Quote from: gbalex on July 01, 2014, 12:57

If that is the case I do not see anyone here discussing it. For instance in this thread most seem to feel that Jon is still making the decisions at shutterstock, when that has not been the case for some time.

While some of their corporate structure can definitely end up affecting us in regards to exclusivity and beyond, it really doesn't affect us until it does. I don't say that to sound like I'm not preparing for worse case scenarios or not paying attention to what is happening. It's just that whether they announce a chimp, Jon or the Dalai Lama is running the place, I can still only really go off of what I/we think will happen or what they say they are doing. And most of those tea leaves are read aloud here on a regular basis.

It does make a difference who is running the place, if you take a look at the track record of who is now running shutterstock and I have. Historically they have taken the company public, put things in place so that they are able to run up stock prices while granting themselves stock at $0 per share. (The Securities and Exchange Commission documentation for this has been censored) Sell those shares off until it is not longer possible to milk more from the company - i.e. our assets. At that point they bail and move on to the next victim.

Bottom line we should be worried about the value of our assets when they are done pillaging.

I've been on the buying side of microstock where I had to negotiate the best subscription deals for a company. Each agency tried to point out minor differences in the content, but when it came down to it, the content is mostly the same. The buying point ends up being strictly on price, not unique content. When the agencies are getting beat up on price, it inevitably ends up with lower royalties for photographers. I think image exclusivity is a way to make stock less of a supermarket concept where price competition is the main factor, to a more qualitative market. SS will likely never go that way as they are very good at the competing in that marketplace, but I wonder if other agencies would not be better served going this route. 

Negotiating price on subscriptions is a scary thought.

Indeed it is. Not pleasant and not something I particularly wanted to do, but was obligated to do. It did give me a good insight into how commodity driven micro is. Micro stock agencies are akin to  supermarkets and department stores that beat each other up on price points. Image exclusive content at least gives them something different to market and sell, hopefully at a higher value. 

I dot think exclusive content should be preferred in the search. That just gives the customer a worse service. They should just be clearly marked as exclusive content and there should be a search option to look at only exclusive content.

Maybe SS itself is not the best agencyto experiment with midstock content. But they have the very high end with Offset and the low end with subs and Shutterstock, why not experiment with exclusive images? Not artist exclusivity, just images.

They could also then pick their favorites and promote them to offset, creating another stream of images that "they have grown themselves". The images on offset are mostly exclusive images anyway, they just come from many different agencies.

Smaller agencies like blend,tetra,plainpictures,westend61 are very good at nurturing and discovering talent, they work closely with their artists and together create a distinct style.

Offset could use the midstock platform to look for talent and more specialized images, they cannot find on Shutterstock.

Anyway it is up to them. But istock is mostly midstock with 180 million dollar market share plus the midstock market on getty itself (probably another few hundred million dollars) is quite an interesting number to look at.

And exclusive images pulls in customers. The higher prices means the artist can invest more in production or create content that is not generic.

Jon was fully aware that the market existed in 2007 and he chose to ignore & stiff his talent to go after market share.

April 4 2007

Snip

"Reports of the demise of traditional stock," Klein says, "are exaggerated."

But technology seems to favor his new competitors. "Our advantage is efficiency," says Shutterstock's Oringer. "And if Getty can use iStockphoto to upsell its customers, why we can't we use higher-priced photos to start moving into its market?"

http://tinyurl.com/22vdhj

I find it frustrating that history is ignored by newcomers regarding shutterstock, Jon purposely chose to keep pricing low on all images in the shutterstock collection, despite pleading by many of its high end contributors to raise prices and he did this to gain market share.

Shutterstock is the polar opposite of "blend, tetra, plainpictures and westend61 who are very good at nurturing and discovering talent, they work closely with their artists and together create a distinct style."

If Jon did not care about contributors historically, why do you think he will care about them now or in the future?  Case in point shutterstock had a chance to roll its best content into Offset. Instead they chose to stiff its best content providers. At this point Yuri, Andreas and other contributors chose to exit or place their higher end content elsewhere and who can blame them.

Snip

For a maturing photographer microstock is a great learning platform, but if you mistake �school� for �workplace�, you are in trouble. I did so for years.

I would estimate that for the last three years I tried very hard to convince myself that microstock was in fact the right place for the professional photographer. After all, my photography carrier was born here. Perhaps exactly because of that, I tried so hard to disregard a growing mismatch between microstock and myself, in product refinement, sophistication and budget. As we grew in skills, as our company grew, our distribution partners in microstock did not. Some agencies where ok, but in total, as a mass and as a workplace, the picture was not nice.

Sometimes it felt like having a michelin restaurant inside a burger joint and at the same time having to match the prices. At some point the professional gets tired of selling 12 course testing menues at 0300AM at burger prices.

I tried everything I could for three years to inspire our microstock partners to close the gab. I submitted plans, did projection forecasts, showcased examples that worked, presented solutions and had literally hundreds of meetings.

I tried every kind of approach I could think of to get the micro agencies to raise prices just a bit and leave place for the kind of photographer both photographers and customers love. I spent literally months in airplanes. No Luck.

http://tinyurl.com/phnjox6

How about the Microstock market as a whole, not blaming SS or investors for what's wrong? How about that the top four on the right are roughly the only four viable places for artists to make a reliable return? Why is that? You're going to say, it's all because of SS?

There is probably a chicken and egg answer to that of which came first. Dominance of the big 4 or belief in the dominance of the big 4? 

For those who missed it from previous discussions.

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1828&highlight=exclusivity#1828

http://jonoringer.com/2013/01/13/why-going-exclusive-as-a-microstock-photographer-doesnt-work/

The first one is the original old one and the second one is the newest.

And one from SS

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=138593

I tried everything I could for three years to inspire our microstock partners to close the gab. I submitted plans, did projection forecasts, showcased examples that worked, presented solutions and had literally hundreds of meetings.

I tried every kind of approach I could think of to get the micro agencies to raise prices just a bit and leave place for the kind of photographer both photographers and customers love. I spent literally months in airplanes. No Luck.

Well if you were able to get meetings with these people, you must be a very big fish.  Thank you for your efforts. 

It is scary to think that even all that effort could not get the agencies to improve their policies toward contributors, and create a better climate for HCV producers. 

That says it all really. 

Quote from: PixelBytes on July 02, 2014, 17:16

Quote from: gbalex on July 02, 2014, 17:11

I tried everything I could for three years to inspire our microstock partners to close the gab. I submitted plans, did projection forecasts, showcased examples that worked, presented solutions and had literally hundreds of meetings.

I tried every kind of approach I could think of to get the micro agencies to raise prices just a bit and leave place for the kind of photographer both photographers and customers love. I spent literally months in airplanes. No Luck.

Well if you were able to get meetings with these people, you must be a very big fish.  Thank you for your efforts. 

The URL at the bottom of that post, http://tinyurl.com/phnjox6, shows that the person who met the people was Yuri.
Which doesn't negate the rest of your post.

Thank you.  That makes more sense.  It is confusing when people post such long posts with so many different quotes and no 'quotation marks'. 

Judging from the poll and my own earning, I think it would nearly instant kill other sites but would that be good for the industry in the long run?

I don't think it would instantly kill other sites. But IS is a good example of what can happen to exclusive contributors and I would think most people would have learned their lesson. I know, it's SS, and everybody loves them. Sounds eerily familiar. Wooyay ring a bell? Wait until SS's stock tanks or they sell the company and the new owner starts bleeding contributors dry.

To recap... New sites treat contributors great. Sites start doing well and begin doing bad things to contributors. The more power and leverage the site has the more bad things they do. And if company finances start hurting, bring on the pain.

If SS stays the way it is (was?)  and doesn't morph into something like IS or FT or deposit or 123 or stockxpert or veer I will be quite pleased with them. Expecting them to suddenly become some midstock place is unrealistic. That said I think they did a poor job of implementing offset with respect to the SS contributors and I think the direction they are going with BS is bs.

I guess I don't see anything wrong with at least offering the opportunity for something better for those that want it and know it will work better for them.

If you have high production value images, put them somewhere else. What's so hard to get about that?

If more of those places existed, I'd totally do that.

Quote from: robhainer on July 02, 2014, 17:40

If you have high production value images, put them somewhere else. What's so hard to get about that?

If more of those places existed, I'd totally do that.

My point in the nutshell and exactly what Yuri was trying to accomplish by communicating with the various micro sites. The bottom line is, he accomplished nothing by trying to work with them to move into midstock.

Therefore he was forced to move on to the next best, but limited option.

I would also cthoman. Where is that Rob? Understand I wouldn't even try for Offset or Stocksy, what I shoot doesn't fit. That doesn't mean anything against those two, which seem to have an interesting idea and direction.

Quote from: cthoman on July 02, 2014, 17:48

Quote from: robhainer on July 02, 2014, 17:40

If you have high production value images, put them somewhere else. What's so hard to get about that?

If more of those places existed, I'd totally do that.

Here's something, maybe SS doesn't want to become something different? Maybe they aren't interested in going the way Yuri wanted. And by the way, no one else listened either. But the weight falls again on two names. Oddly the top two?  Do all the rest get a free pass or something?

Saying what if SS goes exclusive is like saying, what if I discover gold in my back yard. Highly unlikely. Then the speculation and some criticism, including how it would be wrong to favor exclusive in searches, or some flawed part of something that doesn't exist, is quite odd?

Meanwhile Gbalex I was mostly commenting on the repeating, redundant, repetitious, extended financial quotes, as if they actually have something connected to "SS offering exclusive" or most of the other threads. Not saying it's not interesting or there's anything untrue in them, just that we've read it and seen it. Then you are applying the same argument every time the name Microstcok and SS comes up, isn't building facts or data.

After so many slices of onion, you have obscured the flavor, point and purpose and all that's left is the taste of bitterness and tears. I don't really think that SS is terribly interested in our opinions, on the, right way they should run their business. Seems they've don't fairly well with the status quo?

The investors are interested in cash flow and recovery of their investment and then making profits. What would you do if you owned the company or had invested millions into Shutterstock?

I find nothing in your long discovery and financial exposure, unusual or out of line for a successful business.

However:

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 02, 2014, 17:37

...

To recap... New sites treat contributors great. Sites start doing well and begin doing bad things to contributors. The more power and leverage the site has the more bad things they do. And if company finances start hurting, bring on the pain. [/u]

The point that you don't seem to grasp is that by posting financial data, previous interviews with Jon, info from Earnings Calls, Yuris comments, etc. I am was attempting to drive home your final conclusion. It seems you finally got it!

Shutterstock does not give a rats @$$ what we think or how we are doing, they are in it for the money and if they will not listen to Yuri they certainly will not take our views or financial welfare into consideration.

I am not sure how you misses these points, which I have been trying to make for months.  If we want things to change for the better for contributors, we need to take all of the above into consideration. We are no longer dealing with single micro owners at the big 3, we are dealing with the wallstreet crowd and all that comes with those cutthroat business animals.