstock has much more active photographers and they add new pictures all the time. SXC doesn't have many new photos.
3. Approval time
The approval time of photos is very quick at Rgbstock. Usually new pictures are approved within a day. The old approval/admin team of SXC runs Rgbstock now. SXC seems to accept no new pictures at the moment. The last months there are no new photos added to the database.
4. Modern site
Rgbstock is a much more modern site. You can, for example create lightboxes and you can like the photos in a Pinterset style. Also you can share photos on social media sites like Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand SXC has an advanced search engine. On Rgbstock you only can search on simple keywords.
5 . Friendly community
New photos are usually approved on Rgbstock within a day. All e-mail is answered in a day on Rgbstock. Rgbstock has good customer support.
SXC does not accept new photos at the time, and approval times used to be day's or even weeks. SXC doesn't answer to any mail as far as we know.
The SXC forum is offline for months. The Rgbstock forum is active and used by many people.
6. Growth
SXC is much larger then Rgbstock and has a lot more visitors than Rgbstock. In the Alexa.com top 1000 ranking, SXC is on place in 1300. Rgbstock can be found at 28,000. Rgbstock is growing. Slowly but, as it seems, unstoppable. And SXC is loosing ground .
7. New plans
Rgbstock has a lot of new plans. Localized versions will be available soon and the technical crew is working on German and Dutch versions of the site.
Does SXC has new plans? We don't know. We asked SXC by email, but did not receive any answer.
8. Social
Rgbstock can be found on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The development of SXC seems to be stopped at all and this site as has no connections to social media.
Author: Jay Simmons, CEO of Rgbstock.com
