With the freedom that pond5 offers for the contributors it would be great if they made into the top level. But I think with photos, they still have a long way to go. At least for me, the income is over 90% from video.

Video-wise they are a if not the leader!

Photos-wise it's a very different story but there is hope!

I am glad I saw this thread. I have had six sales this month of still shots.  The key is that my commission was $6-$9 per image, so that means that at least some buyers are willing to pay more than those thieves at Fotolia and DP.  I am ALL FOR P5 and, at this point, support them fully.  They get all of my video and my stills and have all of my support.  I will take the clunky site if all they do is get sales up. For P5 they need a hook, though. Pricing is a powerful weapon as Oleg clearly knows. The question we can potentially help P5 with in this forum is to give ideas around differentiation that doesn't require $1 for an image or a 3% commission like DP. In my mind the big question is how can we help P5 hook buyers in the face of $1 and/or 3%?

Seriously, they have all it takes to win - great interface, search, fresh content, recognizable brand, contributors' support. The last one may turn out to be the most important these days. Pond5 give fair 50%, allow to set your own prices and have clear distribution network.

... horrendous site design for buyers,  lousy interface for sellers, unable to stop input mechanism from converting uppercase letters to lowercase after years of requests ...

They have things to work on.

Quote from: BelieveInStock on August 14, 2014, 06:48

Seriously, they have all it takes to win - great interface, search, fresh content, recognizable brand, contributors' support. The last one may turn out to be the most important these days. Pond5 give fair 50%, allow to set your own prices and have clear distribution network.

... horrendous site design for buyers,  lousy interface for sellers, unable to stop input mechanism from converting uppercase letters to lowercase after years of requests ...

They have things to work on.

Obviously, it did not bother buyers that much, as Pond5 is indeed the leader in selling videos, Shutterstock might have caught up a little but stays behind again now, at least for me. And i have substantial numbers to be statistically significant.
As for the seller interface it may be different from other sites that we are used to, but i find it much easier to use. In fact if you submit photos with IPTC, all you need to do is to select all, set a price and send to curator, three clicks, no matter how many photos. In SS for example, you would have to copy and paste the tittle and keywords in for each image if they are different.
The rest are trivial  actually. As i mentioned many times before, no agency can be perfect, the reason why Pond5 can still afford to pay us a fair rate is because they dont have a battalion of employees to feed. We have to see the more important things and be less demanding on smaller issues.
I think Pond5 deserves most of our support. How do you think Pond5 photo sale would be able to pick up if every contributors continue to upload to agencies like DP,FT who sell the same images at very low prices? If the image collection on Pond5 is much smaller than that of other cheap-selling agencies, what kind of stunt you think Pond5 could pull to sell them at a much higher price?
If everybody just wait until Pond5 get good records of photo sale to upload their images, it not gonna happen. Pond5 is fair, and we need to be fair too.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on August 14, 2014, 08:22

Quote from: BelieveInStock on August 14, 2014, 06:48

Seriously, they have all it takes to win - great interface, search, fresh content, recognizable brand, contributors' support. The last one may turn out to be the most important these days. Pond5 give fair 50%, allow to set your own prices and have clear distribution network.

... horrendous site design for buyers,  lousy interface for sellers, unable to stop input mechanism from converting uppercase letters to lowercase after years of requests ...

They have things to work on.

Sean, I gotta be honest, most of the time I find you a bit too harsh to people and agencies both. But, my god, this ridiculous inability to carry over capital letters is... man... you are letting them off too easy here. What *idiots*. Leaders? Please. They appear to be worse engineers than me, and I am a goddamn lawyer.

Not that they are incapable of doing that, i dont think so, rather, they have lots of other things much more important to do. Look at the footage gallery icon of contributors in SS, it's been broken since like ... years? it's not fixed still, you also think they are not capable of fixing it?

Do you think Pond5 is going to be a leader?

In video, sure.

In everything else, not unless they commit to focusing more effort and attention to those parts of the business. Right now I do better at Crestock than Pond5, which says a lot considering I don't even upload to Crestock anymore.

Right now I feel like vectors and photos are just an afterthought for Pond5. Like they heard people wanted that stuff so they opened the doors for it, but then never went any further.

the photo upload system is a kind of medieval torture

They'll only be the leader if a large amount of talented contributors decide to put their work only on Pond5.  If people continue to put all of their work on all of the sites, the cheapest sites will win out in the long run.  I think it's really that simple.

Audi has a point there, but i wonder.

is there anyone here who has the same portfolio with all of the sites?
if u r, can u provide us with who amongst the list to the right of this page are the
cheapest sites?
and with that, provide the evidence that in fact, the cheapest sites win out.

Quote from: etudiante_rapide on August 14, 2014, 15:17

Quote from: Audi 5000 on August 14, 2014, 15:04

They'll only be the leader if a large amount of talented contributors decide to put their work only on Pond5.  If people continue to put all of their work on all of the sites, the cheapest sites will win out in the long run.  I think it's really that simple.

Audi has a point there, but i wonder.

is there anyone here who has the same portfolio with all of the sites?
if u r, can u provide us with who amongst the list to the right of this page are the
cheapest sites?
and with that, provide the evidence that in fact, the cheapest sites win out.

I think most nonexclusive contributors put most of their work on multiple sites.  Maybe there are some contributors that only put their best work on x site and only put their worst work on y site but I don't think that's anywhere close to the norm.  Most sites are worse than P5 if you look at pricing and royalty rate and many sites are selling a lot more licenses  than P5.

I upload to multiple sites, but the sites I feel meet a higher criteria get my newest work. Those that I want to support and I hope grow bigger are my next priority. Sites that make me money, but don't have the best terms are the lowest priority (they don't really get any new work). I can't say it works or doesn't work, but you have to start trying to improve things somewhere I guess.

They'll only be the leader if a large amount of talented contributors decide to put their work only on Pond5.  If people continue to put all of their work on all of the sites, the cheapest sites will win out in the long run.  I think it's really that simple.

When I visited Pond5, I saw many images that are on regular microstock sites.

I'll guess that people prefer to use image packs, subscriptions, credit packs, Dollar Photo Club, etc. when they can, so even if they see an image on P5 that they like, they'll just buy it from another site. Those subscriptions and packs are pretty powerful.

I think P5's stills would sell better if people uploaded different, better quality images there. I think stock needs more quality stratification between 35 cent microstock and really expensive RM.

I like pond5. However from the sales point, it seems Pond5 is no where going to be the leader. I wish it would