I no longer upload there but I've left the 1300 or so files I uploaded alone. I do get occasional sales but it totals about $50 a year so I can't see how uploading even a large number of viable images would pay you enough to make the effort worthwhile.

I noticed this site because of a discussion of FreePik having work they didn't own the rights to.

Shutterstock pumpkin poster and CG Vector version

Shutterstock thanksgiving card and CG vector version

Shutterstock easter bunny and CG Vector version

The site is registered to someone in Islamabad, Pakistan, so it's not clear if a DMCA takedown notice would do any good, but GoDaddy is the host. If you are the copyrightholder you can complain to GoDaddy to get the work taken down.

Just now, the counts are 74,808,398 images / 843,151 added this week

...Edit: Then again, since contributors get paid 25 cents for full sized RF images from most other agencies anyways, I guess it doesn't really matter. The only difference here is we know it is being translated into a print.

This is just not the case. Starting contributors at SS get 25 cents, but "most" agencies do not pay that even for subscriptions. Subscriptions require a commitment to a certain volume per month which is how they get to the lower price per download.

So it does really matter, especially for a contributor who sells prints via another site who now has to compete with a freebie for which they make 25 cents.

CanStock itself pays 25 cents for subscription sales - and when I left them last year it was in part that those sales were an increasing percentage of their tiny volume of sales. All the higher-value sales from their parent company had vanished (what sales there were had been reduced to much lower royalty amounts).

This just amounts to another low-pay deal and doesn't sound to me as if it has any upside for contributors at all.

There's an old adage that no one can take advantage of you unless you let them.

Anyone who is interested in an artist's union or association should read this thread as exhibit A as to why this has not yet happened.

This action does not require anyone to delete any part of their portfolio - or even to stop uploading. The cost to any individual artist of opting out is pretty small (especially for those who say they don't often get ELs)

And yet, it's something lots of contributors feel they can't support.

As far as trusting Shutterstock to see how things pan out with increasing the volume of ELs with price changes, I would point out that the prices for ELs are still unchanged, so right now they're not doing squat to increase ELs by lowering prices. All they're doing is taking in an increased share of what the buyer pays.

If they really were serious about their stated goals, the prices would have changed the same day the royalties did.

They didn't. They still haven't.

Think about the message it would send SS if customers could not buy any EL - the large corporate clients would be fine as they can use their custom plan with one of the SODs for whatever they need. SS doesn't care about contributors but they do care about customers. The customers would effectively deliver a message for us if they were calling to ask why they can't buy an EL all of a sudden.

What a missed opportunity.

Taking the time machine out of the picture...

You don't say what needs to be $1m - gross royalty income? net income? Having $1m in assets aside from your annual income?

If you are concerned about gross revenues, getting that to $1m per year requires vast volumes of images. Which means lots of people shooting and processing them. That's probably do-able but who would? Because your costs would be high and your net profit small.

Perhaps you could tackle 4K video and try to lock that up? It's newer than illustration or stills, but I think the buyer population is smaller as well as the supply, so I don't think that's a sure bet either.

Start an agency?

Today I got a LEL in 123RF for $2.20

The "Limited" part in that EL is different for every sale - 123rf has been asked but they don't publish anything about what rights can be had for what amount of credits or $$. I don't much like the lack of transparency regarding what rights were sold.

Do a search on Shutterstock for abstract background and you get 12,414,978 results

Over twelve million. Think about what that means for you as competition.

It also tells you something about selling from your own site - that is something a number of people have tried and success varies. It doesn't work well for many people because unless the subject matter is very specialized people can get anything they want from the big libraries.

Without seeing what you do it's hard to say if your work is something marketable and unusual enough that selling from your own site would be a good option. Just based on the category though, it's a highly competitive oversupplied area.

You are assuming that it is only a reduction with zero chance of more or equal money and that volume will not go up.... Does this mean that SS can never change anything in their business model?

I am not trying to be argumentative, but do want to respond for the sake of those reading not posting.

Enhanced licenses are inherently different from standard licenses - if you don't do the specific activities permitted by an EL but forbidden by the standard license, you don't buy one. It isn't an issue of price in most cases, but not having the need.

And of course SS can change its business model - and it has done that many times over the years. When they introduced the SOD licensing, I fussed (along with some others) about the lack of transparency in the license terms, but didn't opt out because we were offered a decent percentage of the license (30% for me) and I was willing to accept that until they were caught doing something unfair to contributors, we should give them a chance to pursue this type of business.

It didn't hurt that these licenses were almost all higher priced than existing ones.

I still think they could be more transparent but so far so good and that business has done well for many.

The only possible way SS could hope to increase EL downloads (and I don't think it'd work for the reasons above) is by cutting the price buyers pay which cuts our royalties even further. They haven't said they will reduce prices, so for the moment all they're doing is taking more of the ELs than before - $7.61 from me earlier this week and if I'd have said "yes" to today's request they'd have kept an additional $6.

The other really obnoxious aspect to this initiative was the language used to introduce it - illogical (to simplify the earnings schedule...) (We are your partners and our job is to work tirelessly to serve you and grow our marketplace together.) They way you respect partners is to be straight with them, not drop a bomb in the forums (I never did receive the e-mail) and then ignore all the feedback thereafter.

Like others have said, SS is the ultimate subs site. I submit content with the expectation to get less than 40 cents per download. Probably 95% of my sales are subs (didn�t check it, maybe it is 85%, who knows).

I just took a look at my all time totals at SS (and I did have 3 years away while I was exclusive, which may have altered things) and if I add up all the non subscription totals it is only about $500 less than I've earned from subscriptions. So although you can't necessarily see those percentages every month, half my income from them is non subscription.

I don't believe that there is anything special about types of images that get ELs or SODs at SS, but it is really hard to know. It probably does make more of a difference when you're at the 30% tier, especially with the SODs, but I think SS used to be a subs site and now is a stock agency trying hard to take business from Getty from corporate clients, using profits from the subs business to keep things going while they try to be the amazon of the stock marketplace.

I realize that everyone's circumstances are different, but I do firmly believe that if you have any concerns about agencies reducing royalties for contributors, you effectively signal that you're OK with that when you let cuts pass with no reaction.

When an agency is dominant, it knows it has the upper hand and can generally get contributors to accept whatever it offers - when you're effectively operating a company town, people don't have to like you to continue doing business with you.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on January 29, 2016, 09:49

Now, unity and beauty canopy cover things,

Sounds almost poetic 

Sounds a bit like Sarah Palin (with apologies to those outside the US - she's a part of this election's silly season)

I received e-mail this morning from someone in "Contributor Success" about a customer request for an enhanced license for one of my images (for $22).

The "issue" is that I have opted out and they were offering to process the sale with my permission.

I told them I was very sorry, but no. My answer, in part, with a link to this thread, was:

"I realize you don�t set policy on contributor royalties at Shutterstock, but  I opted out of Enhanced Licenses this week after Shutterstock cut enhanced license royalties for contributors.

It is a shame - I�d like to offer the customer what they want - but I will not be party to the erosion of royalties owed to contributors. If you�d like to explain to Paul Brennan that I�d happily opt back in to Enhanced Licenses if Shutterstock comes up with something more reasonable for contributors, perhaps he�d reconsider?"