I've seen a number of tongue-in-cheek comments here about Adobe giving away software. I would like to remind you that we have given away tens of thousands of complimentary subscriptions through the Adobe Stock contributor Bonus Progam over the past couple of years and that we are continuing the tradition again with the 2020 program. So to answer your specific question... yes, for productive contributors Adobe is giving away a free app each year.

Mat, I think your comparison is lacking. I appreciate very much that Adobe is having the bonus programm. It's a nice bonus, but it's not "given away for free". It's tied to a condition. The condition that we contributors manage to sell a certain amount of images or footage and therefore the condition is that we earn Adobe a certain amount of money. We earn you money, you give us a bonus for that.
The proper comparison to the free image collection would be: If a customer downloads 100 paid images, he gets 1 image for free. That would be a more accurate comparison. He earns you money, he gets a bonus in return. That's how our bonus program works.  But you are giving away free images without any conditions. The "customer" doesn't have to do anything to get the free images, while we contributors have to earn you money to get the "free" softwear. Two rather different things, don't you think?


My overall opinion on this free image collection is: I do believe Adobe did this with a good intention and not to screw contributors over. After all, if we don't benefit from this, neither do they, so they really believe it will boost sales.
However, I believe the selection of free images is way too large and don't think it will have the desired effect of more paid customers.  I have a fear it might be the opposite. With such a huge collection of free high quaity images, I don't think people who usually don't pay for images will be motivated to do so now. It just means more free content to pick from for them after all. But people who have paid for images in the past might think "Why should I pay if they give away so many great pictures for free?". Other stock agencies have one free image a week or even month, not thousands of them.

I hope Adobe will monitor customer behavior closely in regards of whether peope who get free content also start buying paid content and will make the right decision to back down from this whole free collection again if they see that it does not work out as intended and I hope that by then the damage done won't be too big. People who have gotten used to getting high quality work for free will have a hard time adjusting to the thought that they should pay for it again and might just search elsewhere for free images instead of getting back to paying for content.

All this will do is is hijack sales from the non free content at AS. Pond5 removed the web size format because the cheaper format was hijacking sales from the higher priced HD sales there, their data showed untapped sales potential of $millions, and this is a similar scenario. Tom Spota did a similar venture at SS some time ago when he was employed at SS, buying clips outright from contributors to sell cheap on their site and their partner sites, they only wanted clips that had sold constantly over the time it was live on the SS system, this was to try and curb the prevalence of the rise of the cheaper stock sites out there, it didn't work. For this to be implemented with issues that has already been raised by Jo Ann Snover, it appears to me as being a rushed and ill thought out concept or that it's conclusion is a marketing gimmick for Adobes CC photography software.

 "subscribe to our CC and and have access to 100 free high quality stock photos, vectors etc per day!"

Video clips will be next folks.

Never fall for marketing speak, it's a twin to political speak.

This only works for customer that never will pay for any photo.  When stockphoto is not profitable more, i dont need photoshop, gimball, expensive lenses or camera...

Is a wrong move. Only benefit big people...

I just checked this free section.

If the purpose of this was to drive customers towards the paying collection, the search results would include some paying images. This is so obvious to everyone here that the lack of paying images in the search can't be an error.

I'm afraid that the real purpose of this free section is a test to something else. Probably something like all our images free for Adobe sofware suscribers (with may be a paying premium collection).

This is really bad news.

This step only damage the marketability of paid content even at other microstock agencies. Free content will cannibalize from paid content, and ultimately simply harms the content creators. This kind of promotion has never excelled in functionality for all involved. The functional model is the one that offers: Buy YX amount and get XY for free. But if you offer almost 70k free stuff(and allow 100 downloads per day) without any further restriction, where is the motivation for buying paid content? Among the 70k free stuff, there is almost always something that can be used instead of paid content. This does not provide a better chance of gaining a new buyers of paid content, but on the contrary, this step can dramatically reduce sales of paid content. And what is worse, not only at Adobe, but very simply it can hit sales on other microstock agencies. Adobe alone can make a profit from it, but for creators this can be a total disaster. I would very much like to be wrong in this regard but unfortunately this will probably not be the case.

I don't want to be a negativist, but if the sales of the creators will fall down thanks to this(a lot of creators are already affected by current events in the world), so many do not even qualify for the free Adobe CC products. Thus, creators' spending will increase again, while revenues are flying sharply down.

I feel sad as I watch where the entire microstock market is heading.

I've seen a number of tongue-in-cheek comments here about Adobe giving away software. I would like to remind you that we have given away tens of thousands of complimentary subscriptions through the Adobe Stock contributor Bonus Progam over the past couple of years and that we are continuing the tradition again with the 2020 program. So to answer your specific question... yes, for productive contributors Adobe is giving away a free app each year.

Not wanting to sound ungrateful for two years of free subscription on Adobe CC, but to be eligible we all had to actively produce and upload content to meet the requirements. So Adobe didn't really give it away for free, they received much more content and thus more revenue from active contributors.