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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
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26
« on: December 16, 2024, 13:16 »
Thought it worth adding an article from early November that talked about the problems with Shutterstock's acquisition spree and suggesting it was an interesting short opportunity for investors: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shutterstock-inc-sstk-bear-case-162730125.html"SSTKs top-line growth has largely been driven by acquisitions, a trend that may not continue . . . This reliance on acquisitions, combined with a gradual decline in subscriber numbers and revenue per subscriber metrics, signals a troubling trend that management has not adequately addressed." "Furthermore, data from ALTD shows a notable decline in e-commerce sales that contradicts management's assertions, further validating the bearish thesis. Concerns regarding management integrity are heightened by prior misrepresentations about the performance of their e-commerce segment, which raises questions about the reliability of their segment reporting and overall transparency. " That second quote is intriguing. It would be a big deal if the reports weren't accurate
27
« on: December 16, 2024, 07:59 »
For images, extended licenses, at full price, produce a royalty of $26.40. They're much less common than they used to be (custom licenses that cover more uses is my guess as to the reason). I had 2 in October and a sprinkling earlier in the year. I had posted about some very high royalties (again for images) back in 2018 - $94.05 each. Other than "custom", I have no idea what those license details were.
28
« on: December 16, 2024, 07:49 »
Thanks for the link - I didn't see email (and I did check my spam/junk folder). I completed the survey.
Can you elaborate on why Adobe is surveying contributors?
30
« on: December 12, 2024, 16:29 »
Adobe (ADBE) announced their quarterly results Dec 11 after the market closed. The stock dropped in after hours trading and continued to fall today - closed today at $474.63 a share, down $75.30 (13.69%) from yesterday. The revenue and earnings for the quarter were good but the lower than expected growth for the coming fiscal year disappointed investors. They're worried that Adobe isn't able to "monetize" AI tools. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysts-revisit-adobe-stock-price-123216031.htmlhttps://www.investors.com/news/technology/adobe-stock-ai-monetization-in-focus/?src=A00220From a Barron's article that's behind a paywall: "Investors are concerned the company isnt yet seeing major gains from its AI offerings, which it has been monetizing for about a year now. One of those offerings is Firefly, which gives Adobe users the ability to use gen-AI to create images and videos from text, edit images using AI, and more. " . . . We dont see GenAI helping to bend the growth curve in the foreseeable future. And [with] guide suggesting growth is teetering on single digits, we think this will weigh on valuations, From our perspective as contributors, I think the major concern for 2025 would be that our content will be used as needed to support their "AI tools and features are driving revenue/profit growth" message which may end up with lower royalty revenues for us. As we have been promised 33% of either customer payment or a computed payment for unlimited plans, that can still be true but meaningless. 33% of eff-all is eff-all. The other day Adobe and Box announced a collaboration via Adobe Express. There was no specific mention of stock images (versus the customer's own product images) but if these are very low cost/high usage plans, we could see our "custom" royalties drop. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/12/10/adobe-express-for-box-bringing-together-creativity-collaboration-in-the-cloudOne analyst noted that Adobe had pointed to slower subscriber growth: https://www.gurufocus.com/news/2631524/adobe-shares-slide-as-revenue-forecast-misses-expectations-ai-competition-loomsAdobe's slides and press release are on their Investor Relations page: https://www.adobe.com/investor-relations.htmlAdobe's CEO noted in his statement at the beginning of the earnings call that Firefly-powered generations had surpassed 16 billion. At first that struck me as a very big number for a not-very-good genAI tool. Uncharitably I first thought it meant that you had to generate so many times to get anything usable, thus driving up their counts! I think the odd phrasing means that they're counting the Remove tool (Phtoshop and Lightroom) and the various generative expand options - those are OK for very low res images or very small sections, but are otherwise not up to scratch. I don't know how they're tracking every use of the Remove tool with Generative AI turned on, but assume they must be to calculate credits usage. So the big number may be accurate, but not really comparable to Midjourney or any other genAI tool Edited Dec 13 to add an article link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lack-roi-ai-investments-rattles-190529459.html"The earnings report is missing one key metric: Return on AI investments. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the company does not even have a metric to measure those returns with. Investors can be very short-sighted, and they want to see visible improvements. AI offerings were supposed to improve the companys subscriber base. They didnt. The investments were supposed to aid the growth of a company that was otherwise reaching a stage of maturity. They didnt. So what can the company do better during the next year so that 2026 is different? Thats the million-dollar question that shareholders want answered. The companys strategy will become clear with time. But with modest growth prospects, and reliance on share buybacks to reward investors, many shareholders are likely looking for a better investment." ADBE was down again today; dropped as low as $456, but closed at $465.69. Edited Dec 16: ADBE down today, closing at $461.53The total collection size is now 603,641,179. In the last 6 days (Dec 10 - 16) it has grown by over 5 million (5,159,959). Over 4.2 million of that 5 million were genAI. Edited Dec 17: ADBE down, closing at $455.23. That's down almost $100 a share since results were announced last week (closed at $549.93 Dec 11).
31
« on: December 12, 2024, 16:00 »
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24318924/openai-sora-ai-video-generator-hands-onI don't do video but thought this overview of his experiences might be interesting for those who do. "Nothing that Sora generated from scratch was actually usable, though. Its definitely not ready for entertainment or commercial work that needs narrative coherence, and youd really have to reach to even use this as a replacement for a quick flash of stock footage." "Its early days and there are some obvious issues to iron out, but nothing Ive seen so far makes me think that Sora is going to revolutionize video production overnight." The "pro" subscription is $200/month and was not tested
32
« on: December 09, 2024, 16:46 »
...If I add grain in Photoshop 80% of you would assume it's a real photo.
https://i.ibb.co/mBmJr5p/Universal-Upscaler-dc3663a9-364e-434a-978f-356af59f4967-grain.jpg
This just screams fake. Arguably not too different from the over-airbrushed, liquify-filter, skin smoothed fashion covers that have been around for years, but now those are churned out in industrial quantities, not handsful. The masses of getAI people images on Adobe Stock look like a clone army of slick and polished humanoids. The main issue is the size of the market for stock images. It's not growing anything like as fast (at an educated guess) as the supply of content. And there's only a portion of the buyer population who want the shiny-happy-fakey humanoids. If what was being produced with genAI substantially increased the size of the customer group or the volume of content they're licensing this might be a game changer. As it is, the more of the look-alike content being generated just increases competition for the buyers who do want that look.
33
« on: December 09, 2024, 10:35 »
The hype around AI tools far outstrips useful, reliable business cases at this point. C-suite is talking stuff up for investors to keep their stock price up, and even "experts" get caught out when relying on ChatGPT & similar (not forgetting the lawyer who got fined for misleading the court with invented case citations) https://stanforddaily.com/2024/12/04/hancock-admitted-to-ai-use/I review the recent genAI acceptances into Adobe Stock's collection and there is so much mangled, unreal junk. Beyond a personal aesthetic loathing for the plastic-fantastic people - even if they have all their fingers and in the right place - the attempts to represent objects, places, animals, people, tools, equipment, etc. are still deeply substandard. Posting examples seems a waste of time as Adobe clearly doesn't care. I think we should have a similar terminology for the image creations gone awry: https://undark.org/2023/04/06/chatgpt-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/If you can't rely on AI tools, they don't save time when you have to edit/proofread everything to be sure you don't trash your career. Unclear yet if Small Language Models will improve things? https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/small-language-models-set-for-take-off-next-yearNo clue where this will all end up, but looking with a clear eye at the current realities versus getting rapturous over potential seems the only safe/sane approach.
36
« on: December 04, 2024, 11:32 »
Look at your Getty/iStock Connect statement - you'll see lots of royalties less than one cent. Not that it's a contest I'd want to win  Looking at my November statement (for October royalties) I think 0.42 cents (i.e. $0.0042) was the lowest royalty for a license (i.e. not Cost per View).
37
« on: December 01, 2024, 15:59 »
I was looking at November's totals and comparing to prior years. For Adobe Stock I noticed a surprising $$ total for Nov 2018 and dug a little to see why.
The number of downloads was only slightly higher than Nov 2024 and the much higher $$ was a result of 3 custom royalties of $94.05 each. That sort of number was often seen in SS SOD's but I don't think that happened at AS where extended licenses have netted us about $26 and the low volume subscriptions $3.30 royalties.
These were images, not video.
I looked at the old forum posts here to see if I'd asked about these nice bonuses, but apparently not. I'd love them to come back, but I'm not holding my breath
Anyone else who was with Adobe Stock in 2018 see large royalties in November?
38
« on: November 27, 2024, 10:18 »
The default order when you do a search on Adobe Stock (at least in the US) is "Relevence". Many days and with many searches, the top half of the first page is almost all AI images. IMO the massive volume of new (and generally low quality) genAI acceptances means that leaving it to Adobe's software to sort it out is wishful thinking. That sort of thing used to work when collections were smaller, inspections actually meant something and new work was a smaller proportion of the total collection size.
In five days - from Nov 21 to yesterday afternoon (Nov 25) Adobe Stock's total collection grew by just over 6 million items (6,075,697).
Nearly 5.5 million (5,499,162) were genAI.
Let those numbers sink in. And think about the possibility that the genAI content will slowly drive away everything else, and then buyers will drift away when they're bored with the sameness of everything left. Forget what's in my best interests as an individual contributor; Adobe Stock is taking a huge gamble that (a) genAI nearly-like-real-life content is OK with buyers and (b) that if it is, in time buyers will be able to find cheaper places to get it (Freepik's genAI collection is now 168.18 million) or make it themselves.
I've been licensing stock for just over 20 years. I remember a big celebration at iStock when they reached 1 million images...
39
« on: November 24, 2024, 15:14 »
There is something wrong with the bestseller lists, I think it is being manipulated.
That portfolio is chock full of things that should never have been approved. But regarding the recent top seller list, it's by design a strange beast, so doesn't really tell us much of interest. Here's the explanation text on how it's calculated: "For each asset type we generate a list of 200 contributors who made the most sales in the previous week, only considering their uploads from the past six months. Then, we order the list based on each contributors uploads/sales ratio, and the top 10 contributors on this list are featured as Recent top sellers.
Contributors are eligible to be featured at most once every five weeks. This selection process is subject to change in the future."So lots of images could be selling much, much better than the ones featured. If the huge sellers were uploaded 7 months or more ago then they aren't shown; and the total volume of sales from the 6 months or less group could potentially be very small. When you consider the tsunami of genAI content being added of late, one would expect genAI-heavy portfolios to be well represented in that list. And given the very erratic inspection speeds - some taking many months and some only a few days - the recent sellers list could become very skewed.
40
« on: November 23, 2024, 14:28 »
...
Over all, the collection grew 32% between the end of April 2024 and today, but the genAI portion of the collection grew 82% versus the human-made portion grew 6.1%.
...
do we have actual numbers in each case? 6% of a very large number can be much greater than 82% of a much smaller number
Adobe Stock growth Apr 30 - Nov 21 2024; roughly 7 months
total collection: 139,801,939 (576,474,125 up from 436,672,186) - up 32% genAI: 117,178,564 (181,469,399 up from 64,290,835) - up 82% human made: 22,623,375 (395,004,726 up from 372,381,351) - up 6.1% human made asset types
photos growth 9,936,406 (228,291,001 up from 218,354,595) - up 4.5% videos shrunk 3,202,090 (15,884,530 down from 19,086,620) - down 16.8% illos growth 1,990,088 (33,691,112 up from 31,701,024) - up 6.3% genAI asset types
photos 49,408,590 (71,313,378 up from 21,904,788) - up 126% illos 65,134,599 (106,056,450 up from 40,921,851) - up 59% videos 846,305 (1,237,747 up from 391,442) - up 116%
41
« on: November 21, 2024, 15:42 »
My October payment arrived earlier today - it matched exactly the amount shown on my PDF statement. I'm in the US FWIW.
42
« on: November 21, 2024, 15:36 »
Contributors to Adobe Stock won't be surprised to hear that the genAI content in the collection has been increasing faster than the human-made content.
Over all, the collection grew 32% between the end of April 2024 and today, but the genAI portion of the collection grew 82% versus the human-made portion grew 6.1%.
The human-made video collection shrank over that period - by over 3 million images; 16.8%. I assume that means some content left - does anyone know about that? It's not the Pond5 content which was much larger and left in July 2022.
I have no sales data, obviously, but I would guess that the genAI collection size is growing faster than genAI sales - too many kinds of content genAI isn't very good at and massive piles of similars for the things it is.
Possibly the ability to modify Adobe Stock items with genAI and then download will motivate buyers? It's a shame that we will only see "custom" in the royalties list so can't know - unless we find an image in use - if it's part of that program. I'll definitely be interested to see what impact that new feature has on our earnings.
As I don't upload genAI content, my sales would have evaporated if buyers have given up on traditional images. October 2024 was slightly ahead of October 2023 (my portfolio is small, just under 2500 images, and has grown very modestly this year. Nowhere near the 32+% growth in the collection).
Adobe Stock's total collection earlier today was 576,474,125 . For comparison, Shutterstock (as reported on the bottom of their landing page) went from 485+ million at the end of 2023 to 520+ million at the end of September 2024 - about 9.3% growth.
Anyone else have thoughts about Adobe Stock marketplace?
43
« on: November 15, 2024, 19:49 »
Second highest iStock download total for 2024, but the low RPD - $0.53 - is just sad. There were 15 royalties that were 0.015 cents! My RPD at Adobe Stock for October was $0.88 (and the downloads were much higher too) Good thing that money isn't what makes me happy
44
« on: October 29, 2024, 14:35 »
I have continued to see the pattern of overnight reviews for photos with property releases versus long waits (2 months+) without. Oh, and the property-release reviewers don't work weekends
45
« on: October 29, 2024, 14:32 »
I haven't posted about SSTK performance or Shutterstock's financials in a while, but I do monitor what they're up to. https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-reports-third-quarter-2024-financial-resultsEarnings call from earlier today: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4730421-shutterstock-inc-sstk-q3-2024-earnings-call-transcriptYou can find other investor-focused materials via their web site: https://investor.shutterstock.com/Lots of hand-waving, buzzwords and happy talk in the earnings call transcript, but from a contributor's perspective, it's hard to ignore the declines in paid downloads, subscribers and how stagnant the business seems to be if you look at the details versus the CEO's chit-chat. They celebrated that the decline in "content" revenue was slowing - it only declined 7% this quarter versus 9% in Q2 and 10% in Q1 Paid downloads - that's how contributors make money - in Q3 2024 were 32.9 million, down from 33.4m in Q2, down from 36.4m in Q3 last year (2023). In Q3 2022 there were 42.8 million paid downloads. They've changed now they report revenue - now it's Content and Data, Distribution & Services; they used to break out E-commerce (the web site) from Enterprise (corporate deals). And with various acquisitions - Pond5 last year and Envato this year - more revenue gets added to the totals, but it isn't doing much for growth. It's barely slowing the decline. For Q3 2024 Content revenue included Envato for the first time. Take out Envato and they reported $166 million for the quarter, versus $233 million in 2023. Even in Q3 2022 and 2021 revenue was higher - $204 million and $194 million!! Data revenue was supposed to be a huge growth area, although still small compared to content revenue. For Q3 2024 it was $47 million versus $54.5m in 2023. During the earnings call and analyst asked about revenue from Giphy. More talk about huge increased views of GIFs (not about $$) and the note that revenue from Giphy was folded into the overall Data number and won't be broken out The number of subscribers is down as well - 470k versus 551k for Q3 2023 (or 607k in Q3 2022) An analyst asked if Envato's unlimited subscriptions were taking away from regular SS subscriptions and Hennessey said "...were seeing the work that they did on the customer experience, the work that theyve done with the rebrand is driving new subs into the franchise. And so were more bullish today on the growth and the product market fit of Envato than we were when we acquired the company..." An analyst asked for more detail on the content business beyond that the decline in that was slowing; when would it get back to growth? Hennessey said: "On the Content business, look, I dont know what day we cross over, but were making really good progress. The changes that weve made, everything from coming off the free trial to reintroducing our smaller packs, as I mentioned, and our core subscription product is getting traction. Were seeing growth in the business and you start to see the level of the decline is shrinking. You mentioned a minus 10 to minus 9, minus 7, and were predicting that Q4 is better than that. So were really like what were seeing. Then if you add in some of my commentary on the combination of AI in our Content business, were now seeing not only existing customers using the AI sub and maintaining their level of stock use, and in many instances, growing that. Were also starting to see new customers come into the franchise for the AI product and start to use stock content. So we really like this ecosystem thats starting to happen of growth in both stock and AI for customer sets. So again, I cant tell you exactly when we cross over, but I really like the hand that weve got, and the core business, ex-Envato, is improving." I'd translate that to "Darned if I know!" The only reason they can report "growth" is that they added revenue from acquisitions to their totals."Content" is 81% of their business. The other portion, Data is 19% but was also down 14% compared to a year ago. SSTK was up today - upbeat guidance for the remainder of the year seems to have cheered investors, but they tend to be an emotionally volatile lot Separately from the bad news for contributors to SS, it looks to me as if they're running out of road.
46
« on: October 17, 2024, 09:45 »
I don't understand the wild inconsistency in review times. I only submit human-created photographs
In early August I submitted a batch of photos that were approved in about 3 weeks. In mid-to-late August I submitted another batch that are still in the queue nearly 8 weeks later.
Yesterday I submitted two images and they are approved this morning!
The only possible explanation I can invent is that there was a property release on yesterday's images and none of the others needed or had one. Could released images go through a different group in the inspection team(s)??
47
« on: September 25, 2024, 13:07 »
Congratulations on the new gig. I'd love to see the inspection process take less than a month again - how soon before your magic wand takes care of all the hiccups? And is Raul.Ceron, who has posted here a couple of times recently, the new Mat Hayward?
48
« on: September 17, 2024, 11:06 »
I received email from Adobe Stock a few minutes ago saying that they've added a second round of Firefly payments but I don't see it in my account. They said "A banner on the Insights > My Statistics tab in the Contributor portal provides the specific amount that was added to your account." I did select the "Other Payments" dropdown and it said "You have no other payments"
Does anyone else see anything?
I think waiting until the banners were visible to send the email would have been a good idea...
Edited to add that it did update but wasn't worth getting excited about...
49
« on: September 10, 2024, 12:10 »
No date yet "...In addition to contributor earnings growing through Stock licensing and Content Missions, we are excited to issue our second Adobe Firefly bonus payment to Adobe Stock contributors in the coming weeks..." https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/09/10/adobe-stock-continued-commitments-to-creatorsThe rest of the blog post seemed like marketing blather to me. I think what I see in the collection of genAI content (now over 126 million) is way too full of fake Eiffel tower, Grand Tetons, Tower of London, Brandenburg Gate, national flags that look nothing like the real flag (almost half a million "USA flag" with the wrong number of stars or stripes or both) etc etc. From the blog post "...Over the last year weve made significant changes to our site, policies, and procedures to help identify and ensure transparency around generative content, clarify and amplify our policies around the use of generative AI...". I completely get the idea that customers can use genAI tools to modify a licensed asset - that seems useful. But how is having a collection of misrepresented places, things and events in any way "transparent". Or useful.
50
« on: September 06, 2024, 15:39 »
I haven't seen this message. I'm assuming your tax information has gotten mangled somehow. When I look at the Tax Information section, my account says: | Form type | W-9 | | Status | Validated | | Expiration date | No expiration date |
Or has your address magically changed to a country other than the USA??
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