When I started with dissolve, I was happy to see the new site and a new place to sell my videos. I now have about 20,000 videos which sell well on other sites.

I started uploading to dissolve, and CL complained to me about my titles and only my titles. She complained that she wanted them to be worded a certain way, which I thought was unnecessary and excessive. I added that I have 20,000 videos and I can't be expected to rewrite all of my titles just for dissolve. No other stock video company has ever asked me to change my metadata, and my videos sell very well with the existing metadata on other sites.

I changed my worst case titles and resubmitted, but the entire batches (of 50 to 200 videos) were being rejected. At some point, they just stopped reviewing my work.

Dissolve kept retaliating against me by making alleged 'policy changes'. I would complain about something, and the next day they would claim they have a 'new policy' which was clearly a direct response and attack on the email I had sent the day before.

for example, when I told them I have a lot of videos and I can't rewrite 20,000 titles, they sent out a policy change email to contributors saying they no longer will accept large portfolios and would reject a lot of videos. when I criticized their title metadata policy, they announced a service to write titles for contributors, but not for me because I am not exclusive. after I complained they never reviewed my videos for over 8 months, they banned me from uploading new videos, claiming it was a new policy.

My batches sat unreviewed and a few "in progress" for 8 months. I had over 40 batches and perhaps 3,000 videos pending. Finally in January I asked them why they did not review my work, and they started reviewing my work again. one of my batches that sat 'in progress' for 8 months only had 8 videos which were mostly the same shots of road flares, which hardly should take 8 months to review.

However, after my portfolio was only online for 2 months, they then banned me from uploading, claiming my account is underperforming, and they claim it is because of my metadata. I sent them my sales reports for 2 years and paypal desposits which clearly show my portfolio earns plenty of money with other sites. The only sites where I don't make money are the sites that don't have my portfolios online.

I started out making as much as $114 in 1 month.

I just learned yesterday that the reason my files don't sell on Dissolve is because they penalized all of my videos such that they come up dead last in the search rankings, no matter what keyword I search for. So when I search for keywords, I go to the final page and see my videos either on 100% of the final pages or sometimes with a few other contributors. None of my videos appear in any pages other than the last pages. the final pages, for keywords that are common in my portfolio, contain 75% to 100% my videos. some of these videos are of extremely high quality and have sold for thousands of dollars on other sites.

I looked at other pages, and the other pages have a wide variety of contributors on each page. For me, I am mostly the only one with all of my videos stacked at the bottom. Clearly they are penalizing me in search results.

they made my listings last in search results so that I will not have any sales. now they have a fake reason to refuse to review my videos and to continue the ban, or to later close my account.

Since September, 99.9% of my videos have unique titles, and they all having unique keywords for each video. It is rare that a video has the same title. however, dissolve (CL) claims my metadata is the reason I have low sales, when in fact it is because they penalized me in search rankings and refuse to offer my videos for sale.

This is not the proper way to treat contributors.

I wanted to say nothing, because I know they can just wipe my account and remove the 5,000 or so videos I already uploaded, but I now realize they are penalizing me in the search results so I am not going to make any money anyway, so it doesn't matter if they wipe my account.

Dissolve is a dishonest company.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with Dissolve?


"The decision to pause your ability to upload with Dissolve was a decision based on feedback from our production team in regards to the content/metadata of your submissions. The final decision comes from our product director, AB who I believe has been in touch with you. Aaron is away this week at CEPIC so cannot respond to you.

Charlyne"

No charlyne, you have been penalizing me in the search results so my content doesn't sell. it has nothing to do with the metadata. liar.

Dissolve knows who I am.

Ignore them. They will go away.

FWIW metadata is lot more important than many contributors give time for, especially the title. You have an agency pointing out problems to you. Ones that will impact sales of your clips on their particular site and you choose to ignore them. Instead finding fault in policy changes after you don't see the sales levels you'd like. If they simply didn't like your clips they would reject them and not bother with the suggestions or policy changes. They are going to take the time to upload and maintain all that storage and then penalize you by hiding the clips on the bottom so no one can buy them to be nasty to you? Maybe no one is finding them and the search algorithm is pushing your clips further and further down the stack.

They gave themselves an amazingly bad reputation from the start and I know many artists that avoid them.

I think their 5 year clause was the biggest deterrent, but they keep throwing out a behaviour that just has to have you worried.

Penalizing a contributors content and then complain he has no sales?

Sounds very childish.

I wish the new pond5 investors had bought dissolve, they�d have an "elitist" site with the right "attitude" for all their high flying concepts, and we would still have the marketplace we all loved so much.

I've been avoiding Dissolve like the plague, just like Canva, Envato, Depositphotos, iStock and soon Pond5.

I think you will do much better at VideoBlocks.  Good people too at the VideoBlocks.

I agree that the people at VB seem responsive and do participate in the forums, but their sales are Sh!t for me. I have 1100 clips there and get random sales avery few months.  Nothing consistent, so I don't think their model works well for the benefit of contributors, more for them with the membership fees.  I will keep supporting them, though, as they do pay a very fair rate when those rare times happen that we get a sale.  Others' mileage may vary, but my tank is dry.

You have 20,000 clips. That's terabytes upon terabytes of data. The way they look at it is that the amount of money it cost to host all your video files are not justified by your monthly earnings, or their cut of those earnings. In some cases, it's better to not have someone as a contributor because they feel like they're losing money on the account.

Why just accept that big bunch of clips then? Isn't it every agency everyday work to foresee commercial value of submitted photos and footage?

I had completely different experience with Dissolve, CL especially. George also. I've had some more than easy tasks and questions for them and after a little back and forth emails they done more for me than many other agencies even comprehend of doing for anyone. I've had very friendly and warm experience with them and believe me, I've been writing emails to them almost every week in the past year. And every email was responded to with detailed answer and a helping hand. I'm not some super-high selling-mega-giga stock star with awesome portfolio, on the opposite I have around 3000 clips in my port and yet they've treated me very, very nicely.

Now, I cannot speak in other's name but the other side of the story should be out here also. I've had only positive experience with Dissolve, Char and George.

Sorry for your misfortune and bad luck. At the moment I'm having similar thing with SS and Easy Release. They reject one batch for it and they approve another... I'm loosing my mind.

Anyways, maybe you should talk to them again and explain what is happening... don't know what else to say.

Do you have the same clips on Videoblocks?

Quote from: mirkic on May 25, 2016, 16:53

I had completely different experience with Dissolve, CL especially. George also. I've had some more than easy tasks and questions for them and after a little back and forth emails they done more for me than many other agencies even comprehend of doing for anyone. I've had very friendly and warm experience with them and believe me, I've been writing emails to them almost every week in the past year. And every email was responded to with detailed answer and a helping hand. I'm not some super-high selling-mega-giga stock star with awesome portfolio, on the opposite I have around 3000 clips in my port and yet they've treated me very, very nicely.

Now, I cannot speak in other's name but the other side of the story should be out here also. I've had only positive experience with Dissolve, Char and George.

Sorry for your misfortune and bad luck. At the moment I'm having similar thing with SS and Easy Release. They reject one batch for it and they approve another... I'm loosing my mind.

Anyways, maybe you should talk to them again and explain what is happening... don't know what else to say.

Do you have the same clips on Videoblocks?

I used to have. Then I had to be IS exclusive for a while and now I'm non exc again and my files will be everywhere including VB.

And regarding OP's newest situation evolvement - that's the the reality we live in unfortunately. Remember what happened to Sean and Is?  I saw your port and there are some titles that are more "keyword" oriented than the other titles you are giving and maybe that's the trigger for this kind of action by Dissolve? Afraid that Google will penalize them in search if they have 20k of something new on their site with that kind of headlines? But I would accept them in a heartbeat, as the other agencies did.

To bad that that this happened to you.

Hi Mirkic,

Do you realize that if you put your clips in Videoblocks thay will be removed from Dissolve?

Not really, unless Dissolve has changed their policy.  What they did to me was lower my Dissolve pricing to $49 to meet VB, but they only pay 30%.  So 30% of $49 = $14.70 while at VB you get $49 (100%).

The ultimate situation is they closed my account because they wanted me to write "long titles" and I don't have the time to rewrite titles for my 20,000 clips. in fact, they have other sellers on their site with "short titles" similar to mine. to them, a short tile is 8 to 10 words. they want narrative titles with 25 to 30 words.

I contacted about 7 people at their company, their founder and president, and their investors, and they don't care, and the majority did not respond, including the founder and president.

Then they claim I released confidential information about there company which is nonsense, I have no confidential information about their company.

You contacted 7 different people about this issue? Each time thinking someone besides you must have it wrong.? Variations in company policy WRT to submission standards has been the norm since the first dusty slide went out on submission. No, I would suggest you had your account closed because you are calling out individual people by name and unbelievably  saying they are bad employees on a public forum because they don't agree with you.

Quote from: stockVid on May 26, 2016, 06:49

Hi Mirkic,

Do you realize that if you put your clips in Videoblocks thay will be removed from Dissolve?

Not really, unless Dissolve has changed their policy.  What they did to me was lower my Dissolve pricing to $49 to meet VB, but they only pay 30%.  So 30% of $49 = $14.70 while at VB you get $49 (100%).

I think you will find that they no longer match the price and your clips will be removed.

"It will definitely benefit SEO to have longer (accurate) descriptions"

no it doesn't. I have been doing web development since 1994. I have done SEO since webcrawler and the first search engines. there is no such thing that all companies can get free traffic from SEO on search engines from potential buyers the majority of organic search engine traffic goes to the big players like amazon, and almost nothing goes to smaller companies like dissolve.

over 2 decades of web design, I have discovered that 95% to 99% of my traffic was search engines crawling my site, and sales for search engines never accounted for more than 10% of my business. SEO is a pipe dream for na�ve web developers and cannot sustain any business.

only 1 web site can be at the top of search results for any given search, and with 15 stock footage companies, and your videos on all 15 sites with the same metadata, dissolve will not be at that top spot, and their SEO attempt will fail miserably.

snip
If you are an SEO mastermind surely there is 100 times more money in that field so why even worry about not being able to sell footage at a small, "bad" site?

Agree wholeheartedly.

I would try to look at things from a different perspective. Only because I've seen both sides, as a contributors as someone who worked for a company that hosted data.

You have 20,000 clips. That's terabytes upon terabytes of data. The way they look at it is that the amount of money it cost to host all your video files are not justified by your monthly earnings, or their cut of those earnings. In some cases, it's better to not have someone as a contributor because they feel like they're losing money on the account.

I know it's tough, but that's how things work. They recommended the title changes because they WANT your files to sell better so they can justify your account. If your files don't sell, they could be losing money on your account due to the cost of storage and bandwidth. It's not a good situation for anyone.

If they "lose money" for hosting "too many" good quality files... it's they who are underperforming. Not surprising, actually I don't know any buyer that uses (or even know) this site.

Gotta say, I really like the people working at Dissolve. They make time to reply to my questions, they listen to my criticism on issues such as VB price levelling. And even though they wouldn't make an exception for me, they did listen and explained their views in a friendly way.
Fine by me, it's their business, and they can run it the way they want it.

For me sales are very good, behind SS but fighting for 2nd place with P5. YMMV.