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.

You can�t just randomly cut what you owe people unless you�re going through bankruptcy or other proceedings.

Sure you can - but then they can refuse to supply you, sue you or take other action. It's like a company stretching out paying their bills to 60 or 90 days instead of 30 - they just say they're doing it and don't need anyone's approval to give it a whirl.

I could never find anything of mine Photocase liked, so I didn't get this communication, but perhaps they are asking for people to voluntarily forego royalties to keep the company in business? There have been cases where companies and employees worked out deals outside of bankruptcy proceedings, trying to keep a company going, but typically there was some quid pro quo. What is Photocase offering to contributors, if anything?

And with a bankruptcy, there's always the risk that you'll get less than they're currently offering - I think contributors are unsecured creditors with no special priority over others owed money by Photocase.

Given that I never heard stories that they were a great earner for anyone, why would contributors have any stake in them staying in business?

According to their requirements, you need a different release for each shoot day.

"Separate model releases are required for each photo shoot, even if the model has already signed a release from a previous shoot"

Maybe you've been lucky so far and they've gone through, and now you're facing a different reviewer.

I don't have any issues with mines so far.

iStock went through this insanity several years ago and ended up with a rule that allowed using one release for all shoots of yourself rather than a new release for each shoot. You had to mark it (as the OP noted) and even then sometimes reviewers would miss the marking (even at the top and even in red).

If Shutterstock had any functioning gray matter they would implement the same rule. When the photographer is the model, there's no chance of lawsuits and no need for new releases for each shoot.

I think you have two choices: (1) just go with their insane requirement and make a new version of the release with a date for each shoot or (2) try and get in touch with support to get them to fix their rules so they're rational and "industry standard" (if you count iStock/Getty as the standard-setter).

The thing I'm curious about is: how would they know you are stockpiling? I mean, I don't believe you need to share with SS where, how or when you're going to use the images (not sure though).

They wouldn't know for sure, but they have a lot of data about typical patterns of downloads over 15 years in business. They have tracked various misbehavior - buying rings trying to boost royalty levels for example - by looking at which portfolio(s) buyer purchases from. Back when they used to give contributors raises, they'd raise the subscription prices and watch download patterns over a couple of months. Raises for contributors would follow once they saw how subscribers behaved.

As far as I know, all the subscription sites work on the assumption that buyers never download their full allowance of images. That's why they can pay me more per subscription download than the theoretical price per image. It was even easier for them to make out when they had the 25-a-day version of the 750 images a month subscription (that was scrapped a few years ago; 2015 I think). If someone does download their entire allowance, repeatedly, it would be easy to see with whatever data tracking they're using.

The explicit language forbidding this is gone from Shutterstock's license, but you'd have to check other sites to see if they have a prohibition.

I looked around on SanDisk's web site and can't see any product with 2TB in the price range you mention (and I got the same error message about viewing as web page). A quick google search didn't yield that combo

I think there would be issues you'd have to be concerned with about security of your storage - versus that's your cloud provider's worry - and what you'd do if power or internet went out at home while you were away (again possible at a cloud provider, but they have people around to fix it).

I'm curious though, so can you link to a product info page on SanDisk's site?

I don't expect I have much that would be useful for such a dictionary, but I'd be fine with licensing directly - I do that via my own site anyway.

Rather than Royalty Free, you might make it more palatable to get lower prices by having this license be in perpetuity and world wide, but for this dictionary project only (including updated editions over time). So if you decide to get into text books, for example, your cheap license would not cover you. And you couldn't put the images on the cover of Time magazine (if that's still around), and so on.

Lower price for fewer rights. No hassle with views or annual renewal or such - I agree with Sean that you can't realistically handle that sort of admin burden.

I realize there's an element of trust for you to stick to the terms of the license, but that's largely true for the stock agencies too (in that we know they pay lip service to enforcing the IP rules).

Thanks for sharing this (Google translate did a functional job for the most part - I do not speak German)

In general, your findings didn't surprise me - this sort of pattern has been around since the early days of microstock sites. A small number of contributors responsible for the bulk of the sales. Huge numbers of "contributors" who never get beyond a handful of images.

Not sure what it means for people considering starting in 2019 as far as how hard it is now versus a decade ago to climb those ranks if you build a large portfolio. I'm guessing it's harder now

Anyone think of just adjusting the saturation 10% or whatever and the video is considered different enough to be uploaded on other sites? Not just your Exclusive Site?

Even if this weren't an unethical thing to do (which it is), technology will mean you'll have to work a lot harder to cheat than that.

Similar shenanigans were tried in the photo space - flip the photo or crop it a bit, usually by thieves versus by faux exclusives who didn't want to abide by the contract they voluntarily signed - but image matching software has gotten better and better over time and you have to be a lot more creative to cheat than you used to.

Additionally, for most sites that have exclusive deals, "similars" are covered - i.e. you can't upload something from the same shoot and very slightly different from the exclusive content.

Is this some sort of gag for a social sciences paper or were you seriously thinking about this?

I am running the SS contributor app on an Android phone and its working this morning - where "working" means it gets muddled about when "Today" is, but I can see sales for Wednesday May 22

I have been asked about liking the app a lot lately, although I don't log in unless it forces me to, and it hasn't done that in ages. I always say "no" because the bug where they are wrong about "Today" has been around forever and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.

Is it possible you're using an iPhone?

Where is this "new footage marketplace"? Can see see it?

Shutterstock have a habit of telling the customers what is going on and forgetting to tell the contributors:

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/canvas-art-gallery-shutterstock-api?utm_content=post_1_en_The~Canvas~Art~Gallery~Integrates~Shutterstock~API~to~Diversify~Quality~Prints&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=platform_us_partnership_2019_04&utm_source=facebook&utm_term=1_1_facebook_1

I think - but can't be sure - that this is a different program from the one the OP was talking about. However I didn't know about this one either - I did know about the SS API and that they have various people effectively adding an external interface for purchases that will be made via the SS site, not the remote site.

For this print store - effectively doing what Fine Art America and the like do - they would even like us, the contributors, to advertise for them!!

https://thecanvasartgallery.com/how-to-create-shutterstock-artists-gallery-page/

Saying we make more than a typical extended license sounds interesting, but they don't say how much. I don't recall SS informing us of this either - they really are transforming into to a classic example of mushroom management with respect to contributors.

Contributors need to have more control over these sorts of side deals - in the past I'd have said we need opt outs, but given SS's cavalier attitude and poor communications, we really need affirmative opt in or they can't make a new use of our content. It's the only way they would bother to communicate with us about what's going on. Even if it was like Alamy - with a once a year opportunity to change your choices - it would help.

The *only* good thing SS has (and I checked that it's still there, at least today) is the ability to turn off all image sales without deleting your portfolio. In theory, contributors could turn off their portfolios for a couple of weeks to try and get the attention of the folks in the Empire State Building offices who appear to have forgotten who brought them to the dance in the first place...

They several times mention a curated collection of 1 million images that will be part of this "program".

So this isn't the whole collection. Perhaps they have done a deal with one of the large factories to permit this use? Based on these descriptions, it doesn't sound like it's our content. More like those collections of not-so-great images that are sold as a bundle with resale rights; or the wholly owned stuff that Jupiter used to have.

The bad part about this is that instead of trying to build new revenue options for all their contributors, they're putting energy into siphoning off a portion of the market that we will no longer get to sell into - assuming this is a successful program.

People buying images through this sales channel won't be buying from the main Shutterstock collection - less business for us (when it's already showing year to year declines in sales)