Recently I got two sales of HD videos, and my commission was $1.06 each. The price listed for the videos on Pond5 is 40�. Shouldn't I get at least 40% commission? How is this fair? I thought Pond5 was embracing fairness toward contributors as its core value in opposition to other agencies like Shutterstock.

They are indeed sold on Shutterstock too, but not at a lower price. We are talking about single purchases, not subscriptions

Well, P5 has asked me to agree to giving video clips for free. Even after I said no, they continue to ask me to reconsider, saying they would give away 1-4 clips per artist, and that's minimal in their mind.

If we give away our work for free, we would also lose copyright control over our work. We will no longer be able to tell if it was a copyright infringement or not. Even if an agency sells for $1 or less (that's terrible, too), there are paper trails of transaction and license agreement in place.

The particular clip they want to give away was a time lapse from a very unique location. I have said explicitly that I would not permit any of my work to be given away for free.

It is always sad to see one's profession belittled in this way 

there should be a union

there should be a union

And what will the union do to force the agencies to negotiate. In order for a union to function, you would have to be able to control the labor supply or in the case of Microstock, the production of images. With nothing to withhold and no leverage, a photographers union for Microstock would have no power. That's why there's no union.

there should be a union

There is now The Stock Coalition: https://stockcoalition.org/

What works? What doesn't work? Dialogue is good while we collectively
anticipate our next $0.10 commission......

This title make remember me the Dollar Tree Store, in that store all is selling for one dollar!

If they'd said the minimum you'll ever earn in perpetuity is $0.33 per download, then you might have a case, but they're well within their rights to alter their commission structure. Don't need a legal team for that. While empowerment is always desirable, the only real power we have is to choose to accept their terms or leave. Or stay but stop uploading new stuff. 

This title make remember me the Dollar Tree Store, in that store all is selling for one dollar!

Like the Fotolia Dollar Photo Club? I left along with the protesters and look what happened? Now I lost images that AS won't take, that FT already had in the collection and they sold. I joined the protest at IS and now nothing changed, I have about 901 images. Nice that they give me 4 cent downloads and have a minimum of 2 cents.  Bigstock, was paying me 50c a download, when SS bought them, it went to 25c, unless someone had 50,000 downloads. Really! Remember that? I left. 123RF which changed their levels, I wasn't making enough to care, I left.

It's written in the TOS that the agencies can change the rules, as they please and as far as I know, every one of them has. Even some that promised never less than 50% have changed, maybe it's only for new images that the new commission. But another way around that is, yes you get 50%, but they charge the buyers much less, so we'd get 50% of a tiny number.

Ok. How about everyone who has images with Bigstock removes all but one of their images? It's owned by the SS. It costs money to keep the company operating yet few of us make any real money contributing to the agency. BTW, and yes, I was one of those who kept my portfolio with the SS but hasn't contributed since the changed rates.

Empowerment is protection against unfair business practices.

 

What about the idea of hiring a legal council? Everyone contributes 1% of their image income to maintain a legal consulting team hired to provide advice when agencies change or alter their legal agreement with contributors.

A legal council would look at those sort of "contract tactics" and let us know if it's legal AND provide legal methods of retaliation.

Another idea. Empowerment is essential for every contributor.

Go ask a lawyer, free consultation, and find out, there's nothing to sue for or retaliate. They did nothing illegal, none of the above agencies did. They have the right to change the contract.

I'll leave this for anyone else to explain, but as a contributor, we have no power over the agencies. People say "if everyone pulled their images..." really? The whole world joining together?

You can't go on strike, like truck drivers or factory workers or something else where skills and labor are involved.
Forming a union would do nothing, because there's no leverage, nothing to hurt the agencies, nothing to hold back, so they would pay more.

While empowerment is always desirable, the only real power we have is to choose to accept their terms or leave. Or stay but stop uploading new stuff.

That's the way it is. Stay and keep working, or stay and upload nothing new, or leave and take your creative images with you. That's a personal choice.

Go ask a lawyer, free consultation, and find out, there's nothing to sue for or retaliate. They did nothing illegal, none of the above agencies did. They have the right to change the contract.

I don't need a lawyer to tell me that "bait and switch" business practices are illegal, at least in my part of the world.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bait-switch.asp

....but when there's only a handful of contributors responding to the topic it's pretty obvious that a class action lawsuit isn't worth the time and effort.

The only way I see any way to improve the average* contributor lot is the same as what Stocksy did, but on a smaller scale. If it were me, I would get together a half dozen or so contributors with complementary portfolios (size, quality, etc) and build my own site. Its not hard or even expensive to do that much, the hard part is, as always, marketing and finding clients within your area.

But if you develop that solid niche, and have a big enough (exclusive) collection, you can potentially be a disruptor, and perhaps either make a deal with an agency that is better than the terms for the average user, or, you can go after your own markets.

 *edit - "average" being those of us who are perhaps not the top tier, but work hard at this too.

When I win the lottery, you're invited to my stock site.  40% because the agency side will be gobbled up by marketing, software engineers and hosting.

I agree with your idea, that a smaller site could work and with minimal overhead, get decent response. The biggest expense or largest problem about a self hosted agency is just what you wrote. Marketing and finding buyers. Anyone looking for images, using any search engine, will see the paid  ads, the big already established sites, and multiple entries. Best a little site would do is down the pages, fairly unseen.

Lets not forget that someone did try that with (if my memory is present today) Warmpics? He built and agency site, invited established people with good reliable portfolios, many if not all, from here. He still had to abandon the idea after a really good effort.

That wasn't exclusive, I don't know if anyone is willing to take the chance to be exclusive anywhere new anymore, with the exception of Stocksy which has a positive track record and produces a return for artists.

Quote from: porpeller on December 11, 2020, 11:51

there should be a union

There is now The Stock Coalition: https://stockcoalition.org/

I'll ask again, didn't the coalition make some kind of deal with P5. Has anything else come up? I don't think the whole project just disappeared and evaporated. I honestly thought that for the people who joined, they might make some waves and change something? Maybe not on the big agencies, but potentially somewhere that's trying to grow and attract more artists?

. duplicate