I received email this morning from Pond5 announcing the Global Partner Program. I have a tiny number of images at Pond 5 and sales have dried up there for me, so I'm assuming the email is now going out to everyone.

There is a new Contributor agreement to cover the program. Here's that section:

"6. Global Partner Program
Pond5 has created a Global Partner Program with the aim of promoting your content in geographies, markets and to customers and resellers or other redistributors that our traditional marketplace may not reach as optimally. While we believe that participation in this program will generate additional revenue opportunities for your Content, your participation is optional and you may opt out at any time on our Website Opt Out page.
Your license to us includes the right and license throughout the world to market, promote and distribute your Content indirectly through resellers and other redistributors and authorize such resellers and other redistributors to grant perpetual and term non-exclusive licenses to your Content to their customers under the resellers� or other redistributor�s own license agreements, which may include some or all of the rights that may be granted in a Pond5 License Agreement.
We will pay you 50% of Net License Revenue we receive from customers, resellers and other redistributors for Content licensed under the Global Partner Program as provided and subject to the provisions of Section 3 �Compensation�; provided that as part of our Global Partner Program, we will have discretion to (i) set the price of your Content and/or agree to compensation structures with the aim of maximizing overall sales of content and revenue to our contributors, and (ii) license your Content to customers as part of a pool of works, in which case, we will have sole discretion to allocate the amounts paid by the customer among your Content and the other works licensed to the customer on a basis that we in our sole good faith discretion determine is fair."

You get half of whatever the partner turns over to Pond5 and if they bundle up works, they get to decide how much of the bundle price is attributable to your content.

I found Alamy's distributor program unfair and so opted out, largely because the distributor got 40% and I received only 30% (half of the 60% Alamy received). I find it completely unreasonable in the age of internet sales that some third party who does very little to nothing gets to siphon off more of the buyer's payment than the contributor.

So if I cared about income from Pond5 I'd have the same objection - the distributor gets 50% and the contributor 25% of what they buyer has paid. That's just unconscionable, IMO

Anyone getting this? any time I try to add a release, it just takes me to the 123rf homepage.

Specifically, when I click the URL "http://submit.123rf.com/myrelease.php"

it just brings me to the 123RF homepage. "http://submit.123rf.com/myrelease.php"

That page works for me. Possibly it was fixed between your post and now?

Are you planning to license your own work, or are you hoping to get other people to contribute work to your site?

If it's the latter, you need to get a lawyer to work with you on legal agreements (between artist and agency when uploading; between site and buyer when using the site; between agency and buyer when licensing work), not just cut and paste what you found online.

I looked at your dreamstime portfoio, and it appears you haven't been very active as a microstock contributor - do you have some other experience that you can bring to bear to this project?

Sorry if this sounds negative, but you need to be clear about what you're delving into.

https://www.colourbox.com/supplier/smartbuy-smartbuy-227172

Lots of stuff from shutterstock, some of mine.

He just copied all my keywords, and I use my name in my keywords.  Easy to find him that way.

Have yours been taken down yet? The ones I found are all still there - and Sandra Cunningham said she was contacting them, so they're certainly taking their time.  As if they just didn't care...

I wonder what a MARKETPLACE to a PLATFORM means.

If you read the earnings call transcript, the analysts ask, but get complete gibberish answers and then say "OK". Unbelievable.

I was also curious about the comments on capitalizing labor costs. I wondered why they might be doing this - I found a few general articles, like this one. Does this mean that SS is trying to show more profits in the short term by capitalizing their labor?

They also give a non-answer to the question about whether lower priced subscriptions are canibalizing existing higher priced options

Oringer also made some vague statements about customers using their own images as well as ones they purchase - I assume in the new platform world scenarios?

"Every business needs imagery to sell their product or service and we're increasingly becoming the place that people go to get those images. We will also continuously become more of a place that people go to work on their own images and we will be more in the work flow of all of these businesses."

There was also a question about enterprise vs. other customers:

"Q. And then secondarily if you can talk a little bit about with a higher mix of enterprise customers does that at all affect your gross margins.

A. So on the latter part of your question. Gross margins are really unaffected, as a result of the fact that the contributor royalties are generally similar across the platform when you average all of the different types of customers on each platform so. So that is not an impact. As it relates to customer growth, it's been very stable if you would in the 14% to 15% annually and the revenue per customer was essentially flat year-over-year. That was attributable primarily to a higher mix to enterprise but also a higher mix to some lower priced subscription versus our 750 image per month product."

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/27/shutterstock-aims-to-become-a-premier-digital-plat.aspx

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/shares-of-shutterstock-dive-after-earnings-sales-miss.html

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/27/why-shutterstock-inc-stock-tumbled-today.aspx


The fact that the CFO will become COO on March 1st suggests at attempt to look serious about the money side of the business. Shame they've just taken their eye off the ball with their main collection (who knows what their premium-special-select stuff looks like). Stuffing it with dreck - allowing truly mind-bending image spam - is not a good long term move, but they just don't seem to care.

Earnings at SS are flat or falling for many contributors (again, no idea what the premium-special-select folks see, but it may be that they're doing fine for now), in large part because the SOD high royalty sales have vanished, but also because subscription volume is stagnant.

Adobe/FT seems to be doing well, but it'd be nice to have a few agencies growing robustly. 123rf appears to be stumbling; Stockfresh is on life support; I don't hear anything good about iStock (but as I have only 109 captive images left there I don't know much first hand); Dreamstime continues its downward trajectory.

All SS has done of late is cut royalties - why would they think anyone is happy with that situation?

...I thought they are paying better, what's your experience.

I don't recall seeing anything less than 35 cents, but that's not really their problem. In the last 18 months, slow sales became the tiniest dribble. Even over the busy (everywhere else) Christmas season they barely moved the needle. I will leave my images there, but I haven't uploaded in a while as it seems pointless.

The tell-tale marks of a thief - they have images that are also found on Shutterstock, but with three different Shutterstock contributors

Three examples and Colourbox should shut this down right away - even if you ignore the fact that the same misleading title and keywords are on all images. A truly lazy thief

https://www.colourbox.com/image/portrait-of-man-and-woman-image-24326829
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beauty-lady-gold-fish-111389261?src=jtUgajIQpSeXSCVtpI51lw-1-0

https://www.colourbox.com/image/portrait-of-man-and-woman-image-24326891
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/the-young-blonde-looks-out-umbrella-112812865

https://www.colourbox.com/image/portrait-of-man-and-woman-image-24326686
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-blonde-woman-holding-umbrella-out-108768590

I logged in to see if I could find an e-mail address for you to use (I used the contact form when I had problems). The error I got trying to select the Contact us link said:

The esp.gettyimages.com page isn�t working

esp.gettyimages.com redirected you too many times.
Try clearing your cookies.
ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

I'm guessing they've broken something. I looked through the FAQ and all the what to do if you don't see the answer here links produced the above error

I just received my payment (PayPal; I'm in the US)

I didn't remove my 500px portfolio, but I pulled it all out of marketplace when they changed their royalty arrangements. I had intended to have exclusive images there (had even uploaded a few) to see how that went, but the writing was on the wall when they hired Kelly Thompson that the agency side of it wasn't going anywhere.

For your non editorial stuff, include Adobe Stock in your mix. They're giving Shutterstock a run for their money.

No one cares about CanStock.

It's Adobe Stock that SS is worried about. Their 10 image pack/subscription/whatever is priced the same as Adobe's. If someone goes to Adobe and buys, I get a 33% royalty; at SS I get 30%, so I'd be quite happy if they want to Adobe Stock

I'd rather they kept buying the On Demand at SS where I collect $2.85, but if that goes away, then I'm better off if the customer buys at the competition.

I received a second email with a link (email formatting was odd but the link worked). It appears they have basic profile data, payment method and join date moved over correctly