Do they mean they are updating their policy or actually abiding by the policy they already have....for those that don't get "waved through" inspection 

https://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/en_US/kbat02/000012339

From the end of the article, there's a paragraph that I think is addressing that topic:

"You may encounter instances in which your work was rejected even though there is similar content already exists on the customer site. Our collection is frequently evaluated and content that does not comply with our guidelines is removed. Intentional disregard of any of Shutterstock�s policies can result in account suspension or termination."

If I were to translate the above: We may never get around to removing the overwhelming amount of image spam we have permitted, but if you submit similars, we can close your account.

The way I think about the horrendous gap between the purchaser downloading the image and me getting paid is that it is covered by Alamy's higher prices. It's a very common business practice to charge less for payment up front (car rental or hotel) versus when you check in/pick up versus when the invoice arrives later.

The smaller sales with long-delayed payment are an annoyance, but I can live with that. I don't do distributor sales because I think it's a racket in the age of internet agencies and the distributor makes more than I do for essentially nothing. Fortunately, Alamy lets you opt out.

As an example, I got paid August 1st for a sale from 30 May that just cleared at the end of July. The longest was over a year (including several emails with Alamy support to remind them to chase the customer up).

I have had a few refunds, but not lots.

Apparently you got into a business you didn't understand. Insulting people who are trying to explain things - not defending them - isn't helpful to anyone.

If you're new to this, you'll get better and faster at editing the photos and handling metadata over time.

10 similars is going to get you a lot of rejections - not all agencies are equally strict, but you want to make selections based on usefulness (which equates to salability) not on how fast you can process the files.

Good images will sell for years, so the time to get it online isn't really an issue except for those image spam portfolios on SS, and there is no reason to try and be like them

I haven't tried contacting them, but I have a $20.80 balance sitting there with no new sales in nearly 2 years (but I stopped uploading there when sales stopped).

I was sort of hoping that if they shut down they'd pay their balances owed - it's not our fault their site is moribund and they should just pay us our earnings and shut up shop if they aren't going to actively manage the site.

They've been able to hang on to all those earnings for all those who haven't met the payout threshold - money in the bank for them to offset their operating expenses even if they aren't doing much beyond keeping the site up.

How about changing your policy on payout of balances to those closing accounts? Or reducing the threshold to $5 (to avoid nuisance payments for a few cents)?

Ironically:
https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/protect-your-content?fbclid=IwAR0tiYqNHX5ZEGGFY5FcCEf0RvAqdcHybIj8HC4MkCdzNM2O603HS6l42JQ

"We pride ourselves on the integrity of the content submitted by our contributors...."

Right. But that was said in 2014 - clearly a different time . . . to be judged by the standards of the day . . .

Goes along with "Your call is very important to us.."

Tossers!

https://about.canva.com/pricing/

Does that help?

Have a read

https://www.microstockgroup.com/newby-discussion/microstock-photography/

There is no economy of scale for the lawyer to make the work significantly less for handling a large number of low-value claims.

There's no class action possibility (in the US) for contributors whose work has been used without, or in violation of the terms of, a license

Given that, there's no sense in trying to pool resources to pay a lawyer.

The fundamental problem is that each violation is a small value item even if in total, the sum of all violations is large.

The only way this will change is with very expensive licenses (which is not the direction the business is moving in) or very large statutory fines for violations, regardless of the actual commercial loss.

It's the economics of microstock licenses that makes this situation hard to fight.

And that doesn't even deal with the issue of what list of countries are you going to pursue legal fights? Violators and contributors are all over the globe...

Write this off like "shrinkage" in retail. It's a cost of doing business.

...Both of these are efforts to keep users happy ...however we've become aware that there is a major downside which is a decline in contributor sales...

What planet do you live on that it didn't occur to them the Getty partnership and offering collections of free images would impact the sales of those who uploaded to Canva?

Really??

I'd take any soothing words about how they want to improve things with a truck load of salt. They're either not serious or so inept as to be incapable of implementing any remedy.

It's such a shame that a company with an honestly innovative approach - as opposed to all the Shutterstock wannabes with no marketing plans - turned out to be such a waste of space from a contributor point of view.

This is a lovely English expression describing people who are woefully incompetent (and piss-up is slang for an alcohol-fueled party). Shutterstock appears to be heading for some sort of award for being unable to do anything well any more - sales being a big issue, but knowing when "today" is on the contributor app being another. It used to be one day behind. After the last "fix" it's now two days behind. And that's better somehow??

And now we have the monthly email about my earnings being computed - unedited screen capture of the email. No name, no amount no nothing (except for links to post this nothingburger to facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.

Tossers!

It isn't free if you charge 15% of royalties paid, so I'm not sure you should be describing your service as free. Perhaps saying no upfront charges, but we collect...

You need to check spellings in your FAQ - lots of typos

Then you have fudged some details about payouts. You have a threshold of $30 for payout, but agencies - Dreamstime is a $100 minimum, for example - may have higher ones. I'm sure you're assuming you'll be over the threshold in aggregate, but are you really promising to pay contributors even if you don't get paid by the agencies? What about refunds - do you have a policy for those? Dreamstime holds money for 7 days for EL sales; what's your policy for paying contributors? iStock pays ages in arrears, do you just follow their payments to you with payments to the Wirestock contributors?

I know this all sounds like quibbling, but you need to be clear to what extent you are offering clear and universal terms, and to what extent contributors are still bound by the various agency rules, not your rules.

Another big thing for contributors to consider IMO is to what extent the search position of their content will be affected by submitting under one account with a bunch of other contributors' work. It's probably impossible to know for sure, but search position is a large factor in decent images selling (or not). Especially if you are openly appealing to people who are new and can't even be bothered to accurately keyword their images, I'd be worried that my images might be dragged down by poor quality overall. Would you ever turn contributors down if their images were heavily rejected by agencies?

At one time, Dreasmtime used to set your upload limits on the basis of your acceptance percentage. I stopped uploading there so I don't know if they're still doing that, but all agencies have rules about accounts and what will you do to make sure your aggregated account doesn't get closed down because someone is submitting rubbish, or stolen content, or too many similars, or...

I've previously talked about the problems with turning over keywording for anything but the simplest of images, but even if you leave out editorial, there's a lot of specialist content where you need to know the details of what and where for accurate, useful and sales-producing keywords.

Given the small number of agencies that represent the bulk of the sales, I honestly don't think there's enough time saving to make it sane to turn over 15% of our earnings to a third party, for photos at least.