...I dont care what their Q whatever reporst says I think they are plain and straight losing buyers. Simple as that.

I think the story is probably a variation of the old joke about one foot in ice and the other in a fire - on average, things feel just fine. 12% revenue growth isn't across the board, even if you for a moment discard the elephant in the room of the 63% growth in the collection. Some big chunk of that growth is rubbish that will sell very little, but we're competing, I think for a smaller 7% growth because the big bucks is in the enterprise business, not "e-commerce" (what they're calling the traditional SS agency).

Their quarterly report and earnings call transcript said that buyers increased 13%, revenue increased 12%, their buyer retention rate was 92%, paid downloads grew 6% and that growth was spread about evenly between existing and new buyers. I'm not sure how those can all be true without something declining (that they aren't detailing). Enterprise business was 29% of revenue and now it's 32% and most of the increase in revenue per download comes from enterprise and video which are higher priced items.

Using hypothetical numbers for an example: The comparison quarter was 100 buyers with 100 sales at $2 each (average). $200 in revenue. Revenue increased 12% and is now $224

Enterprise revenue was $58 and it's now $71.68 (29% of $200 versus 32% of $224); e-commerce revenue was $142 and it's now $152.32 - about 23% growth in enterprise and about 7% in e-commerce. Many of us have seen the large SOD sales dry up, meaning probably that we're in the low growth bucket. Where we're competing with a substantially larger collection.

It'd be interesting to know more about where the lost buyers are - enterprise or e-commerce. I thought about ways to guess the download split between the two segments but I don't think there's any way to do that with what they've said publicly. I'd guess that the lower-royalty, lower price packages that are replacing some of the on-demand sales might have more impact in the e-commerce sector where our revenue per download is flat or falling.

"Contributors are required to keep at least seventy (60%) percent of their portfolio online with Lifeographies.com for a period of at least one (1) year. You may disable all files older than six months from the date of review at any time. You will be allowed to disable a total of thirty (40%) percent of your total Media submitted within the past one (1) year. Media that was disabled and then enabled again will be counted as new submissions, no matter of their original upload date."

Come on.  Really?

Although the numbers have changed, that paragraph looks copied from Dreamstime's rules, including the mangled english of the final sentence:

"Contributors are required to keep at least seventy (70%) percent of their portfolio online with Dreamstime.com for a period of at least six (6) months. You may disable all files older than six months from the date of review at any time. You will be allowed to disable a total of thirty (30%) percent of your total Media submitted within the past six (6) months. Media that was disabled and then enabled again will be counted as new submissions, no matter of their original upload date."

Not sure I understand how the same photo is for sale at Alamy and for free at Freestock

https://www.freestock.com/free-photos/group-friends-party-smiling-having-fun-10485907

http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-group-of-friends-at-a-party-smiling-and-having-fun-134744669.html

And 123rf, Shutterstock and Freestock

https://www.freestock.com/free-photos/female-friends-enjoying-drink-together-wine-116069317

https://www.123rf.com/photo_16217566_stock-photo.html

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/female-friends-enjoying-drink-together-wine-116069317

I don't know what questionnaire you're referring to. When I first saw your post I thought perhaps one would be coming and I'd comment after I saw it. Nada.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4068496-shutterstock-sstk-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript

Couple of commentaries

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/03/tepid-results-reveal-shutterstocks-vulnerabilities.aspx

http://www.markets.co/jefferies-sticks-to-its-hold-rating-for-shutterstock/72175/

http://www.capitalcube.com/blog/index.php/shutterstock-inc-breached-its-50-day-moving-average-in-a-bearish-manner-sstk-us-may-4-2017/

Couple of things caught my eye - in spite of the brain numbing sea of corporate-speak.

Enterprise business is now 32% of revenue (up from 29%).

Revenue per download increased 5%, but it was "...primarily driven by continued growth in our enterprise and motion businesses which operate at higher price points than our traditional e-commerce images offering" Download growth was 6%. I wonder if you were to look at the revenue per download in the e-commerce section if it's falling as a result of the new lower price packages. They don't break that information out.

Customer base expanded 13% but the download growth was 6%? They said "We saw a 6% increase in paid downloads driven by growth in new customers as well as increased activity across our existing user base." Something must have been going down - customers leaving? large customers leaving and being replaced by smaller ones? - to make those numbers make sense, no? Am I missing something?

64% of revenue is from outside the United States, of which half is Europe.

In response to a question about whether they can return to higher growth in the e-commerce business, Jon had this rather rambling almost-answer:

"I think that the core part of our business can grow again. And we're focused every day on coming into this office and working together to do that. Part of the reorganization we went through where we organized the company into GM verticals is really going to help us do this. We were on a new tech stack. We have a lot of great ideas. We know the market is really large, that we sell to businesses. Businesses use our images every day to sell their product or service. We have 1.7 million of those customers today and we know there's tens of millions of more customers out there that need these assets to sell their products, sell their services, so."

Glad they have great ideas. Hope some of them are greater than spiffying up the payment history page...

In answering a question about the makeup of the growth in the enterprise business, they appeared to indicate that to date most of that business was images:

"So the split between expansion within existing customers and new is about 50/50 and so we're seeing continued retention and spend from our existing customers as well as the attraction and spend from new enterprise customers. That's primarily in the image business. We see opportunities in video, editorial and music both domestically as well as outside the U.S."

Answering a question about whether the new tech platform was helping accelerate growth, I think this word salad is a "yes", although timing isn't clear. I love reaccelerating growth

"That will enable us to move faster, cross-sell between products, understand who customers are between all of our products, and our customers � and allow us to do things like focus on reaccelerating growth in the core, for instance."

Later in the transcript, Deutsche Bank had a crack at the same topic, but didn't get a clear answer; just lots of stuff about all the different types of customers SS serves.

There was a question about whether they'd seen some of the higher priced packages getting "traction" - as they'd blamed lower priced packages for lower growth previously. The long answer seems to say that they don't want to be the low price answer, but the fair value one, and they have lots of sizes of customers. Why the questioner just said "thanks" as opposed to following up, who knows:

"Yes. So I'll just refer back to the last answer I gave in terms of what we're seeing is that we recognize that there are everything from project oriented users, there are small and medium sized businesses that utilize images and other assets, music video and so on, on a more regular basis. There are freelancers and then there are, if you would, large enterprises that are utilizing huge numbers of assets over -- on a daily basis.

And what we're doing is we're making sure that from our small and medium sized business products, our enterprise products, our team subscriptions as well as our individual users that we are providing them with the pricing and packaging that meets their needs on a fair value basis. And so we're not ever trying to be the lowest priced. We're trying to be the best value for the work and the projects that they're doing. And when we do that, we see high long-term values consistent with our return on investments that we've had history."

Asked about things that were working - or being tried - other than changing pricing, Jon had this to say:

"I mean if you look at our pages they change all the time. We're constantly updating them. If you look at the � even the responsiveness of our core site, speed is way up. The site will feel snappier from page to page. That is our new platform at work. And we plan to get better and better, add things like site speed globally as we start to move that code to the edge in a more cloud based environment.'

Moving code to the edge in a more cloud based environment??? Is that what passes for technical conversation in the Empire State building? Perhaps someone is seeing a snappier site, but it certainly doesn't feel that way from the contributor side.

Yes - I did go back to look at April's numbers on site, just in case there was some huge mystery sale in the SOD column Sadly not.

Things have not been stable or functional in the last few months - does not speak well of their latest flavor of software VP...

If you upload via Adobe Stock, there is no free section and any rejected images will not go to Fotolia's free section (although I thought that was removed anyway, but I'm not sure about that)

http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-free-section/msg475291/#msg475291

Ive been lagging behind.  Never even visited the Adobe contributor portal.  Guess I'd better sign up.  Will my Fotolia login infi get me on the site or do I have to sign up new and somehow link the accounts?

http://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-contributor-portal-updates/msg486861/#msg486861

This "Some of our editorial customers report usages to us over a period of time" sounds like the company has already got your image and they only pay for it if they use it or am I reading this wrong.

That's correct; and they don't always pay right away after they report the use (if they're a large enough customer they're given a lot of leeway)

And what reputable stock agency sells public domain content which should be free in the first place?

Getty Images

I was an iStock exclusive a long time ago, so none of my experience is relevant to you, but while it was once a great place to sell, I don't see much of a future for the site. Based on the steady stream of exclusives who are leaving (with stories similar to Stan's) I can't see how you could make financial sense of such a decision.

Bear in mind that iStock's owner, Getty, is struggling with a massive debt burden left by two rounds of private equity owners. They have competition for large business customers from two other agencies (Adobe Stock and Shutterstock) and when the good news about revenue is that it isn't falling this year, you may want to think hard about selling exclusively through them. I have no clue what all the press releases about focusing on the consumer is - at least no clue how that will make them or contributors money. iStock used to have a healthy trade with small businesses - designers - but drove most of them away over several years of terrible decisions.

If you're thinking about exclusivity, stop uploading to DT so the 6 month lock will not be a problem (I think they still have this; at least check it out)

I'm now wading through it - I wish they made it easier to find the changes (long paragraphs where one word has changed but you can't tell that at a glance).

They're doing away with the 45 day notice on future changes.

They're changing the relationship from licensee to agent - I wonder why that would be? From their forums, someone asked and CR replied that it wasn't a change in how they did things, just catching up the language to reflect it...

I don't know what "Image Options" is - but if I agree to it they can alter (pre-format) my images prior to licensing. If that's just converting a color space, I don't care, but if it's something else, I'm hoping that means there's an opt out. I guess I now need to know about Image Options

Some category of people who can make a charge on the total paid by the buyer called "Affiliates" is introduced (was just Distributors).

If they machine translate the metadata, you can't sue them if the machine mangles the text. You're only responsible for the accuracy of your original language.

The rules about what rights you hold in the image have been broadened to include copyright free work. Not sure if that's a change in practice or just catching the legal document up to what they were already doing - I've never uploaded public domain work.