I'm not sure what your point is in this thread. Every member has access to all the content...that's a copy statement about SS vs. iS, where you need to pay more to get access to exclusive content. It has nothing to do with how many sub dls you get per day.

Perhaps you'd really like to get people riled up against SS so they don't notice iS has lowered prices again, but you're grasping at straws. There's no news here. It's an offer/copy test.

Nice job! Interesting to see how someone else works. Some suggestions from someone who creates commercials for a living:

Move the montage of your icons and your website URL from the end to the beginning. End with your website URL right after the tutorial is over. I thought the video had ended there until I looked at the time bar. You might want to incorporate a screenshot of your site.

More explanation, less music. For example, why radial gradients? (3d, light source, etc.) why the colors you chose? Any filler info about good icon design? (simplicity, strong shapes, etc.)

Turn the music down. It gets really loud when you stop talking. Is that because it's free thru YouTube so you can't control volume? If so, you may want to license one piece of stock music to use in all videos so you have volume control.

At the end, Suggest people visit your site for more icon design and to license your icons!

Best of luck...I hope this brings a lot of traffic.

Quote from: Shelma1 on March 15, 2015, 14:22

Can I just point out how disingenuous the title of this thread is? If you're first reading it you might think SS is ending subs. All they're doing is lifting the 25-per-day-limit, but keeping the monthly limit, the pricing, everything else the same. In other words, it's just a marketing tactic to attract new customers. They're not lowering prices, they're not changing what we get paid, they're not ending anything, they're not giving any more content to customers. (In fact, this might just be a test.)

I think once customers know that some people are getting 750/month they will ask for that rather than the 25/day model.  It seems that once they start this they probably will have to do it for everyone.  How would you feel getting the worse subscription plan while other people are paying the same for the better one?

Seriously? It's the same subscription plan. You get 750/month either way. You're reeeeeeally stretching here.

The offer could very well still be in testing if not everyone's seeing it. Though if people are tweeting about it, the cat's halfway out of the bag.

Quote from: Shelma1 on March 15, 2015, 11:15

Big difference between SS and iS: When iS offers discounts you make less, but when SS offers discounts they still pay you the same amount.

That's not true.  When SS offers a discount on enterprise sales those discounts "flow" to the contributor as has been said before.  You get a percentage of what the customer paid for those sales.  Subs pay a set rate but that is the same at iStock too.  I'm assuming discounts to image packs also "flow" to the contributor but if you have something specific that says those discounts don't then please do post a link to that.

I see no difference whatsoever in the amount I make. Subs still earn me exactly the same amount, as do ODDs, EDs and SODs. Those pay a flat rate. On iS any discount has a direct impact on my credit sales, which are comparable to ODDs on SS (though much less since they dropped the prices of non-exclusive vectors). iS subs pay less too. iS doesn't offer anything comparable to EDs and SODs, as far as I know.

Quote from: Shelma1 on March 15, 2015, 10:20

Shutterstock hasn't lowered their prices. Instead they're going after the midstock market and charging higher prices for big customers.

I've seen Shutterstock offering a lot of discounts in the past couple months.  20% off image packs or subscriptions and now it appears they are offering a monthly subscription instead of a daily one.   I think it's great if you are getting some higher priced sales, it seems from most of the comments I've seen on here that those are rare and may be getting rarer.  If yours are up then great.  One off sales aren't going to move the market much though, it's the very low average price that is doing it.

Big difference between SS and iS: When iS offers discounts you make less, but when SS offers discounts they still pay you the same amount. My earnings per image at SS surpassed iS last year, and the disparity keeps getting larger. I'm not sure what you consider "big sales," but I get dozens of non-sub sales on SS daily. And I make about 40% more for a sub sale at SS than at iS. SS is setting higher pricing but still taking market share from iS and Getty. I get no "really big" sales from iS at all, but I do at SS every so often. Just the facts. I'd love it if iS did something right.

SS has agreements with large customers�ad agencies, for example�where they pay hundreds of dollars for images. I'm not exactly sure what comes wrapped up with it...additional legal assurances? Extended use? But they pay much more than the average buyer. It does not mean your image will necessarily be used for sensitive purposes...more likely it will be used in an ad campaign or something like that.

Yup. We absolutely pay tens of thousands for images. Last ad we shot, we paid the photographer about $35,000, if I remember correctly. That was only two years ago. I'm sure that ad agency is still paying that amount for their shoots.

And music rights? Millions.

Now when I sign in I see a red-bannered offer to buy credits for $12 each or 3 for $33. Weren't the new lower credit prices on par with Shutterstock before...about $14.50 each as an entry point?

If you are getting rejections the best thing to do is figure out how to improve.  The reviewers are almost certainly correct in their rejections, maybe the real reason is that the photos are not good so they pick some other reason from the list.  Shutterstock doesn't have a "your image is no good" rejection do they, if you're getting focus rejections and you're sure they are actually in focus then that's probably the reason ( how many many times have people said their images were in focus or noise free but when zoomed into 100% they obviously aren't?).  Make better images and you won't have problems, focus on improving rather than complaining and conspiracies.

Explain my rejections for "poor rasterizeration," while the same jpgs are offered for sale at SS as an option to the vector file. And then after emailing about them I'm told to resubmit because the reviewer was mistaken.

I'm not sure what's going on...whether the reviewers really are making mistakes, or whether this is Shutterstock's way of holding back the huge tide of incoming images.

I've bought a few images from there, so I get their emails all the time now. Kind of sad to see them giving away tons of free stuff every week, and huge image packs offered for next to nothing. People offering 500 icons for five bucks when each could be sold separately at SS, for example. I'm afraid from a buyer POV it is a race to the bottom.

I'd like a raise from iStock too. A 50% raise from them would just bring them into line with Shutterstock. That's sad.