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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
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1127
« on: June 02, 2020, 13:56 »
Microstock agencies are one of the main reasons why making decent money by selling stock has become more and more difficult. You, as Shutterstock contributors, have a large part of responsibility for this situation and now you whine because Shutterstock is unfair with you ! BLAME YOURSELF for accepting contributing to these sites and selling photos for peanuts.
For heavens sake! Give this old saw a rest. The "old school" stock photographers took work away from assignment photographers. There was good money in that too, but that didn't stop any of you from raking in the cash selling badly isolated apples and oranges for $500+ a pop (along with some really good work). Could you dredge up some angst about how digital cameras ruined things for darkroom professionals? And how exactly would anything have been any better if Shutterstock weren't around? Getty was ripping off photographers before Shutterstock was a glint in anyone's eye. For what it's worth, the microstock setup was initially entirely reasonable and as fair as having both Woolworth and Neiman Marcus in the retail sphere, or Timex and Rolex in the watch market. The fact that Shutterstock grew up to be a money-grabbing public company that has forgotten that 100% of its content is owned by others (with no contract requiring it to be there for any period of time) has nothing to do with its origins in creating a new market for stock images & video. It has gone horribly wrong, but selling higher volumes of images & video to small and medium sized businesses at a lower price is an entirely reasonable business proposition. Your arguments that we're all whiners just don't comport with any facts.
1128
« on: June 02, 2020, 11:04 »
You can gather lots of data from other contributors in the Shutterstock forums. The fine details vary, but the big picture is crystal clear. One example:
1129
« on: June 02, 2020, 10:52 »
Very likely I'll be disabling my account. I think everyone needs to though or a huge # of contributors to have an impact.
I think it will make a difference if there are noticeable holes in the collection - the image spam can fill up 150 million easily but a lot of that is just not commercially viable. When Shutterstock's bread and butter corporate customers can't find the things that were in their lightbox - when big, noticeable contributors like eyeidea shut off their portfolios - buyers will realize Shutterstock is no longer the great one stop shop it once was. We don't have to get the numbers down much to make a big difference. Even small potatoes contributors like me had content in the first page of searches https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1266812478647709696And for more niche subjects, when a buyer goes to find something, their choices have noticeably shrunk https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1266843339673886720
1130
« on: June 02, 2020, 10:44 »
I have read all the posts and know the changes. But it says on my dashboard that i am still level 5 and therefore haven't been reset back down to zero.
You will still get 0.1 sales at level 6 too. Previously subscription sale were not calculated by percent but were a flat rate of 0.38.
Now they are calculated according to the percent... But the biggest issue that they are calculated like if subscribers would use up all their quota. We don't get adjustments for unused downloads.
(but the way, the number of downloads is also on a decline lately...)
Thank you very much for explaining, much appreciated. Much more helpful and productive than the other person.
....and this is why top contributors won't join any revolt. Because they got an email saying their royalty rate has been bumped up from 30% to 40% and didn't read any further. In their minds they've all gotten a raise. I'm guessing a lot of them are surprised to see 10 royalties even though it's not January.
Yesterday afternoon, Shutterstock's forum thread on the royalty cut was full of posts from people who had seen their stats and suddenly realized that it wasn't just about the reset to Level 1 in January. Lots more people were starting the process of disabling sales. Some quotes: "Thats funny, that earlier everyone was thinking that "reset" in January will be the biggest problem of that change... no matter, as we can see after sales."
"The base of our income, i think, comes from the subs... And these levels don't have (much) influence on this... Only on the expensive sales. So, in the end, these levels are good for the show." "Goodbye Shutterstock! 10 cents is humiliation. My port is deactivated" "I am Level 5 so why am I making 10 friggin cents for images??? SS decided to sell subscriptions at a loss, not me, so why do we have to pay for your mistakes." "SS said that levels 5 and 6 will earn more...I'm level 5 and there is 10 downloads, 13 downloads, 17 downloads and 20 downloads.....strange math SS, very strange." "Level 5 and I earn much less, 10c, 16c, 17c, totally unacceptable now but imagine from 1st of January 2021" "That's just terrible! This is worse than my expectations. The drop in profit is 3 times. Well, this is not a serious business. Your excuse for these changes is ridiculous. I will not upload new content from today. " "Wow - just had my photo sold for... wait for it.... $0.11 (Single and Other license) ! In fact - out of 25 images sole yesterday - only one was for 0.38 (which is what i was getting before the big change), the rest were between $0.10 and $0.20. And i'm level 4... Unbelievable..."
1131
« on: June 02, 2020, 00:43 »
Looking at the Shutterstock forums this afternoon, it appeared that seeing tiny subscription royalties in stats made the serious nature of these cuts plain.
Even if some of the fine-grain details can only be seen with more weeks/months of royalty data, the big picture is pretty clear right now.
I was at Level 4 before disabling my portfolio, but would have become Level 5 shortly (depending on how badly sales slowed). Doing some rough calculations made it clear to me that any benefit of getting 35% instead of 30% would be completely outweighed by two things. Having to slog back up from level 1 to 5 each year; and the impact of masses of 10-15 subscriptions.
I've been using another contributor's phrase for halting uploads in twitter posts about this - #DontFeedTheGreed
It's pretty clear to me (and increasingly clear to remaining contributors looking at this afternoon's stats) that there was only one beneficiary from today's royalty changes and that was Shutterstock.
1132
« on: June 01, 2020, 22:54 »
... More SODs in a day than I've had in a long time - are they doing some sort of special promotion? ...
From their forum, the explanation was that it was a bug causing subscription downloads to show up in the SOC column - right low-ball number, but wrong column. They say they've fixed it (I can't check as my portfolio is now disabled, so I can only see sales from October 2004 to May 2020  )
1133
« on: June 01, 2020, 22:48 »
Message from a Creative Manager at a national brand...
That's great!
1134
« on: June 01, 2020, 22:47 »
It's great that you're getting the word out, but when I tried to find you on twitter I couldn't at first
#shutterstockboycott has three results if you do a search on twitter (your post is one of them and that was the only way I could find it)
#BoycottShutterstock has many hundreds of results and will get anything you say more traction.
I try and use #Shutterstock as well in anything related to this fiasco
1136
« on: June 01, 2020, 15:49 »
...For those that do not want to delete or disable their portfolio just yet at least refrain from uploading new content to SS. Don't feed the greed! . . .
I like Don't feed the greed! I liked enough to borrow it for a hashtag for tweets https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1267548751175901184Can't use the apostrophe in a hashtag, so the grammar police won't be happy, but I can live with that I've disabled my portfolio, but for those who can't #BoycottShutterstock, we can advocate that they #DontFeedTheGreed
1137
« on: June 01, 2020, 11:04 »
So might that be one of the Facebook (or similar) deals that had subscription royalties showing up in the SOD column? How nice for you to hit rock bottom right out of the gate
1138
« on: May 31, 2020, 19:36 »
I wrote a blog post about this royalty cut so there is a collection of thoughts all together - things get very spread apart in long topics like this.
https://www.digitalbristles.com/shutterstock-bombshell-royalty-cut-june-1st/
The only thing left to decide is what time on Sunday to turn off my portfolio on Shutterstock 
Your blog is great but the font is so bleak that readability is very bad. I personally couldn't read till the end for this reason, its just hard to read.
Sorry about that. I did a quick and dirty edit to make the text a much darker color, but I'll take a look at fixing that for the CSS when I get a few minutes to figure out what I did when I set that site up. Can't remember how anything was organized!
1139
« on: May 31, 2020, 16:09 »
Disabling initiated...
1140
« on: May 31, 2020, 11:25 »
Disabling doesn't mean instantaneous results on the site - search engine has to update, just like with new uploads. I don't think you can coordinate timing even if you decided it was a good idea
1141
« on: May 31, 2020, 11:24 »
Oh come on people this is an agency which hardly sell anything at all and ....
Anyone who's been with Dreamstime a long time knows of their problems (I've been there since 2004) but that's not the point. The fact that they don't sell much or that me uploading to them again won't increase sales are also not the point. Take the time to celebrate a small positive move in support of contributors in a sea of totally unhelpful or outright hostile agencies. As they say with presents, it's the though that counts Edited to add that I received a download this morning for one of the files I uploaded yesterday - I understand it's not significant, but it feels like a lovely counterpart to Dreamstime's kind royalty increase starting tomorrow.
1142
« on: May 31, 2020, 10:51 »
...I might use Twitter in this particular case, though.
If you decide you'd rather not and would like me to tweet about it on your behalf, let me know. It's always best if it's the person themselves talking about their work, but if that image is disabled, that's "news" worth talking about (and I grabbed a watermarked JPEG in case) so I will as a back-up plan.
1144
« on: May 30, 2020, 19:00 »
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.
Pavlovsky didn't respond to an emailed interview request, but in his statement Wednesday he echoed his earlier statement: "As a transparent organization, one of our core practices is that once we've had an open and honest conversation on a topic, then we commit and move on
Things have changed. And the market for micropriced content they are targeting is China.
I remember the stories about censorship at the time, but didn't see this particular story - which certainly outlines an unlikely-to-compromise Pavlovsky. The problem he has in angering his suppliers is that it may be harder to get stuff to sell over time - without which he has no business - if the agency has a reputation for treating suppliers badly. It's really a gamble that he can afford to p*ss off lots of us and it won't matter to his customers. Remember StockXpert that was bought by Jupiter Images because they needed new content for a few of their moribund subscription sites that didn't have enough new content to keep subscribers paying up? It can happen that big names - photos.com was the subscription site I think - can fail, as Jupiter Images itself did in time. Shutterstock isn't immune to these sorts of forces. The fact that Jon Oringer is just standing by and letting this all happen infuriates me. He knows how this business was built, but he's letting someone else do his dirty work for him. He can't even make the bad news a personal message from him. I'll quote from the email in 2012 when Shutterstock went public: "Today was a very exciting day for Shutterstock a day that wouldnt have been possible without each of you. This morning, Shutterstock became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. This milestone is the result of many years of hard work and innovation, and perhaps most importantly, the incredible talent of each of our contributing artists. Together we have built a thriving, diverse, global creative marketplace that spans more than 150 countries. . . . As we celebrate this milestone, I would like to extend a sincere, heartfelt thank you for making this all possible. It is because of you that our marketplace is truly spectacular. We look forward to the exciting journey ahead, and will continue to work at making Shutterstock a rewarding experience for contributors. "Edited to add a link to a tweet highlighting 2012 sentiments with the June 1st plan... https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1266884032731611136
1145
« on: May 30, 2020, 17:21 »
I will disable my portfolio June 1st. I haven't uploaded much lately for other reasons, but I won't upload anything to SS.
In addition to tweets about the change, I thought I'd also try highlighting images that would be #GoneJune1 as part of #boycottShutterstock. I haven't put links to Adobe Stock in tweets yet, but might mix tweets about #Shutterstock slashing royalties with "go here instead" messages.
https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1265672584315547649
I think the messaging should be simple - to try and get the general point across. Especially on twitter, you don't want lengthy explanations of the details.
https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1265693477007851521 Jo Ann, as far as I know, this vector set of mine: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/vector-set-calligraphic-design-elements-page-65754793 still is Shutterstock's most often sold image *ever*. (32,956 downloads so far on a single file.) And I'm going to disable it (and several others) on the first of June. Feel free to use this any way you want - both info and image!
That's a pretty amazing total - congratulations! If you're planning to talk about that on twitter, that's great. Do you not tweet? Out of curiosity, how do you know about it being their most sold image - I didn't know of a way to get stats like that. By the way, the rest of your portfolio is lovely too
1147
« on: May 30, 2020, 16:39 »
I'm not aware of any account closures other than for image-related problems (stolen content, copied content, etc.). They are trying to keep a lid on things by making a public example of trouble-makers. I know nothing of the new CEO, but he has no connection with contributors or the origins of the business. I don't expect them to change what they're doing, but I want them to get the biggest possible public shaming for behaving like uncaring corporate jerks. There are businesses that don't like to be associated with (buy from) an unethical outfit. My tweets have emphasized the big corporation versus small-business contributor angle as I'm hoping it's the sort of viewpoint that might motivate buyers to shop eleswhere. I'm also, even though I'm a minnow in their great pool of 320+ million images, highlighting images that are at the top of searches and will be going away, as another way to possibly engage the designer community. I have more, but here are a couple of examples so far https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1266812478647709696https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1266843339673886720
1148
« on: May 30, 2020, 15:23 »
Regarding the above post - why would someone not be entitled to the payments in their account if they close their account and the amount is great than $35?
From the Terms of Service, section 8d: "If your account is terminated for a breach of the material terms of the TOS, in addition to its other rights at law or in equity, Shutterstock shall have the right to retain any royalties and/or other compensation otherwise payable to you hereunder as liquidated damages." One of the ways you can breach it is violating forum guidelines, section 7: "Any activity by you on Shutterstock's forum (please see "Forum for Contributors") which does not adhere to Shutterstock's Forum Guidelines may result in the termination of your Shutterstock account. The terms of Shutterstock's Forum Guidelines are deemed incorporated into and made a part of the TOS by this reference." Not saying any of this is right, just that that it's what we signed up for.
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