So,
You don't even know if an extended licence has been sold....
For wich reason you asked to redbubble to remove the product?

Really helpfull and interesting, thank you!

So, if I understand well (sorry I'm not english native) the agency put the expenses on the contributors...
This is really WORST than a commission cut, they are going to tell contributors that YOU pay a fee to have a place in agency.
Next step: reopen to any contributor... that pay the fee

No thanks. I'm happy the be kicked off from this. Simply ridiculous, I should have to pay for your work cutting from my fee... I don't know any anti basic economy rule choice

If I understand well!

Quote from: MatHayward on August 09, 2017, 17:26
Most designers prefer to add their own post processing effects to match their project exactly. Not all black and white conversions are created equally. Doing it yourself limits the options available to the customer and ultimately limits your customer base. In my opinion you are better off uploading the clean, color version of the file and letting the buyer adjust how they want.

Adobe Stock will accept some black and white content but it must have a serious "WOW!" effect to be considered.

-Mat

Hi Mat
I'm sure you're right generally speaking  but I have to say  that many of my bestsellers  are in black and white,  one of them is top on adobe/fotolia, hundreds of sells. I think that vintage style black and white is specifically linked to the content. I'm reasonably sure that same image in clean color would not sell the same

Quote from: Dumc on June 21, 2017, 16:25
If I'd run an agency, I'd rather pay more to well established image factories with good quality photos than newcomers whose images might not be so great. Paying more to image factories also makes sure, there is a constant flow of new good images.

If I'd run an agency, thinking that what you describe would be a good move, I'll pay that factories fixed prices for exclusive images. Surely I'd not leave door open to other contributors nor a chance for the factories to leave me for new professional horizon.

Your idea could be a choice, but in this case agency moves would be really different from what they actually do, in my opinion.

Quote from: jonbull on June 19, 2017, 14:00
real there is still somebody that don't think ss and other agency are controlling the level of sale for any contributor?
do you think that company like monkey business for example, who employ 10 15 people and have cost of 200 thousand pound minimum year, still produce content without any insurance that at least they file will be positioned good? dreamer

And which should be the agency interest doing this? Paying higher royalites, when they know that could have billions of good images paying less?

It's funny, this conspiracy idea is exactly the opposite of the other famous one, where the agency should distribute earnings to much more contributors to make them all happy.

So, is an agency interested to pay only big contributors, paying more royalties, or is it interested in paying less large number of contributpors, to earn more and make them happy? To be or not to be, this is the question

Quote from: jonbull on June 14, 2017, 12:30
Everything begin like this in any agency...some year of good motivation and pink glasses...then come the partnership and cut royalty in half....then come  lower price to attract more buyera...then come the cut of royalty to keep up with competition. Seen already in many places.

I don't believe AS will fall this way.
There is main difference between Adobe and competitor agencies: sell mictostock is NOT Adobe core business.
They could simply pay contributors and give out images for free, just to give Adobe products customer a big service and advantage.
Software developmente is the core business for Adobe, so I don't believe they have any interest in lowering contributor rates and make them angry. Adobe simply don't need to make money with photos and videos.

This is only opinion of course, let's see what will happen.

Quote from: mb on June 02, 2017, 14:35

Quote from: derby on May 31, 2017, 23:11
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?

Does those images have similar relative position if you search for them with more specific keywords?

Thread is very interesting, and I'll try to answer from my point of view. I'm not a db algorythm expert as you :-) I will just try to give myself an answer.

First of all, I see a little bit confusion and misunderstanding about the point. People here often talk about three different events:
1- constant drop of earnings
2- alteration of search results depending on buyer (area, past search, preferences...)
3- alteration of search results to push a cap on contributors earnings

Points 1 and 2 are absolutely real, with no doubt, for many reason. But have nothing to do with point 3.

We're discussing point 3. Ok.
Wich are the reasons for an agency to play in this way?
I see a couple of reasons: one is to pay less royalties giving advantage to new "0,25c$ level" contributors, other is to give buyers always new files to choose.
Can you imagine other reasons to cap earnings? I can't see any.

How to do this? The only way (only legal way!) to do this is to costantly change search results, mixing rating for every single image with contributor rating... it's really complicated, I know, but it can be done.

Giving the high numbers of new files every day the result should be to have a completely different search result page quite every minute (or second...).

But the point is to bear in mind the buyers advantage: agency probably want to give them a good mix of new and old good images. How can i cap earnings of old images? Simply impossible, as they should just disappear from search results. And if ALL good earnings should disappear from search results the buyer would be not very happy to find different images every day.

About contributors: ok, I could give a contributor rating, instead of image rating. I could, let's say, give a maximum rating for total images of a single contributor and push up and down his images (so his earnings) until a maximum amount. In this way, contributors with many images would be strongly punished!
No sense at all.

What I really think is that the growing mountain of images tend to make this calculation quite impossible, and any statistics is unreliable, as should depends from number of total files and number of files uploaded by single contributor.
What I really think is that there is a big contradiction between people who cry about drop in earnings and people who cry for stable earnings (too much stable?). The two points of view are at the opposite, but often we read both in the same thread, as in this.
Finally I cannot be sure about the real answer, of course
And, as I told before, I think Mb post is really interesting and I can imagine that something is true. What I believe is that final purpose of manipulation is NOT to give cap on earnings, as I can't see a clear reason to do this without big risk to penalize buyers.

Quote from: DallasP on June 01, 2017, 10:40
Incredibly easy ... when people purchase just write a cookie ... Ever been shopping on Amazon and then see the ads for the same item on Facebook?

Not when you're spending hundred of $ for a clip.
When you're looking for something of 100$ value do you just click on the first ads choice? I don't think so.

And you're talking about manipulation from the buyers point of view. This is absolutely normal, it's marketing.
Manipulate the contributor side is a completly different thing.

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on June 01, 2017, 09:26
If google can adjust your search results based on location you live, what you usually search, what is currently interesting, what had more views and many other factors, why would be impossible to adjust such a small scale database for many other reasons? Don't underestimate the power of code. Never.

Maybe I'm not explaining this very well ;-)
I'm sure that a lot of adjustment are done on database results for a single search. I simply don't believe that locking earnings on a specific amount for each buyers is one of this adjustment
I can believe that some contributors could have a generic rating that push their images or clips up and down, but this has nothing to do with selling the content. It depends on new content pushing, mixing with old ones, and better content with same subject moving up.

Quote from: Video-StockOrg on June 01, 2017, 08:07
Then explain me, why we see in three year analysis number of sold files per month slowly rising with number of uploaded footage, and those sold files per month are always in +-10 %. We've never seen one month being sold 10 files, and another 100. There is always between 50-70 files sold. This is clearly their capping system that gives priority for some factors we don't know yet.

This means nothing, it's perfeclty obvious that on long terms the numbers tend to be more stable, much more than day by day numbers.

Another important thing is that your assumption means that agency changes clips ratings in search results to adjust number of sells and earnings.
But the assumption has no strong basis: maybe for photo a buyer stops on first page and choose the image paying few pennies, but I don't think that this works for someone who spend hundred of dollars. This person will probably search very well and deep before buying a clip.
So it would be quite impossible for agency to push some clips and change the buyer direction in easy "search results" way.

Quote from: LDV81 on May 31, 2017, 23:22
I don't know if you know it, but you should perform such tests from different locations. You can use a decent VPN, e.g. TunnelBear or the one in Opera. And clear the cookies between searches. Of course, you shouldn't be logged in while testing.
FWIW, I don't perform such tests anymore, I am only interested in the amount that is transferred to me every month.

I know very well. It would be very easy to do it here, just screenshot from different user from all over the world. If I remeber well, this happened in the past, without evident results.

And, more important, ok SS could give different results, and so?
Which is the advantage for the agency to have so complicated and endless calculating for giving different results in different parts of the world?
I cannot understand this from any point of view.
For example, it's better to give more space to new images for european buyer search? Or for american ones?
Well, this kind of complication is completely useless from my point of view

Quote from: mb on May 30, 2017, 20:19
It is not simple to understand but in general if you are statistically significant seller changing in your sales is directly related to changing your behaviour/status or your buyers behaviour/status or even other contributors status/behaviour with which you are competing for a position in a search engine order.

Your post is really interesting and I believe that something is true.
But the whole line of reasoning has no commercial/economic sense at all.

About financial reason, if SS intention would be to reduce the money monthly payout to contributors, why some months ago they gave opportunities to lower the minimum payout? At the contrary they should increse it. Now they have to pay people that earn 30$/month only. Why?

About search algorythm, which kind of test do you did in past years?
For example, I have a couple of images always on the first search page for a very generic search ("movie") and they stay there from more than two years, moving up and down depending on download numbers, but always in the first page.
And this position is not changed after a lower earning month. So?

I think that all is connected to number of new files uploaded.
Number of file makes day by day harder to be in good position, simply this.
Obviously, for sure, there are search algorythm adjusting: and it's absolutely obvious that sometimes new contributors could have good rating, because they give more money to the agency. But giving this as a normal rule would expose the agency itself to a great risk.

So what you are not calculating in your statistics is the risk of the agency to give its buyers low value images. And this is still a point for big buyers (surely not for a single buyer)

Quote from: ShadySue on May 25, 2017, 22:07

Quote from: derby on May 25, 2017, 11:46
Where do you read about 10% royalties?
Eyeem gives 50/50 to the author, and the Eyeem/Getty agreement is not public, I think

So if you choose to submit to eyeem, you don't actually know what percentage of Getty's take Eyeem gets, so you are getting 50% of
That's not a business 'decision', it's entering a great Lottery!

You're right :-) but it's perfectly normal, as it's exactly the same for all other agencies and their partnership. Who knows the company agreement?

Where do you read about 10% royalties?
Eyeem gives 50/50 to the author, and the Eyeem/Getty agreement is not public, I think

Quote from: shiyali on May 25, 2017, 01:26

Quote from: ShadySue on May 24, 2017, 23:56

Quote from: tdezenzio on May 24, 2017, 23:19
I've had some good sales from Eyeem with a recent sale for $105.00 licensed by Getty.

Wow! So Getty sold it for $1,050!!!

It's a personal business decision. Everyone decides what to sell, where and for what.

I think that most important point is not the "AI" software efficiency.

The point is that a buyer should know EXACTLY what he wants. And for conceptual images I'm quite sure this is not real. The buyer simply doesn't know exactly which kind of image want.
This side of human creativity will never be overtaken by any artificial AI.

Well, I hope so :-)