I hardly believe that once you ask them to delete your account they will refuse.Looks like we might find out soon.

Not the same files the HD and the UHD...
I`ll let them for a while to see how are sales and after I will rethink the price strategy if it`s bad and also speak with dissolve support. Sincerely I don`t konw what to do but leaving dissolve is not an option.

So they already priced your hd clips at 49?Was that from their part without asking you anything?

EDIT:Looks like this is happening already.Some of the newest clips there are at 49 already...

Quote from: gcrook on August 01, 2015, 12:39

So lets imagine this for example.

Let's suppose that Aaron or any dissolve representative came out 2 days ago speaking like a person and not like a robot from the 90's and announced the following (which belongs in the sphere of imagination,but just for the sake of argument)

Dear dissolve contributors,lovers,brothers,lurkers,and casual bystanders.We have realized that we have to compete in price because..yada yada,corporate greed 101...yada yada...marketing 101 etc,that we need to price hd at 59usd for all non-exclusive portfolios because of all the aforementioned yada's.But at the same time we will raise hd commission at 40% so that our beloved contributors will earn the same royalties as before.
We will also run bulk discounts shutterstock style whenever necessary (big clients,corporations etc) but we will maintain the 40% commission for you like pond5 does in discounts (and ss doesnt).
We will also implement a true contributor console where you can not only do whatever everyone else is also capable of doing in most of the other agencies but send us feedback on uploads and help us communicate so that we can fix curation and other mistakes fast and efficiently etc etc.

Would it be so difficult for them to go that route?
Would it be cost prohibitive?
Would they lose contributors?
Would they grow as an agency?
Would they set a paradigm that would make people forget about all the others and focus on them?
Would it.......(fill in the blanks)

Then why?
Because the "markets" i guess.
Well, there you go.

Even in this scenario I wouldn't license my footage through them. In the market at the moment we have 3 main agencies - SS, P5 and iStock/Getty. VideoBlocks seems to be the up-and-coming agency with a unique model.

Many non-exclusives tolerate selling at 30% through SS because the return to them for most sales is somewhere in the order of $20-25 with some sales for significantly more. They don't particularly like the 30%, but the sheer volume of buyers makes it a hard place not to sell for non-exclusives. On top of that SS have a track record of consistency.

While there's some negative posters lately here making noise about Pond5, they're generally accepted as a very good agency for video sales. The ability to set your own prices and a 50% royalty is pretty unique in the industry, as is the practice of offering periodically discounts to customers without cutting into the contributors share of the price. They're also probably the only agency that has bought another microstock and increased that agency's royalties to 50%.

Videoblocks seems to be getting a lot of attention lately, and is almost certainly the reason for this change - the $49 price point is no co-incidence. From a contributor perspective though its a model that has potential to be very lucrative. Its early days though and they may end up also being one of the many agencies that don't succeed in this business. What will obviously concern Dissolve is that VideoBlocks is attracting new contributors at a much faster rate than they are. From my searches, it looks like they already have more 4K footage than Dissolve in a much shorter space of time.

Its worth re-reading what Dissolve posted just over 12 months ago about commissions (and the response): http://www.microstockgroup.com/dissolve/introducing-dissolve/msg386463/#msg386463

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on July 04, 2014, 17:53

"When a contributor signs with Dissolve, their royalties are set for the duration of the contract. So, no need to fear of rates reducing after you�ve signed on."

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Didn't take long did it?

Yes you are correct.
I never had the illusion that this scenario would make them top agency in this business,or "change the world" if you may.
It would still consider this  borderline theft,but for most it would be more than acceptable and rightly so.

But what this scenario would do,and thats where i think that you underestimate the context of such an announcement, is it would make every other agency who always tights the screws on their contributors but not on themselves (quite the opposite in fact) look like complete and utter clowns.
You would have a representative speaking in public like a person for once and not like a robot,and you would show in practice that you understand the prevailing notion that is apparent today
which is described along the lines of "what a load of bullcrap another agency screwing us over spouting pretentious stuff about markets and economies etc"
I find great power in examples like these even if it's a lesser evil in a sense.
I dont dream of a utopic world,but dissipating the illusion of hard pragmatism in public is a hobby of mine that i like to practice.

EDIT:You mentioned videoblocks.If thy succeed it will be for one and only reason.Because as long as they keep this model they will have people backing them up no matter what.Everyone i know uploaded FULL PORTS there not even test clips,and we are talking about an agency that noone knows exactly what it is and where it came from.Dissolve has been around for 2 years and we know that they make sales, and people still test clips there (well after all this noone will propably upload anything anymore).Do you see what i mean?There is power in that having the people by your side.Look at this thread.Dissolve became the "Darth vader" of stock overnight to the point that people started cheering in this thread for videoblocks.Needless to say im uploading everything there despite my concerns.Dissolve should pay attention to this paradigm although it might be too late for them now.

If they had already done something like that you would know.
Chances are they wont like eco said,but at this point all bets are off.
Not that it will make things any better (for me at least)

Quote from: Daisy on August 01, 2015, 10:30

They're obviously obsessed with their own self importance. Telling us to contact them whenever we make a price change elsewhere. The sheer arrogance is astounding.

I guess the question then is, if I decide to increase the asking price at P5 to something like $150 or $ 350 for a series of clips, will Dissolve follow? It has to work both ways.

If you dont contibute to ss, or anywhere else, then they should.Which makes this "matching prices argument" so hypocritical,because who contributes only to dissolve and not at least to ss and p5,not to mention all the rest?
But the thing is this.Even if there are people out there who fulfill the requirements,how absurd is it to force non-exclusives to promise that they will -as long as they contribute at dissolve- keep their prices exactly the same everywhere?
Impossible not to mention out of context.
Does dissolve even realize that they weren't the ones who invented microstock?

It seems a lot of people missed the message between the lines...

Shutterstock and other sites continue to successfully sell at higher prices because they provide a superior product.  Dissolve cannot provide a similarly superior product experience for buyers, therefore they are going down the discount pricing street.

How do you define inferior product?You mean contributors uploading their "b-rated" stuff because they are feeding their good stuff to other agencies?Or perhaps that dissolve offers lower quality service to buyers?No i dont think so,it seems they have been treating their buyers better than anyone by making further discounts,offering unwatermarked clips from them to "test" and who knows what else.
Perhaps what you say is true but even those who have uploaded "test" clips do report constant growth of sales including me,at a level that i didnt think possible.My view is that dissolve has been growing continuously (have hinted off record,at least thats what i made out of it) and their collection and quality of clips is growing.
So if what you say doesnt apply?
What then?

Well thank god they dont seem to feel threatened by videohive/envato (yet).They sell hd for 7.5usd there.

Guys relax with this moralism about uprezzing.Things are subjective in this area.
If we literally go this route then we should technically not upload anything from canon dslr cameras prior to the markIII,since the real resolution is upsampled internally and is less that 1080p.
Still canon dslr's are a huge portion of stock footage,and not only the newer ones.

1080p is no guarantee for sharpness.It describes pixel count but not detail.Resolution is subjective,and has always been.
A true 720p from from a cinema camera uprezzed to 1080p will be sharper than the 1080 of mostr dslr's and even some eng type cameras.
How about home scanning (recording with a camera rather than a true film recorder) old 8-16mm film?Is that true 1080p?Not even close if you consider the degradation.More like pal/ntsc in resolution.
Still it comes in a 1080p vessel from those who home scan their archived film.

Now since we are on the subject i dont think that anyone should uprez anything unless the quality of the video AS A WHOLE justifies this.
And 720 from a dslr rarely does.But people buy it.Go figure.

If Dissolve undermines my average net royalty per download of around $25 via SS and P5, I would stop uploading new footage. I would then upload only a few select clips periodically as exclusive.

I've thought about this too but what makes you think that:

1) You will sell clips there at these high exclusive prices given that most of the people will offer their hd clips for 49-79.
2) You will still receive higher commissions as exclusive and the prices for exclusivity will remain high?

Quote from: Monty-m-gue on July 29, 2015, 16:28

...and you're going to match the fairer royalty split of your competitors, right?

Aaron answer this please

Dont push them too much for an answer, they might snoop around and decide to go with a more "e-markets competitive" commission like istock's for example.

So you are telling us pretty much that whoever lowers prices even further and you "decide" that they "threaten" you, you are going to match their lower price.
You are doing a very aggresive move here and it's all on our backs.Why not match the lower price then and raise the commissions so we get the same 24usd (which is already bad enough) for hd if you want to be all fair about it?

And again you need to clarify something that is a bit disturbing.How will you know if certain collections (why "collections" and not clips?what does "collections" mean?) are being offered elsewhere at lower prices?Will you search all portfolios?its impossible.Perhaps you will only need to scout clips at videoblocks or not scout at all i guess and just go with it.
And what about the previous announcement for sd downconversions?

The video Stock market is still in a very early stage, very little content overall, but it looks like they want to position themselves as a themed niche agency.

Let's hope this is not what they want to do, because i think that "themed" or "niche" video as opposed to a similar still image has very little chance to sell as part of a bigger puzzle, (which is what video is used for in most cases,in video projects).

Again we're speculating here,unless we see what this is all about we can only riff-raff.