Both. Have an 8TB drive I do weekly backups and store in "fireproof" safe. From videos I've seen, fireproof may be more of a marketing term. So I also have automated photo/video backup to Amazon Photos.

Quote from: CJH Photography on September 13, 2020, 10:31

I'm also concerned that, with easy price comparison through Google, I am cannabilizing my better-paying sales working with SS.  Last month I made $19 on a sale on 20twenty.  The same image would have netted me $.10 on SS.  Takes a lot of sales to make up that difference in RPD, and the volume wasn't there for me on SS to make it worthwhile to stay.

a frequent claim w little to back it up - first, how many buyers spend time analyzing google for lowest price - esp'ly when  the difference is minor?

how many people have subs at multiple sites?

finally, there's no indication that one site cannabilizes another and more (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that different images sell on each site.

i buy & sell (non-photo) on ebay & amazon - based on my sales i can see that people don't compare prices - even on the same site, people don't look - else why would they pay $25 for a comic that's also listed at $10?

Buyers absolutely do compare prices. This is the main reason I dropped being exclusive at iStock years ago and removed most of my portfolio. I had buyers contacting me through my personal website asking for pricing for their client projects where their budgets were hundreds or thousands of dollars. Because of exclusivity I had to point them to my iStock portfolio where they'd save a ton of money and I'd lose a ton of money. So I dropped the crown but left my portfolio there.

Then buyers would contact me and I'd give them a quote.  More than a few times they responded "what's the difference between your quote and the pricing for the same images on iStock that are way less". Answer was, there was no difference. So I pulled most of my portfolio so I was no longer competing against myself and I could set whatever pricing I could get.

Keep in mind many of these buyers are at large companies and are sourcing dozens or hundreds of images for large client projects. Clients always balk at pricing forcing the company to look for cheaper options by comparison shopping. Just because they only buy one image from you doesn't mean they aren't spending a ton of money on a bunch of images.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on June 25, 2020, 08:07

Right they paid out $1B to contributors. Not a word about the fact that they also made billions of dollars from contributors. Or the fact that Jon became a billionaire from contributors.

From yesterday on twitter

https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1275903045214146560

Good specific financials showing exactly what we bring to them.

Right they paid out $1B to contributors. Not a word about the fact that they also made billions of dollars from contributors. Or the fact that Jon became a billionaire from contributors.

And that's the whole problem. They don't see this as mutual partnership. They see themselves as the ruler who provides all of the value and us as the peasant workers who are expendable and worthless.

Without them we wouldn't have the opportunity to earn money from them. We would however have the opportunity to earn money from our media from other places. But if they didn't have our media, there would be no Shutterstock and probably no billionaire Jon.

I once had my own stock site with the CMSAccount software. Paid $70 for the template, spent days customizing, fixing and tweaking, then creating a database, prepping my portfolio, writing license documents, uploading everything, checking the payment system, tweaking some more...I got it all up and running after many, many days of work.

I figured if I made 10 sales a year, I'd be able to recoup my costs.
But my portfolio wasn't big enough to get traffic, and those who did find my website didn't purchase anything.
On top of that the VAT system was hard to configure as I couldn't automatically check where my visitors were located. In other words, automatic checkout with custom VAT options was not possible.

All in all it was a big waste of time for me.

It's a waste of time for a lot of people because picking the software, configuring it and uploading images are only the first couple steps. There's a lot to do after that to make sales.

Sounds like you mean something like Symbiostock. I'm guessing there's not enough money in it.

If you're in it for the long term you need something that has financial backing so the platform will be sustained. Otherwise you'll be having to redo your website every few years when the software is abandoned by its creator. Check out Photoshelter and Photodeck. Or even Shopify.

It's funny that over the years I've made jokes about all of the wealthy executives sitting in an extravagant conference room enjoying expensive hors d'oeuvres and cocktails while talking about the next round of "good news" of how to screw us. Based on their actions we knew how they felt about us regardless of how many times they talked about contributor value. This is just proof. We're just expendable nuisances to them.

What's funny about his statement is he's saying to go somewhere else or sell your own work. What I think he's failing to consider is the other option. Not selling stock at all because it's becoming a waste of time. They've squeezed our earnings so low that Shuterstock, and stock in general, no longer matter to a growing number of people. Years ago when I was making thousands of dollars per month it would be hard to walk away. Today, I spent more on a dinner last night than I made in a month at Shutterstock. I could walk away from all stock sites today and not care at all. Already done with Shutterstock.

This is NSFW but interesting hearing these two rant about agents, partners, managers and others ripping comedians off. Some of it sounds similar to stock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO_rW0Bvy1I

Someone needs to educate these free contributors. They probably have no idea what they're getting themselves into and will likely regret it later.

And one of these stock companies should be actively recruiting them to move their work to stock. It would be more competition in stock, but that's better than competing against free. And if there were few/no free options, end-users would have little choice but to buy images. Or just buy these stock sites for their content or shut them down as a loss.

Quote from: Smithore on June 04, 2020, 13:05

There's something strange, i've opt out for 7000+ photos and 500+ video selling, when i'm consulting my dashboard I can see now there is still 970 photos in my portfolio, that's means nothing !!!!
Contributors who have opted out, do you encountering the same issue ?

Yes. My portfolio count went down in fits and starts and finally reached zero. I also saw that when the count on the screen you showed was one number, if you clicked on the portfolio link right there it'd show a different number.

It'll all go to zero shortly

So when you disable, are the files deleted? My portfolio now shows 0 files. Not that I care if they're deleted. Just curious.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on June 02, 2020, 21:05

Quote from: zstoimenov on June 02, 2020, 19:25

Edit: I expect them to hide the portfolio disable buttons next.

I'm surprised they didn't do it already. Even more surprised they didn't disable it right before they announced the change. ...

I was fully prepared for them to take away the on/off switch, but as I see how many people are disabling portfolios - I watched the number of photos drop by 70,000 in a half an hour this afternoon while I was tweeting some #BoycottShutterstock stuff - it dawns on me that the more we disable, the less likely they are to remove the control.

At some point, it becomes in their interest to leave them enabled if they believe they can talk contributors into restoring images. Come the end of June they'll have more financials to report and an image count. They may not want to fess up that they inspired a boycott and only have a small growth or a decline in the collection. Also, it would force contributors to choose to close their accounts or delete images if the button were gone - all much more work to manage than the on/off switch.

As they couldn't manage the code to get royalties into the correct columns after the change, they may not want to make things more complicated for engineering than it needs to be

I doubt they've budged from their dictator approach. They're removing forum and Facebook posts, banning people, not responding in the forum, etc. I still think they're working on whatever they can do to squash contributors including disabling the buttons. Gotta show us peons who's boss even if it hurts them.

Edit: I expect them to hide the portfolio disable buttons next.

I'm surprised they didn't do it already. Even more surprised they didn't disable it right before they announced the change. But yes they're probably working on removing it right now. It's a big site and even simple changes take time to make and test.

Personally doesn't matter to me. I saw the 10 cent sales and immediately disabled my port. If they force the issue to remove the disable buttons to where I need to delete my account, go ahead. Don't care. All of these stock sites taught me a long time ago that I need to diversify income to where they dont matter. And I have. And they don't.

What's ironic is these stock sites have done so much to diminish our earnings from significant to meaningless for so many of us. In doing so, they've also lost any leverage they have over us. If they paid us all really well and the majority of us were making big money, it would be a different story. If this happened years ago when my earnings were really good, I wouldn't easily be able to walk away. Today, I can, and have. Karma.

Interesting.https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/chinese-censorship-or-work-elsewhere-inside-shutterstock-s-free-speech-n1144211

� The culture that we want to build is also one where when leadership makes a decision, we move on. We commit, and we move on," Pavlovsky said at the Dec. 10 internal meeting.

So essentially they want employees and partners to be farm animals. Sheep. Produce, be afraid and be quiet.

Sounds like Jonathan Klein. "Lovely to get the milk, the cream, cheese, yoghurt and the meat without buying the cow"