I purchased a Stock Submitter subscription. It is no longer available.

I am also unable to report the problem through your software. It just gives an error.

They had a major database crash today. They are aware of it, and are in the process of fixing now.

Pond5 is a SET YOUR OWN PRICE site. Not a controlled pricing site. Costco is a controlled pricing business. There is a big difference. So unless Pond 5 intends to dictate prices like most other sites do, there is no substance to your argument. And the way they snuck clips into this test without informing contributors is shameful. I am relatively certain there is some tiny clause in 5 point font point font in their terms that allows them to do this, but it is certainly came across as deceitful. Who is now responsible for resetting their prices back to the way they were when the test is completed? And all of this testing is for what? To merely �recommend� a price pojnt to us? They do that today and I ignore that. And I do fine on P5.  They could have very well asked for volunteers but they chose to nab n grab.

In the end, your position is only substantitive if P5 is moving towards forcing fixed pricing on contributors.

I have never set my own price there, and just let it go with their standards.  As such, I don't feel as maligned as someone might who specified a price and had it then changed on them.

I do agree that doesn't seem like something they should be able to do without consulting with the provider...

Love how they keep repeating how this is going to mean more revenue for contributors. Do they really think people are that stupid? Maybe if they say it enough times in one email, it will come true. 

I am mostly constantly surprised by how little people on this group seem to understand marketing and economics.  Costco sells for far less than their competition, but who makes the most money?

I had one of my first businesses back in the 1970's.  I experimented with pricing, as any decent growing business will do.  I sent out mailings (in those days, catalogs were sent by US Mail to potential consumers).  Some with higher prices, some with lower prices. Some where some prices were higher but others lower, trying to determine the optimum price for different lines of products.

In my case, I discovered that if I dropped my prices by roughly 15% that my sales volume went up almost 30%, and I had more money in the bank at the end of each quarter (though I had to hire a couple extra people to handle the increased volume, which was of course, factored into the analysis).

OTOH, I had a photographic art print show in town recently (ended a month ago).  I experimented there and had a few prints at a lower price.  I had fully expected those would be the big sellers. To my surprise, my highest priced prints ($600) sold out, while my cheapest prints ($295) did not sell at all. 

mmmm.... That still surprises me, but that is part of the point -- without testing, you will never know what the optimum price point is.  Sometimes lowering a price will increase the volume enough to produce higher dollars in your pocket, sometimes not.  When dealing with widgets that must be manufactured (or even prints that cost me money to make and frame) then you have to consider cost of production of each additional widget in the analysis.  Where there is zero incremental cost in production though (as with digital media), then sometimes the per-unit price seems uncomfortably low.

Of course, you can always keep the price really, really high. That lets you gloat when you make one single sale.  But then I would personally prefer selling at half that price if I can then sell it 10 times...

[By the way, we've stopped supporting the Mac version (due to the lack of the interest) and I would recommend you to try out our new cloud service that does the same but better and supports more agencies than the Mac version: Microstock.Plus

FWIW, I was also not happy with the Mac version, and switched a few weeks ago to the cloud version.  It is still in beta, so a few rough edges. Overall, I like it a LOT better than SS on the Mac though...

0,27 cento to 0,95.....how much are commission...really people are so desperate to contribute with any bshit that opens its door?
ibeing a photographer is not a medical prescription...

Royalty is stated very clearly on the same page you quoted that price. Creators get 85% (WeMark takes 15%)  If you were an early supplier of media, you get 100% royalty on those images.

I do find it interesting that they charge users in Dollars, yet pay artists in <<??>>

If there has been a significant time between the rejection and now, AND you can improve the editing based on experience since then (and PS/LR improvements), then sure... why not?

I did that about a year ago.  I went through rejections from more than a year prior. Re-edited and resubmitted.  About half were accepted this time around.

One warning -- I would NOT do that with Adobe, since they might very well bring back their free year of LR/PS.  If so, and using same rules as 2018, you need more than 50% acceptance rate, and I wouldn't want to drive down my acceptance this way (unless I had a few that i was sure are now edited such to avoid the prior rejection reason).

Some of us, don't need the anywhere, anytime, or available for someone else features. I do have dropbox, the maximum free account. If I needed to send a photo, or a series, and I don't do much video, then I have the resources. But yes, for different people, cloud would be much better.

I think you are missing the biggest draw of cloud backup -- protection against loss resulting from fire, burglary, or similar office-destroying events.

I have zero interest in the "anywhere, anytime" aspect of cloud backups.  In the last 50 years, we have

(1) been threatened by a volcano (we lived in the shadow of Mt St Helens when it erupted in 1980),

(2) evacuated due to a regional fire in the San Jose (CA) hills in 1985. The fire destroyed 36 homes, including that of my boss at Motorola.  The fire was literally stopped across the street from our home, so we ended up only with smoke damage.

(3) Our home was split in two during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 (also known as the World Series quake, since it occurred moments before the opening pitch of the San Francisco / Oakland baseball world series.)  My office was completely destroyed.  (Actually, we sold that house just 3 months before the quake, so it was the buyers that got destroyed.  We moved North to Berkeley, where....)

(4) evacuated due to the largest urban fire in the US in 1992, in Berkeley (CA) where 3300 homes were burned in the Oakland Firestorm.  Again, the fire was literally stopped across the street from us, so our damage was a canopy and landscaping.

(5) were burglarized in 2016, where the thief took two laptops, a Canon 70-200 f2.8 lens (costs $2500) and $1000 in cash from our petty cash drawer (my wife had sold a painting the day before).  Fortunately, the disk drives were in a separate locked room, and were not taken,

When I have a disk failure, I have local backups to recover, via Time Machine.  Much faster and more convenient.  However, in those 5 instances noted above, we might have lost all our onsite data in one giant flop.  Had that happened, I would have been VERY happy to have a cloud backup to recover from.

I might be just plain wrong - but take a look at this:

What's the deal?

You are not seeing what you think you are.  Not quite sure what is going on, but I put in "Blackbox" as the contributor and get the exact same number of clips and the exact same clips.

I don't think the search is working properly.

It is sad that I cannot find new tutorials. Real useful tutorials.

Do you know about RSS readers?  Most of the good photo/video blogs have an RSS feed. That is what I subscribe to.  I get daily world news (NYTimes, CNN, NPR) plus a dozens of photo/video blog posts every day.  I scan through them, and just go past the headlines on maybe 5 to 10 per day.

The headlines (typically w/ first paragraph, but sometimes the whole article) gives me a constant feel of what is happening in the areas I am interested in.  The headlines that talk about a new video let me pick and choose which videos to go watch. 

For me, that works much better than just subscribing to YouTube and then watching random things that come through.

At any rate, if you are not familiar with RSS, go check it out.  On a Mac, my favorite reader is called "Reeder" and is available on the Apple App Store.

I used your code to sign up. Don't count on ever seeing a cent and I'll be sure to post my code as soon as I get one?  I will try some uploads and see how I like the system.

Thx!  I got an email saying that you had used the code.

Now that you are a member of BlackBox, you might want to join their Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/blackboxglobal/).  It is a closed group, only open to BlackBox members.

It is a very active group, and pretty much every question I have had has been answered there without me even having to post myself.  The founder is also making hints about some big improvements that will come out February (next month), including something related to mentoring so the more experienced videographers can help teach the novices.  I am guessing that will be in exchange for a percentage of the revenue on sold clips that were part of the mentoring, but I have no inside knowledge to know for sure.

I personally use DropBox Plus and couldn't be more happy. For �99.00/year I have all my images synced on all computers. I also can access them at any time from my phone or iPad. Super convenient, easy to use interface, in other words it just works. All in all, simply amazing value for money.

$99/yr gets you 1TB. Not exactly "unlimited" -- I use more than PER YEAR for new media...

Does anyone know if that's allowed? Or does Blackbox requires full portfolio exclusivity on footage?

What you describe is entirely within the license of BlackBox.

BB is NOT exclusive.  The only limit they place is that any video clip sent to them cannot also be sent to ShutterStock, Pond5, AdobeStock, StoryBlocks or Vimeo.  If you uploaded clip A both to BB and to one of those agencies, it would result in a duplicate upload, and you would risk losing both your BB membership AND the ability to upload future clips to those agencies.

However, you can submit "clip A" to Blackbox, plus any other agency that accepts video not listed above.

You can also submit "clip B" to any and all agencies, as long as it is not also submitted to BB.

You can mix-and-match as much as you please, to allow you to test direct vs BB, or to expand your market beyond those listed above.

(BTW, if you do join BB, I'd appreciate if you use my referral code -- JKX5J2D3 ). Doesn't cost you anything, but they then give me a dollar or so each time you make a sale.

BTW2 - I have only been on BB for a few months, and already make more money there with 800 clips that I make with a photo portfolio of 4500 images on a dozen agencies.  3 more video sales today, at $35 each. (35 dollars, not cents! )