It sounds like more bottom feeding that will be met with enthusiasm from the masses so that they can complain in the future about how they are getting ripped off and sales dropping off the cliff because of the agencies greed etc...

Ring a bell? Deja Vu?

I could never happen without enthusiastic contributors.

I have always thought that VB business model is quite weird, but never thought of them as a real threat, as their membership collection is frankly quite poor.
The big damage has been done by the P5 membership plan, as they do offer 200k really good clip for next to nothing.
Probably 80-90% of the action in P5 is on the membership program and even participating artists (who have been pushed at the top of the search) are starting to feel the pain, while for the non participating ones like me the sales have died immediately in May and our files are buried in the deepest ocean.
The funny thing is that participating artists wonder why ther sales are disappearing, very funny

Videoblocks is paying out 47 dollars per download so far.

That is a much better rate than what I get at many other places.

I see the biggest threat in the pond5 membership program where very high quality files are made available for 5 dollars.

But overall the video market is very young, so I am not too worried.

The tomorrow always begins today. I am pretty satisfied working with VB so far but signs of what I was dreaded in beginning already showed up. There were several attempts to buy content from contributors to include it to their free collection. And they are very flexible in what is concerning the price and the rights. As for the cases I now they wanted limited rights so the user could sell the same videos on other sites. The compensation offer was rather silly, something about 70$ per clip for selected clips but after the refusal they were more than ready to negotiate further. The future of such politics you can imagine by yourself. And the royalty cut will seem much less evil than big competive collection under membership plan.