Lots of times - searches, as mentioned above (I keep a folder with screen grabs as a sort of digital tearsheet).

Also, I've run into my images - in an airport when two images from a previous trip were wrapped around posts in the departure lounge. A relative living in another city recognized a bus wrap use (it was his lake house in my photograph) and sent me an iPhone picture. He also got some advertising in the (snail) mail from a local realtor including a number of my photos. Another relative saw my picture (it was of me) in a magazine in a waiting room. A photographer in another city noticed one of my pictures in a local paper and sent me a copy. A few times the designer has sent me a copy (or in the iStock old days, it showed up in the designer's showcase).

I've even seen my house in a Facebook ad (doing one of those "That house looks awfully familiar...")

The strange thing is, when I login to FAA I don't see the message but it was from "[email protected]"

I will definitely contact FAA.

That's the way contacts from FAA customers come through - I've had several of those. The first few lines should be "From: [name] and their e-mail address". The FAA user doesn't get your e-mail unless you reply to them.

If you don't have a throwaway e-mail account to use when replying to questionable things of this sort, you might want to get one for the future.

It beggars belief that agencies still do no checking using a google image search (at the very least) on newly uploaded content. I used Google image search on Tyler's airplane picture (from the iStock pirate's version) and the second of the visually similar images takes me to Tyler's Dreamstime upload of that image.

It takes virtually no work to check for an already uploaded image, and once you've found content from more than one other artist, you can close the account - perhaps you wait until you find three other artists' work just to be on the safe side

Bottom line is that the agencies just don't care, protestations about artist's rights notwithstanding. They make their money on the license whoever uploads the content.

http://www.alamy.com/blog/introducing-the-new-alamy-image-manager

RF editorial is in these changes, rolling out starting this week (not sure when everyone will have these tools)

I uploaded about 1400 files there in 2011 when I left iStock exclusivity thinking I'd give it a shot as the guy behind it was one of the founders of StockXpert.

It never really took off, but I made about $50 a year (that's not a typo) until fall 2015. Since then I've made about $28 and sales appear to have dried up. I can't see any reason to upload there.

I'm unable to get into my account.  Trying to resend the email, and then clicking on the link gives a "page not found" error.  Anyone get in touch with them?

I got a page not found error the first time, but tried again (I think I had the mail resent a second time) and then it worked. Clearly buggy but I didn't contact them as I was able to log in in the end. This was yesterday or Saturday, I think.

Quality is such a vague term in the context of licensing stock. If a buyer finds it useful - or lots of buyers find it useful -  then saying it's low quality but sells a lot seems pretty daft to me. Assuming that work that doesn't sell doesn't meet market demand assumes that the market got to take a look at the work and decided not to buy it. That's not always what happens. Good, current, saleable work can and does languish sometimes.

I've been selling stock a while and have seen sales for images take off or sink as changes in search results occur on a site (easier to see when collections were smaller). Not seasonal images, or outdated technology or fashion; just a sudden shift in what ends up on page one for default search results. I'm not the only one who's seen this - you can find oodles of discussions of overnight changes.

Reality is that search position isn't the only thing that determines sales, but it's a huge factor. You can't flog cr#p by putting it on page one, but if there are several perfectly usable images in a certain category, the one up front in the search results will typically sell better.

But the idea that quality images (whatever those are) will just float to the top is wishful thinking, IMO. Good images in an underserved niche have more of a shot than those in an oversupplied category (over 3 million hits for Christmas background on Shutterstock for example), but filling the first page with spammed garbage helps no-one (I doubt that stuff actually sells as it's mostly much less good than what you see in a popular search) and hurts both buyers and ethical, honest contributors.

It's true that contributors don't and can't control the search engine, but can fuss if there are bugs an agency hasn't noticed or horrendous unfairness of some sort. Fussing without leverage generally doesn't work (that's the big stick part of walk softly and carry a big stick).

The bigger the agencies get, the less they need any one of us - they're more worried about getting and keeping buyers than contributors at this point (especially SS with their apparent disinterest in what's in the collection as long as the numbers are big and growing). So it's harder than it was to influence them.

You could choose to avoid dealing with complaints or petitions, but I think there's bucketloads of data from the last decade and a half that thinking all you have to do is produce better images and sales will come isn't going to work out.

An article on why investors reacted negatively to Shutterstock's results.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/shutterstock-shares-fall-on-weak-sales-guidance-cm704429

I read through the transcript of the earnings call, and it seemed to me  that SS was being pretty defensive about the impact of Adobe on their sales/earnings (basically saying it made no difference and hammering on the talking point of their library being the biggest).

One question about the downloads from the Photoshop plugin didn't get answered but Oringer said "We are seeing thousands of users in Adobe use our product with access to over 100 million of our images. So we see thousands of people inside of Adobe accessing the largest collection that's ever been integrated into creative cloud period." If he'd had tens of thousands of users of the plugin, he'd have said that, so I'm assuming that the actual number of users really is low. And I also assume they'd have trumpeted the download numbers if they were significant.

The CFO talked about what they've done promoting the plugin "... major holding companies and advertising agencies to make presentations which our sales teams have done to significant sized groups at their organizations so that they can see the ease of use" and about the great customer feedback they've gotten. This seems to indicate there are no real results so far ('cause they'd have talked about that, not their sales efforts, if they could have).

I also found the comments about the various segments of their business a little depressing for those of us who aren't included in their Premier Select collection. "Enterprise" is 30% of their revenue with 35,000 customers and "... continues to grow faster than the business today". Edited to make a correction; most of us are not in the Premier Select collection. All of us are in Premier - thanks to Shelma1 for pointing out the distinction

They have over 1.6 million customers total.  They expect to convert more "e-commerce" customers into enterprise accounts - I think e-commerce is where most of us here live as far as downloads.  "...our enterprise customer base has grown rapidly and we expect that trend to continue as we convert more e-commerce customers into enterprise accounts, broaden the portfolio of content available to our enterprise customers, and introduce new functionality and services into our premier product. Customers who upgrade to our enterprise product increase their annual spend with Shutterstock significantly"

They also said "Finally, we saw revenue per download increase 5% on a reported basis and 8% excluding the impact of foreign currency movements primarily driven by our continued success in growing our enterprise business which operates at higher price points than our traditional e-commerce offerings."

Bottom line, the vanishing of the high-value SODs appears to be a result of them converting the buyers who shopped with our stuff to other collections where our offerings aren't available. Hence my patterns of seeing download volumes up and revenue down.

A guy from Deutsche Bank asked about revenue growth - that it appeared to be overall at a rate close to the consumer growth (he didn't get a clear answer as to why, at least as I read it) and also asked about the "re-platforming" driving acceleration in revenue growth - why hadn't that happened as they'd earlier said it might. Lots of words in the answers about motherhood and apple pie, but no direct answer to the questions asked

"It would mean a great deal to us if you could tell us why you�ve stopped shopping at 123RF.com "

Received a survey request from 123rf this morning. I clicked on the link, but it's clearly targeted at buyers not contributors.

I don't have a buyer account there so I'm not sure why I received this - I did find it interesting that their incentive was something that doesn't cost them anything (free month with StockUnlimited) versus a discount or incentive to shop at 123rf. If you wanted to get buyers back to 123rf, why wouldn't you let them shop there for free as the "thank you"?

I thought the list of questions was a bit strange - starting out with asking for my "UID" - they don't use that terminology anywhere on the site. They use "Username/Email" on the English version of the site if you go to log in (and I assume that's what they want). They might also have pre-filled that out with the e-mail they sent the invitation to so as to save me a step.

It always bugs me when there's no "other" option, especially when the list of choices doesn't look complete to me - for example, why not have an option for "my company purchased a subscription at another site". Let me tell them why I don't purchase there any more versus assuming they already know all the possible reasons.

The fact that they're doing a survey suggests that they're seeing some fall off in business (it's also possible that they're just supremely attentive to customers, but then I've no idea why they'd be sending that e-mail to a contributor who never bought anything in that case)

Anyone else get one of these?

I'm seeing my sales for yesterday (Nov 1) this morning (Nov 2) and my October sales (sad as they were!) are still showing. I think I'm seeing everything I should but I didn't look yesterday so I don't know if I saw the bug this month (I did last month)

...You're absolutely right, but you're also splitting hairs slightly. I mean, it's a graphical symbol meant to represent an event, and a brand, across all of their marketing channels. If that doesn't constitute a logo then it's pretty * close... it's not like such a case would get laughed out of court.

Are you seriously suggesting that the guy should forget about the rules of Shutterstock being broken, and his intellectual property rights being breached, just because there's a slight chance that the logo might not be a logo, when in every conceivable way... it does seem to be a logo?...

Splitting hairs is what lawyers do. At the hourly rates they charge, that can be very costly for their clients. In the US with contingency fees being legal (not the case everywhere) sometimes if you have the possibility of a huge payout, a lawyer will take a case on a contingency basis.

If you have large companies, governments or rich clients on one side, you have to consider the practicalities of the chance of winning and the costs of doing so, weighing that against the largest possible payout you think you could get. If you win and it costs you more in legal fees than your judgment, what's the point?

It's in the contributor's best financial interests to try and resolve this without a lawsuit, IMO. In addition to the issues of making the details of your case , you've got five countries involved, apparently, and possibly another country where the agency is. Which court do you take this to?

The OP mentioned that the countries are rich - not sure what that has to do with anything regarding the infringement issue, but it probably means they can outspend a stock illustrator in a legal fight. Legal battles are typically long, costly and ugly.

It isn't a logo unless they try and trademark it. Otherwise it's just art they use in their materials.

Why are you assuming it's a logo?

I cannot know for sure, I only see so many youtube videos, one showing a dilligent speaking on TV with a tribune showing my Illustration, then five countries armies with trumpets looking at a flag being raised... with my Illustration on it...

It's kind of big but not sure what leverage I have.

Without any more details than you've given, I don't think you have any reason to complain about their uses of your illustration.

If there are limits on numbers of impressions (print) that they've violated, they'd need an extended license. If they are distributing your vector as part of a press kit, then that's effectively a template (forbidden at some agencies; extended license at others). If they're selling tee shirts with your eagle on it then they need an extended license, but if they're just giving away swag at these meetings, then they're fine with a standard license (print run limits still apply).

The rule about no logos is that the buyer cannot copyright or trademark something with your copyrighted artwork in it. If someone uses your artwork in all their materials knowing that they can't trademark it as their logo, there's nothing to stop them licensing royalty free artwork for that purpose.