Quote from: cascoly on December 23, 2025, 23:50

Quote from: Zero Talent on December 23, 2025, 20:37

Quote from: videostock.system on December 23, 2025, 08:30
It doesnt look like an isolated case. After the acquisition, changes in algorithms, marketing and platform priorities seem to have hit sales hard for many contributors. Pond isnt completely dead, but for most authors its clearly no longer the stable income source it used to be. That said the recent Pond5 AI training bonuses have been really nice.

Yep, except that those AI payments were not really bonuses, but rather close to you selling your selling rights forever to a competitor, who is now cashing in on your work, instead of you.

nonsense - do some research  about how training works (plenty o,f info in the ai section)
-- you're not giving any 'selling' rights -
-- your images are used (among millions of others) for dataset training
-- the resulting dataset has no reference or links to the original images so no one ever sees your images
-- you're getting $ for images that likely have never have, or ever will, sell (esp'ly on pond)

those complaining about sales on pond and not opting-in for training are conducting self-inflicted monopod destruction. fine by me

I'm sorry you didn't get the point. Please read properly what I wrote and what you quoted above. What I said is that it is like selling your selling rights to a competitor, not actually selling your rights.

The undeniable fact is that very often customers no longer buy photos because they can generate their own using an algorithm that has become your competitor, a competitor you helped train by basically giving away your work.
This was a shortsighted, geeedy decision to earn a few peanuts, wrongly labeled as a "bonus", when in fact it's only a tiny fraction of what you could have earned, in the absence of your self-made competitor.

No surprise that sales are dwindling across the board.

I got a dataset payment this month 2025 so still going as for sales only get a handful a year with 30+ videos & music

Since December I've been getting a lot of daily views on pond5.  I hope that will translate into a nice fat dataset payout later in the year 😊

Quote from: Zero Talent on December 24, 2025, 04:30

Quote from: cascoly on December 23, 2025, 23:50

Quote from: Zero Talent on December 23, 2025, 20:37

Quote from: videostock.system on December 23, 2025, 08:30
It doesnt look like an isolated case. After the acquisition, changes in algorithms, marketing and platform priorities seem to have hit sales hard for many contributors. Pond isnt completely dead, but for most authors its clearly no longer the stable income source it used to be. That said the recent Pond5 AI training bonuses have been really nice.

Yep, except that those AI payments were not really bonuses, but rather close to you selling your selling rights forever to a competitor, who is now cashing in on your work, instead of you.

nonsense - do some research  about how training works (plenty o,f info in the ai section)
-- you're not giving any 'selling' rights -
-- your images are used (among millions of others) for dataset training
-- the resulting dataset has no reference or links to the original images so no one ever sees your images
-- you're getting $ for images that likely have never have, or ever will, sell (esp'ly on pond)

those complaining about sales on pond and not opting-in for training are conducting self-inflicted monopod destruction. fine by me

The undeniable fact is that very often customers no longer buy photos because they can generate their own using an algorithm that has become your competitor, a competitor you helped train by basically giving away your work.
This was a shortsighted, geeedy decision to earn a few peanuts, wron]gly labeled as a "bonus", when in fact it's only a tiny fraction of what you could have earned, in the absence of your self-made competitor....

whether or not i contribute has NO EFFECT on generation of AI as it's just a  nano-miniscule portion of the tokens for the billions of calculations that create each image.  the same number of AI images will created whether i contribute or not.

earlier many complained about training using scraped images without paying for them, now many of those same folk are opting out when agencies are making payments

i'd say the blackrock/vanguard companies are just trying to squeeze contributors as much as possible - in order to push people towards their "subscription" video assets (based off of massive theft) like runwayML.