There was a time when I could make over $100 a month at GL. And while that was never anything to really get super excited about, it showed some potential. Now I won't make $100 there in a year.

GL is a bit of a weird one in the stock business. They sort of came out of nowhere and actually made a positive entry into the market. Things looked good, and then all of a sudden there was that weird notice about something changing in Google that basically nuked GL's search placement, and then uploads stopped, and since then we've really heard nothing.

There have been stock companies who shut down, and companies that just went radio-silent and disappeared. With GL I get the feeling there's a lot more to it than just poor sales or bad luck with the Google algorithms. Maybe someday we'll find out the real story.

Quote from: Nikovsk on March 09, 2015, 10:03

A bronze X sale went from 50 to 60 and so on. Nice move!

For photos went up from 50 to 60, but from vector down from 80 to 60, and looks like if someone had maximum of 80 credits, like me, fotolia put new 30 credits price to all vectors(bronze)

so everyone check it out in your portfolio

 

I'm not seeing that. All of my vectors are still priced at 100 credits for Extended XV.

Thanks, Lee.

Got it, thanks Lee.

I'm assuming that when my stuff goes up for sale, whenever that is, I'll be notified?

We had an agency that had easy and fast upload, the option to set our own price and paying us 52% royalty!
What did we do? upload our stuff elsewhere to get that quick fix then complain for not having sales at GL (Graphic Leftovers) and eventually quit them...

GL isn't exactly a good example of a squandered opportunity. They had their own internal problems, poor branding (the original name didn't suggest "premium" content), some kind of search meltdown and poor placement in Google, etc. Sure we can always say we should have supported them better, but in the end I think their undoing was mostly their own fault.

...Did we use this very forum as a leverage to guide buyers? We still don't to this day.
Did we give them any chance by uploading files exclusively for a certain amount of time? Nope again, looking for that quick fix is all that seems to matter these day, like junkies. 52% of nothing is nothing. WTH do you expect anyway when your same work is up much cheaper elsewhere. Buyers are still willing to pay big bucks if you only guide them...

Agreed wholeheartedly. Our biggest failure as a community has always been (in my opinion) our failure to turn our collective frustration into something positive. We're a community of complainers, and surely I'm as guilty of that as anyone. But when it comes down to doing something, we largely don't do enough or anything at all.

A few years ago I wrote a long post about rallying behind a single good company, someone who pays 50% or more, has a good site, good "curb appeal" for customers, a simple buying system, and preferably experience in the business. I thought that company was Stockfresh at the time, but they've since proven that they're not really interested in taking on the task of marketing the site and expanding their reach. I guess they're content with where they are right now.

The point was, though, that I thought if we could all make some sort of effort to drive customers in a certain direction, towards more fair companies that offer the best mutually beneficial experience for both buyers and contributors, that the collective strength of the community would make a difference.

We know that individually we can make a difference. Referral programs prove that. I know I've personally referred at least 100 buyers to Stockfresh and Creative Market combined. Imagine if everyone on this forum referred 100 buyers to good agencies. Or even 10 buyers. Those numbers add up.

The reality is, we won't ever do that. We won't ever agree on which companies to focus on, and in past discussions about this some people actually think that Shutterstock is the company we should be referring buyers to, despite SS paying largely unimpressive royalties. And as long as we can't agree on even the most basic things like who the best companies are (from a contributor standpoint) then we'll never get beyond that point to make anything good happen.

We also won't do anything to put our work where it does the most good. I think if everyone made a minimal effort to change upload behavior, it would make a difference. I try to push stuff to Creative Market first, and to offer more with each file at CM than I do elsewhere. I have a really good selling set of 9 vector badges that I sell everywhere, but CM I added 3 more badges that are only available there. And I offer PSD versions of many of my images at CM, something I don't offer anywhere else. It matters. If someone really wants a PSD version or a fully editable text version (SS and others don't allow vectors to retain editable text), they'll go to CM to get it. When someone contacts me asking about why the file they bought at SS doesn't have editable text, I tell them exactly why and where they can get fully editable files in the future. And you know what? They go there to buy those files next time.

We can affect buyer behavior if we try. And if we combined our efforts and rallied around a couple of the best companies, it would absolutely make a positive difference for us in the long term.

I think GL was the victim of their own failures, but other companies will fall victim to our failures if we continue to only look at short-term gains and ignore the long-term health of the business.

Since I'm on a devil's advocate kick with SS today, here's another thought on this subject:

I think getting a raise at Shutterstock might be the worst thing that could possibly happen to microstock. Hear me out...

Imagine we get a raise tomorrow. Everything goes up my 10% or something like that. Everyone "woo-yays", we sing the praises of the SS HQ staff and thank them. And everyone feels a renewed vigor with SS, uploads increase, loyalty to the company goes up, and all-around joy-joy feelings towards Shutterstock spread across the microstock landscape.

Is that a good thing? Maybe in the short term. But SS already has a huge edge on the competition when it comes to contributor loyalty. Despite not paying particularly well per sale, SS is still often referred to as the best company in the business, even among contributors. And certainly for some valid reasons. But certainly not in terms of RPD.

So the edge SS has on the competition increases as more and more contributors are increasingly inclined to focus their efforts on producing work with SS in mind, in light of the new (modest) financial incentive to do so.

In a way, one could argue that SS offering a raise could possibly help them increase their dominance in the market, making it harder and harder for smaller companies who pay far better per sale gain any sort of increased share of the market.

I have to wonder if this bit of contributor dissatisfaction with SS and what they pay is actually good for the market as a whole. Certainly it has to be for me personally. Over the last few years I've seen my income from SS slip to 45% of my total microstock earnings (in previous years SS made up 55% of my monthly microstock total). And the more SS slips and companies who pay better per sale gain, the better I do overall.

I hate to say it but part of me doesn't want SS do do any better. And since I can see how maybe giving us a raise helps them do better, maybe it's really in my best interest to never get a raise from SS, keep that bit of collective contributor frustration alive, and let that frustration continue to keep people looking for other avenues to license their work where they can get better pay.

Just a thought...

... If they really wanted to not be an agency, they need to have a system where the contributor is paid automatically as soon as a buyer purchases a license...

Exactly. They want it all in their favor, they're a marketplace when it benefits them, but an agency when the market status doesn't benefit them. They pay contributors directly but invoice customers on behalf of the contributor. They can't always be all of these things, and even though they operate like an agency, they'll continue to insist that they're not, at least when it suits them.

...Now they are going to have a lot of contributors leaving because they don't want to deal with the potential tax problems and they will be keeping their money under the $50 payout threshold, how can a reseller justify keeping that money?

They can't justify it if they're a true marketplace. So again, they're operating like an agency. At least until they see some tax benefit to being just a marketplace and then they're saying they're that again.

It all makes no sense.

Mine is right on the money (pun intended), and matches up with the transactions I see in PayPal and Skrill. Exact to the dollar.

Why are you leaving so fast? The way I see it it's legally impossible for them to claim that the contributors are the sellers. So things will probably change?

From what I've been told, they have no intention of changing this.

At this point even if they changed the policy I'd have a hard time going back in with them. This wasn't the only reason I was unhappy with Envato.

The best thing that could ever happen to iStock would be for Getty to spin them off to make some quick money. Getting out from under Getty is the only way iStock will ever bounce back.

At least the name is appropriate. Twenty20%

Oh and they're another 20%-royalty-rate company. Great.

 

...The only possible way to differentiate oneself with SS or other large companies is to provide either exclusive platforms or exclusive images. Adobe has access to exclusive platforms, so there's that...

There are other ways, at least on the vector side of things. SS has always lagged behind in terms of what they offer the customer. They only just recently began allowing a jpg download of a vector file from the same page as the vector version, something that other companies shave done for years. They also still insist on vector files with text have the text converted to shapes (meaning you can't easily change the text to something else), while other companies also have allowed these types of fully editable files for years. And more and more I hear from customers wanting these fully editable files and not being able to get them at SS.

My point is that there is still plenty of room for improvement and innovation in terms of how companies present and deliver stock content. SS doesn't do it perfectly. And who knows, maybe they're working on some innovations of their own. I'm just saying that there are other ways a company can distinguish itself from SS and others, beyond exclusivity.