So, two months after the original post, how many people pulled their ports?

I'm in a quandary.
Haven't pulled my port because SS is my biggest earner.
Just got another $2 video sale.

Luckily I never get these $1.50 sales, and I sell a lot there. I can understand that people are very unhappy with it. What type of footage is typically sold at those low prices?

We get low and high priced sales.  Marketing and the internet are very complex with each sale being used for something completely different than the last.  I guess to me $1.50 sales really don't matter when they're made up by $180 sales.  If I'm gonna spend my time doing this to make money, then that has to be the overall goal... making money!  Not getting caught up in small stat details.  iStock and Shutterstock are both getting lower and lower on some video sales but each month are making more and more money.  So why care?  I'm having my best month ever at Shutterstock and it's the 23rd.  Should I deactivate my portfolio because of a couple $1.50 sales last week?

Good comments

my friends have told me that my videos are worth only $1.50 anyway 

OMG 😁 Well you can always answer that not only video quality but mostly subjects needs and license request from buyer will make the price!

Looking at other threads, is there any point in contributing photos to cheap stock sites? There was a time when the "stack em high, sell em cheap" philosophy worked. Where it has ended is with contributors asking serious questions around the possibility of making $100 a month!

Is there any reason to assume that if we as a collective of contributors adopt the same approach with video, that the result will be any different?

Or, put another way, if you are making $1000 a month from stock videos and you simply removed all of them from cheap sites, upped your rate to, say $450 a sale minimum, would you actually lose any income?

Obviously, that would mean only supplying to agencies that allowed you to determine your own price. I'd guess though, that there would be some short term pain for longer term value and nobody would be holding you by the balls.

Another way around this is what a lot of us did to iStock a few years back when they pushed us all around contractually. We simply stopped uploading to them. You still get your money from them now, but they don't get the benefit of long term contributions going forwards and you are weaned off the dependence of their sales channel slowly.

So if you are really annoyed with an agency, it's really much better to just stop contributing to them, take their money now and figure out alternative sales channels going forwards. That way you get hurt the least and take back control of your own valuable creative work.

I agree 100% with your post. People keep complaining but the picture is always quite clear in front of us. It is us and only us who decide where we invest our time and resources to maximize profit.
Obviously shooting cloud timelapses or landmarks with awful light and pricing them 400$ at Pond5 is not getting you anywhere. Shooting great footage and receiving cents at Getty neither. Lets create unique content and people will pay for it, as simple as that.

I agree 100% with your post. People keep complaining but the picture is always quite clear in front of us. It is us and only us who decide where we invest our time and resources to maximize profit.
Obviously shooting cloud timelapses or landmarks with awful light and pricing them 400$ at Pond5 is not getting you anywhere. Shooting great footage and receiving cents at Getty neither. Lets create unique content and people will pay for it, as simple as that.

Perhaps there are more options that may yield better returns per video in the long term.

An example could be to use the cheap sites as a way of market testing premium content. Use the 80/20 principle across all sites to determine what your best video content is - then every 12 months systematically purge top earners from cheap sites and crank the price up elsewhere. If cheap sites want to sell videos for $1.50 - well then make sure it's videos that don't sell well anyway.

Or if that is too risky, do the opposite!

Accept that only 20% of your videos will actually gather good sales at cheap sites. That does not mean that someone does not need more specific video content every so often. So remove 80% of your videos from cheap sites instead and then crank the price up elsewhere.

This would mean reviewing how you see your creative work. There is no "good" and no "bad". Just videos that sell frequently and videos that don't. My guess is that quite a few videos that don't sell well is because they are too specifically targeted to a particular market and the demand for video is still far from its apex.

So as demand for video increases, so will the demand for more specific video that caters to a more exacting market specification. If that video is only available for $400-$600 or more (bloody yay) - well that's pretty specific content right there that is unlikely to be replicated by someone else - hence the increased value.

Want that footage Mr Buyer? Well fine, this is the price. Too expensive for you? Well, go and buy your own GH5, Metabones speedbooster, Canon 50mm fast lens, Glidecam and model located specifically at the Niagara Falls eating a cheeseburger, then drinking a coke, then washing their hands.

You get my point - someone trying to enhance hygiene levels in public places is a very specific target market and that a video or sequence of videos may not sell well at cheap sites. But to that person who actually does needs it, it sure saves them a bundle of money to buy them all at P5 for $1200.

If we all did this, we would limit the depth of the cheap agencies and likely increase the overall value of our collective portfolios. You could still make money from the big sellers - so as contributors, we lose nothing and the content that does not sell may well make far more $ when it eventually does.

The buyers would soon learn - need a blurry crowd of feet at the railway station or a cellphone millennial dude playing on his phone at night . . . cheap site for you. Cheeseburger at the Niagara Falls? Pay premium at P5.

today 4 sales at 1.50 the past 10 days about 20 sales for 1.50 my total earnings in the last three months decreased about 35/40% don�t you think these 1.50 sales do matter I do


Inviato dal mio iPhone utilizzando Tapatalk

today I sold the same file 15 times ar 1.50$ I deleted the file and I truly think its time to delete them all


Inviato dal mio iPhone utilizzando Tapatalk

  I think Adobe is doing great with video.

... yes something is weird with them(Adobe)... after constant rise, there are some gaps with no selling periods.. like everything was frozen, none or sporadic sales... this is second or third time... similar happens at P5 from time to time...

Adobe is in middle ground in comparison with other leading stock video agencies. Much better than Istock/Getty without question. I even wonder why non exclusives collaborate with them. Fortunatelly I know many large footage producers that don't. Shutterstock comes next with their 5$ licenses and also a low royalty split.

But Adobe is still far away from P5. Much better split for contributors and editorial content makes them a better option. Also I get the best revenue sales from them. Although they sell less that SS the net revenue from P5 is much larger. Just today I sold another license with 166$ for me. So Adobe still has work to do IF they want to be the number one option for contributors.

Quote

Derek like so many other contributors on this forum know how to run a site better than SS,IS,GI and AS combined and are so sure of themselves they need to come here to express it. I doubt Derek will answer you as he is so busy consulting other agencies how to do it right and/or starting the next new big agency that will show the well established ones how to do it right.

Dennis, I am surprised you even tried to understand this cud.

First, I have to get into the habit of checking this forum on a regular basis and assimilate the tools so I can respond in a timely manner!

Second, while some folks may not take the time to respond, others hopefully will.  While Adobe (or any company) isn't perfect, I can say from personal experience that Adobe as a company cares about creatives and contributors and we're looking how to make Adobe Stock the best overall experience for both contributors and customers.  I'm always open to hear!

Thanks,
Dennis