I wrote a long of time ago the only objective of fotolia was to find someone able to buy them.
Now with Adobe they will be able to sell your images bypassing the few rights you had. On their cloud you will see hundred images sold as 1 download, lower prices and they will give your images for free to premium adobe clients.
Adobe Should give software for free to image creators "working" for fotolia because 800M$ worth their pictures not the crappy people managing it.

So you think people will pay for adobe software to create or edit their images that they then give away?  Not likely.  If adobe did that, they would be shooting themselves in the foot.  They need us to make money to pay for their products.  I think they should be working on making this more convenient for designers, not cheaper.  The budget end of the market probably don't use adobe products, why cater for them?  Designers that are used to paying for adobe products and for stock images are probably more interested in improving their workflow than getting the lowest price.

Adobe can't afford to screw this up because so many microstock contributors use their software.  There are cheaper or free alternatives to most of their software, so they should be doing all they can to keep us happy.  We can also remove our portfolios and FT will be worth nothing, so it will be interesting to see what they do with it now.

If they impove FT for contributors and get back all the people that have left or never bothered using them, they could cause problems for SS and Getty.  Must be easier for designers to buy images within the adobe programs than have to go to a site owned by another company.  Perhaps adobe wont need to run FT at a huge profit because they have other profit streams that the stock sites don't have?

...@Sharpshot: surely it makes sense for all of us to complete the tax interview and minimise our US tax liabilities. As Lobo has pointed out - even people in non treaty countries will then only be taxed on US sales. Also - do UK citizens even need to get a ITIN EIN ? Isn't the UK issued 10 digit UTR going to be enough (and if not is it really such an issue having to get an EIN ?)

No idea about an EIN but when I looked in to it before, the ITIN is going to cost money and take time.  I refuse to get one and I don't want to pay withholding tax, so the only option is to leave sites that insist on it.  Hopefully istock will be like the other big sites and it wont be required.

Has nobody mentioned this?  Do Getty insist on non-US residents getting an ITIN number?  A few sites have insisted on that, most of them have found a way around it.  If they insist on it, I think it will be time to remove my portfolio.  I'm against it on principle, why should I have to get an Individual Tax Identification Number for a country where I don't live and don't have to pay tax?  It looks like a load of unnecessary hassle and expense that other sites have managed to circumvent.

If they do insist on the ITIN number, I could pay the US tax but I'm not doing that, I would rather sell my work elsewhere.

I suppose the good news is that I will never have to visit the site again, unless it is to remove my portfolio.  It used to be fun to go there years ago but even getting my earnings paid has felt tedious lately.

What I find hard to comprehend is how FT and DT have failed to overtake istock in the earnings poll for independents.  Just goes to show that the only big site that has had an effective strategy to maximise their earnings in recent years is shutterstock.

I am sure istock, FT and DT would all be making much more money if they had given us an incentive to increase our earnings.  Making it harder to make money has stopped me uploading new images, I just don't see the point in working harder to make less money.

Just upload to Pond5 and don't bother with the other sites.  They seem to have the most buyers and let us choose our own prices.  I think its almost impossible for BigStock to get many video buyers now, they are too late, like all the sites that fail to get a slice of the stills market.

Quote from: gbalex on November 13, 2014, 19:20

Quote from: pkphotos on November 13, 2014, 15:03

Mind boggling that Shutterstock can be selling a high volume of footage clips for great prices one moment, and then introduce footage sales at world record low prices the next, in fact footage sales even cheaper than DFC giveaway photo prices. It's not April, so what's going on? Is there a collective wish at SS to wind down and bankrupt the company? Are they on drugs?

There is a collective wish at shutterstock to drive up stock prices... Annual revenue at shutterstock is 235.52Million.   

To date the SSTK take for share sold for key inside investors is 351.5 Million excluding INSIGHT VENTURE PARTNERS V L P, SHUTTERSTOCK INVESTORS I LLC, as well as Institutional holdings via INSIGHT HOLDINGS GROUP, LLC.

Just think what their take must be when you add in their larger holdings.

Again these guys are in it for the short term and they do not give a rats @$$ what happens to the video market long term. By then they will be cashed out and will have moved on to the next vehicle/victim.

No matter how much you wind yourself up into a frenzy, no matter how many times you regurgitate and re-post the same half-arsed conspiracy theories ... the truth is that absolutely nothing has changed in the two years since the IPO. Other than SS becoming even more successful by following the same path as before that is.

So do you understand why they let BigStock go down a different path that looks more like the disastrous istock way of treating their contributors so badly they end up leaving?  I can only hope that they treat BigStock as if it was an independent business, and they have nothing to do with the way the site is run, but it still reflects badly on SS because everyone knows they own it.  Looking at the earnings poll and my earnings, BigStock has not done well since the SS takeover.  I can see it falling back in to low earners and then there will be no reason to have a portfolio there.  I think they should either close it and send all the customers to SS or go for the higher end of the market.  Low commissions and low sales volume is a disaster for us all, as istock has proved in recent years.

Wow, we do need some answers quick on this one.  How could anyone make money with those prices?  It wouldn't be worth uploading and buyers wouldn't use a site with no content.  They are probably too small and too late to sell video anyway.  Pond5 can't sell many stills and the microstock sites that have left it too late to get in to video can't get buyers.  Selling out like this wont work and it just makes me wonder what on earth SS are trying to achieve with BigStock?  Don't they see that things like this tarnish SS?

I removed all my best selling images years ago, now my video portfolio has gone.  I'm still convinced that the best way for a site to make money is by giving us a chance to increase earnings every year.  Istock made that impossible for me and I have gone from doing everything I can to increase my earnings there to cutting them to very little.  As they were making 4x more money from my sales than I was, I just can't see how that has helped them.  There might be plenty of people that will supply them for almost nothing but will they produce what the buyers want?  I very much doubt it.

If they had gone the other way and increased commissions, going exclusive would of been a viable option for almost everyone and they would have no real rivals now.  Why didn't they think of that?

Just deactivated the rest of my video portfolio, except 1 that has never sold.  I wish more people would take their work off istock instead of endlessly complaining about them but leaving all their portfolio there.  Every buyer that fails to find what they want there and finds it on a site that pays us more is going to help us.

It was a real pain uploading video clips there and its such a shame that they have to go but hopefully buyers will find them on Pond5, I can sell for less there and make much more than I would get from istock.

My camera does 3840 x 2160 and according to wikipedia, that's the ultra high definition television (UHDTV) standard.  They say the 4K industry standard is 4096 x 2160. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

I see both these sizes selling on Pond5 but I would probably do 4096 x 2160, as that can be cropped or scaled to 3840 x 2160 if required.

I stayed opted in to see if there were many sales but FT is still dead.  I'm opted out now.  I think that the DPC will be a big flop because FT have ruined their brand, just like istock have.  The only way to rebuild it would be to get us interested again and istock and FT don't seem capable of that.  I'm still doing well with the sites that haven't taken away my motivation to make money.

Sales slowed down but I still get the occasional one and I haven't uploaded for months.