Your links won't become active until you've have made more posts (don't recall what the magic number is, but it's an anti-spam measure). Anyone can get to your portfolio, but will have to cut and paste

Stock licensing is different from other types of photography - I'm sure you've read about it already. Your images are lovely, but may not have the sales potential of things are are more boring to look at but are useful as part of a design, web site, annual report, text book, etc.

You'll get lots of opinions about exclusivity, but I wouldn't dream of it today - and I was an iStock exclusive for a few years back when it really was an excellent option.

You don't graduate to Getty per se - and you'll find lots of threads here about minuscule royalties from Getty's various deals. This thread talks a little about other non-micro options

https://www.microstockgroup.com/general-macrostock/getty-selling-at-microstock-rates-what-next/msg516953/#msg516953

You can get your work on Getty via EyeEm (or other partner sites), but that's a pretty slow as well as indirect route and the money is then split three ways.

As far as the difficulty of submitting to multiple sites, iStock has long held the crown for the biggest pain in the butt - they're not all that hard and some are really straightforward.

As far as agencies best suited to what you like to shoot, if your goal is to develop a regular income, it might be a better approach to shoot things that will sell better. If it's not really about the income, possibly finding one of the specialist macro agencies and offering exclusive images (not artist exclusivity)

Good luck

Modified to add a couple of additional links to threads here you might find interesting:

https://www.microstockgroup.com/alamy-com/new-alamy-member-question-what-should-do/msg527719/#msg527719

https://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/just-to-introduce-myself/msg508991/#msg508991

Good idea. Descriptions are used in searches, and adding relevant words in your descriptive sentence(s) gives you additional keywords if you hit the max of 50.

Plus, descriptions get placed in the page's title, which is good for search engine indexing.

I hardly think this new minimum should cause anyone any grief.

It's a truly stupid idea because it doesn't address the real problem, assuming the real problem is poor titles.

I write good titles as well as good descriptions; SS ignores the title and grabs the description and it's always more than 5 words.

A rule that makes "Thunder engineering tasty screwdriver elephant" OK but "Granny Smith Apple" not OK is a waste of time and energy for them to enforce.

Getty's estimated revenue for the year ending Sept 2018 was about $867 million according to Moody's investor services. Shutterstock 2018 revenue was  $623.3 million. Adobe has made a dent, but unlike the other two companies, licensing media is not their primary business, so it isn't getting 100% of their attention.

I'd like to see Adobe really take on Shutterstock, but I think they're happy to have stock licensing as a way to bind their subscribers more tightly to them and will do just enough to make that happen; probably not more.

Getty has messed up in a million ways, but while they're saddled with massive debt and don't appear to have much in the way of innovation going on, they're still used all over the place. I think dying is overstating things, in that they're still huge.

Shutterstock has lost the plot, but momentum counts for a lot and they'll fight harder as it's their only business, so they may yet find it again.

Follow the money...

In addition to all the caveats above, you have to decide if you think this will work in the medium to longer term, even if you make something decent in the short term.

They are pitching that it's a limited group who will participate - because they know if they take in too many videos it'll dilute earnings. But if this package is appealing, buyers will want more choice of videos which will encourage Envato to include more content, which will dilute your earnings.

Where are these new buyers coming from? Where could they be coming from? There is a market for video, but how is that going to suddenly enlarge because of their marketing and promotion? I doubt that it will, which means that they're either cannibalizing their own sales or stealing from another agency. There's no magic here.

I'm sure those quotes are genuine from the early participants, but would you bet you'll see the same type of enthusiasm?

Bottom line is that your interests and the agency's interests will not be aligned - they will want more buyers and don't care about how many videos are in the pool. You will want to sustain your earnings by keeping the pool of videos limited. It won't end well for contributors, IMO.

...It seems like Adobe can't implement such an easy tool...

There is no reason Adobe can't do this. They choose not to.

They have not done much to improve contributor features - and some of the features they have added (like recent top sellers) have been window dressing they decided was helpful versus the bread and butter features important to (and requested by) contributors.

Their actions (or lack thereof) speak very clearly, regardless of any PR spin about how important contributors are to them...

No class action lawsuits, arbitration to resolve disputes, infringement (we have to submit a DMCA takedown notice, meaning we have to locate the copyright holder and can't tell them about infringements if it isn't our work - not sure that's a good thing but it saves them the trouble of sending us that canned email), plus a change to the Compensation section(9i.):

"Royalty payments based on a percentage of sales price will be based on the sales price actually received by Shutterstock and calculated after making any necessary deductions for any refunds, cancellations, previous overpayments, and any taxes, levies, imposts, duties, currency exchange costs, or other similar charges that are imposed on the payments received by Shutterstock. If any law, government ruling or any other restriction affects the amount of the payments which Shutterstock's licensee can remit to Shutterstock, Shutterstock may deduct from Contributor's royalties an amount proportionate to the reduction in such licensee's remittances to Shutterstock."

I think that is new and suggests we may get all sorts of variance in our payment based on their accounting of various charges and deductions.

I don't see any mention of a process to appeal what we believe to be incorrect allegations by others that our content is infringing - section 13e says they can terminate an account for a violation. There's nothing in the DMCA policy that talks about how a wrongfully accused contributor can straighten things out.

I never had a wrongful accusation at SS, but while at iStock someone said a picture of mine was an unreleased shot of him (which it wasn't - the picture was released and it was of an iStock employee, so it wasn't hard to straighten out). Given SS's current approach to contributor relations, it's not reassuring to me to see all sorts of new rules with no corresponding process for how problems can get straightened out.

There's a new section 18 about electronic communications delivery, but it seems harmless

Section 19f has a new part giving them wiggle room to notify us of changes in a number of ways, not specifically listed - it used to be "...by an announcement on your login page". Now, it is:

"Shutterstock will notify you of any such change by an announcement on this page, your login page, and/or by other means to provide you the opportunity to review the modifications before they become effective."

Not sure why that's a good idea - seems to give them leeway to be less transparent.

I missed this ground-breaking news (haven't tried the feature as I've switched to an Android phone and this is just for iPhone).

https://www.dpreview.com/news/4159992671/shutterstock-ar-feature-lets-customers-preview-stock-images-as-wall-artwork

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/view-in-room-augmented-reality-tool

http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2394627

I have no idea how this got to be a priority, but perhaps they're looking for "innovations" to tout on the Q1 earnings call coming up next Thursday?

...As a result, also all existing contributors had to accept the terms of use dated June 2018 upon login to the portal.

Kirsten,

Thank you for explaining the background of this login surprise for contributors. However benign the intentions were here, I think this highlights an area which would really benefit from improvement in contributor communications.

At least two other agencies - Shutterstock and Alamy - provide clear explanations of what changed whenever the upload agreement/contributor terms of use are updated. As these documents are long and dense, it is hard otherwise to figure out what the changes are. They also send contributors email, as well as information on the contributor web site prior to requiring acceptance of the new terms.

It really helps to build trust with contributors when the agencies communicate with us over pricing, licensing and upload/contract changes.

Examples, FYI

Shutterstock terms - note the helpful summaries of each section on the right

https://submit.shutterstock.com/legal/terms

SS summary of changes the last time they happened in 2015

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/2015-contributor-terms-of-service-updates

Alamy's terms and their contract change record


https://www.alamy.com/terms/contributor.asp

https://www.alamy.com/terms/contributor-contract-changes.asp

I just came here to see if I was seeing something odd - as you noted, it's bizarre that terms supposedly 10 months old are suddenly presented in a tiny box requesting our agreement. I intend to read it first - as an example I was not aware that there was a Dreamstime-like requirement to keep a portion of the work online until a 90-day notice had elapsed (edited to add that this isn't new - see below).

It doesn't look as if anyone really took care when writing these terms as paragraph 62 is probably intended to be 6.2 as a sub paragraph of section 6.

I will see if the internet archive can get us prior versions for comparison to see what might have changed.

Here is a July 2016 version of the terms and the 90 day restriction is there, so it's not new. Still looking to see what other versions I can locate

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/servicetou/Adobe_Stock_Contributor_Agreement-en_US-20160721_1200.pdf

And here's a PDF of the new terms (easier to read than in that minuscule box presented when we try to access our account information)

https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/servicetou/Adobe_Stock_Contributor_Agreement_Addl_Terms_en_US_20180605.pdf

I really think Mat needs to explain to us what the changes were from the prior version and why we're now being asked to acknowledge our agreement.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on March 28, 2019, 13:05

Look.  It's been done.  It didn't work out. 
http://aspp.com/stock-artists-alliance-closing/

...That does not mean, however, that contributors cannot organize in a different way. Even a simple website with a blog can attract a following if it's relevant, and in turn help spread the word about agency practices and host calls to action.

There have been lots of contributor actions over the years microstock agencies have been around (or at least that I'm aware of since starting in the fall of 2004). Many in the early days had good results, largely because there were more agencies and none of them had much market power at that time. They all needed content and so the balance of power between contributors and agencies was less unequal than it is now.

If you want to effect change you need leverage. Calls to action aren't leverage and in an age of widespread gig economy abuse (such as Uber's treatment of drivers), the problems faced by microstock suppliers don't really stand out from the many simlar situations. So it's not clear to me how you get negative social media buzz of a sort and size that publicly shames any of the agencies for their actions and grabs buyers' attention.

One piece of leverage that often worked in the early days was withholding uploads - sites need a constant stream of new content to keep buyers coming back. That's great for contributors because it's leverage that doesn't hurt our income so badly. I don't think it works any more because the collections are so huge that I doubt anyone would notice.

OnePixel was trying to get off the ground without the one advantage that initially buoyed up the awful Dollar Photo Club - OnePixel had no content whereas DPC had the entire Fotolia library (contributors were not initially allowed an opt out). Refusing to supply OnePixel shut them down, thankfully. But with DPC, a lot of people deleted a lot of content from Fotolia to force  FT to offer an opt out - I believe there was a 6 million image drop at one point.

For a while, video contributors had some leverage because agencies were trying to build their video collections and needed content, but that fades as the collections grow, and with it the option to withhold new content as a way to get the agencies to behave more fairly.

If you don't understand who holds power and has leverage, you can't force changes. It is true that for the most part, all the agencies would have completely empty web sites if contributors pulled their content - there's very little wholly owned content. Without some union-like organization to wield that club, it's effectively absent from the business landscape and so can't constrain the profit grabs of the agencies.

Figure out how to create leverage from the large, global and unorganized pool of contributors and you can do what the Stock Artists Alliance could not.

I can't see much value for categories when you have such huge collections (SS especially, but also AS).

The sites must have some stats on whether anyone ever clicks on them as a way to browse. And if they did, I'd have to imagine that a quick translation into a few important keywords would allow on the fly category searches without any need for the contributor to do anything.

I think the problem is that you can't really predict the future with any useful degree of accuracy. Given that, spreading the risk around makes a lot of sense.

I was an exclusive at IS (mostly for photos, but some illustrations) but too far ago to be relevant to your choice. When they were the #1 microstock agency and progress (2004 to 2008) was strong, it looked like the risk was worth taking. Between mid-2008 and mid-2011 a lot of things changed and I saw what I interpreted to be the writing on the wall and decided that the risks were too great and I'd do better to return to diversification before things hit bottom.

The overall financial health of an agency is relevant to you, in addition to the money you're making. If you later decide to leave, you aren't able to pick up where you left off - there's always a step back before things pick up.

I have a hard time imagining why it would make sense for anyone with an existing portfolio that has demonstrated its sales ability to go exclusive with iStock. YMMV