I vote with my feet. The days of hoping to convince sites like IS or SS are long gone. I am in power of my own productivity. I do not wait for answers anymore. Thus I just upload generic BS to Microstock agencies and the rest to other sites. Everyone CAN DECIDE what is his own value of his work. We are not dependent. And if 5 bucks are worth more than your self esteem, please go for it. Good luck. I am worth more.

In the end I think this is the result that the sites will have earned. Those who produce higher end content will find sustainable outlets for their work and micro stock will be left with the content they deserve. It will just take a few years to sink in to the powers that be at micro, that the best of the slave labor force has moved on.

I am not surprised by your findings. We hear feed the beast as a mantra all the time and I have always felt the practice is off base.

Your findings also show that many contributors are most likely also image buyers and how you treat them as contributors will translate into lost or gained site sales.

If that's too much to ask, at least they should hold off similars like DT does.
The way SS is doing just makes their collection even more redundant than it already is.

Completely agree, you only have to search a few large ports by keyword, to see just how redundant the collection has become.

As for review consistency you only have to look at the new images approved, to see that the review process is badly out of whack and has been for a very long time.

Shutterstock does not need constrictive feedback to support it's contributors.

"Whoooo Yay" http://tinyurl.com/pkuwt73

You must be bored Pete

Quote from: jrwasserman on July 03, 2014, 09:06

SS already gets all the content they need. Creating an exclusive collection for them would likely just raise their costs, with possibly no greater return. I don't think the motive is there for them when they can out-sell current competitors without exclusive content.

True. By upping commissions to exclusives (if that ever happened) there would have to be an answer for shareholders regarding the additional costs.  If, say, exclusivity costs SS another $250,000 a year, a shareholder would ask what's in it for me? You just pulled xx basis points off the gross margin.  There would have to be a clear, measurable return if they offered exclusivity.  In my mind the right kind of contributors must be wooed to go exclusive. In other words, maybe exclusivity is by invitation only, which would filter out basic portfolios where SS would not gain a market edge by allowing them to go exclusive.  So, let's take Sandralaise as an example.  She has a wonderful, powerful port.  That is the kind of target they might go after, as opposed to someone who snaps basic travel shots or tomatoes on white. Simply no advantage to them on the latter. This is to say that I don't think exclusivity in terms of the contributor making the decision is in the realm of possibility. More along the lines of applying for exclusivity, having your port reviewed for uniqueness, possibly sharing revenue numbers with SS, and then a pragmatic decision could be made.  This, in my mind, would FORCE losing agencies to up their commission game as they would be losing significant revenue from the likes of the sandralaises.

Yes Sandra has a powerful port and yet not one of her images was included in the Offset collection.

Stocksy was smart to include her work, which better than many images in the Offset collection.

Sure, I attempted to put in a balanced comment, everyone has their own opinions. It was just a thought, no biggie.

I do appreciate your view and comments, I many not agree with them, however I do think we are all entitled to express our viewpoints here.

I would also cthoman. Where is that Rob? Understand I wouldn't even try for Offset or Stocksy, what I shoot doesn't fit. That doesn't mean anything against those two, which seem to have an interesting idea and direction.

Quote from: cthoman on July 02, 2014, 17:48

Quote from: robhainer on July 02, 2014, 17:40

If you have high production value images, put them somewhere else. What's so hard to get about that?

If more of those places existed, I'd totally do that.

Here's something, maybe SS doesn't want to become something different? Maybe they aren't interested in going the way Yuri wanted. And by the way, no one else listened either. But the weight falls again on two names. Oddly the top two?  Do all the rest get a free pass or something?

Saying what if SS goes exclusive is like saying, what if I discover gold in my back yard. Highly unlikely. Then the speculation and some criticism, including how it would be wrong to favor exclusive in searches, or some flawed part of something that doesn't exist, is quite odd?

Meanwhile Gbalex I was mostly commenting on the repeating, redundant, repetitious, extended financial quotes, as if they actually have something connected to "SS offering exclusive" or most of the other threads. Not saying it's not interesting or there's anything untrue in them, just that we've read it and seen it. Then you are applying the same argument every time the name Microstcok and SS comes up, isn't building facts or data.

After so many slices of onion, you have obscured the flavor, point and purpose and all that's left is the taste of bitterness and tears. I don't really think that SS is terribly interested in our opinions, on the, right way they should run their business. Seems they've don't fairly well with the status quo?

The investors are interested in cash flow and recovery of their investment and then making profits. What would you do if you owned the company or had invested millions into Shutterstock?

I find nothing in your long discovery and financial exposure, unusual or out of line for a successful business.

However:

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 02, 2014, 17:37

...

To recap... New sites treat contributors great. Sites start doing well and begin doing bad things to contributors. The more power and leverage the site has the more bad things they do. And if company finances start hurting, bring on the pain. [/u]

The point that you don't seem to grasp is that by posting financial data, previous interviews with Jon, info from Earnings Calls, Yuris comments, etc. I am was attempting to drive home your final conclusion. It seems you finally got it!

Shutterstock does not give a rats @$$ what we think or how we are doing, they are in it for the money and if they will not listen to Yuri they certainly will not take our views or financial welfare into consideration.

I am not sure how you misses these points, which I have been trying to make for months.  If we want things to change for the better for contributors, we need to take all of the above into consideration. We are no longer dealing with single micro owners at the big 3, we are dealing with the wallstreet crowd and all that comes with those cutthroat business animals.

Quote from: robhainer on July 02, 2014, 17:40

If you have high production value images, put them somewhere else. What's so hard to get about that?

If more of those places existed, I'd totally do that.

My point in the nutshell and exactly what Yuri was trying to accomplish by communicating with the various micro sites. The bottom line is, he accomplished nothing by trying to work with them to move into midstock.

Therefore he was forced to move on to the next best, but limited option.

I dot think exclusive content should be preferred in the search. That just gives the customer a worse service. They should just be clearly marked as exclusive content and there should be a search option to look at only exclusive content.

Maybe SS itself is not the best agencyto experiment with midstock content. But they have the very high end with Offset and the low end with subs and Shutterstock, why not experiment with exclusive images? Not artist exclusivity, just images.

They could also then pick their favorites and promote them to offset, creating another stream of images that "they have grown themselves". The images on offset are mostly exclusive images anyway, they just come from many different agencies.

Smaller agencies like blend,tetra,plainpictures,westend61 are very good at nurturing and discovering talent, they work closely with their artists and together create a distinct style.

Offset could use the midstock platform to look for talent and more specialized images, they cannot find on Shutterstock.

Anyway it is up to them. But istock is mostly midstock with 180 million dollar market share plus the midstock market on getty itself (probably another few hundred million dollars) is quite an interesting number to look at.

And exclusive images pulls in customers. The higher prices means the artist can invest more in production or create content that is not generic.

Jon was fully aware that the market existed in 2007 and he chose to ignore & stiff his talent to go after market share.

April 4 2007

Snip

"Reports of the demise of traditional stock," Klein says, "are exaggerated."

But technology seems to favor his new competitors. "Our advantage is efficiency," says Shutterstock's Oringer. "And if Getty can use iStockphoto to upsell its customers, why we can't we use higher-priced photos to start moving into its market?"

http://tinyurl.com/22vdhj

I find it frustrating that history is ignored by newcomers regarding shutterstock, Jon purposely chose to keep pricing low on all images in the shutterstock collection, despite pleading by many of its high end contributors to raise prices and he did this to gain market share.

Shutterstock is the polar opposite of "blend, tetra, plainpictures and westend61 who are very good at nurturing and discovering talent, they work closely with their artists and together create a distinct style."

If Jon did not care about contributors historically, why do you think he will care about them now or in the future?  Case in point shutterstock had a chance to roll its best content into Offset. Instead they chose to stiff its best content providers. At this point Yuri, Andreas and other contributors chose to exit or place their higher end content elsewhere and who can blame them.

Snip

For a maturing photographer microstock is a great learning platform, but if you mistake �school� for �workplace�, you are in trouble. I did so for years.

I would estimate that for the last three years I tried very hard to convince myself that microstock was in fact the right place for the professional photographer. After all, my photography carrier was born here. Perhaps exactly because of that, I tried so hard to disregard a growing mismatch between microstock and myself, in product refinement, sophistication and budget. As we grew in skills, as our company grew, our distribution partners in microstock did not. Some agencies where ok, but in total, as a mass and as a workplace, the picture was not nice.

Sometimes it felt like having a michelin restaurant inside a burger joint and at the same time having to match the prices. At some point the professional gets tired of selling 12 course testing menues at 0300AM at burger prices.

I tried everything I could for three years to inspire our microstock partners to close the gab. I submitted plans, did projection forecasts, showcased examples that worked, presented solutions and had literally hundreds of meetings.

I tried every kind of approach I could think of to get the micro agencies to raise prices just a bit and leave place for the kind of photographer both photographers and customers love. I spent literally months in airplanes. No Luck.

http://tinyurl.com/phnjox6

Quote from: gbalex on July 01, 2014, 12:57

If that is the case I do not see anyone here discussing it. For instance in this thread most seem to feel that Jon is still making the decisions at shutterstock, when that has not been the case for some time.

While some of their corporate structure can definitely end up affecting us in regards to exclusivity and beyond, it really doesn't affect us until it does. I don't say that to sound like I'm not preparing for worse case scenarios or not paying attention to what is happening. It's just that whether they announce a chimp, Jon or the Dalai Lama is running the place, I can still only really go off of what I/we think will happen or what they say they are doing. And most of those tea leaves are read aloud here on a regular basis.

It does make a difference who is running the place, if you take a look at the track record of who is now running shutterstock and I have. Historically they have taken the company public, put things in place so that they are able to run up stock prices while granting themselves stock at $0 per share. (The Securities and Exchange Commission documentation for this has been censored) Sell those shares off until it is not longer possible to milk more from the company - i.e. our assets. At that point they bail and move on to the next victim.

Bottom line we should be worried about the value of our assets when they are done pillaging.

Quote from: gbalex on July 01, 2014, 11:07

Over time I have found that few have the stomach or inclination to uncover the cold hard facts. Life is more pleasant when viewed through rose colored glasses.

When this site began most of the people who visited here came to discus the cold hard facts of business, many of those people have moved on for one reason or another.

When this site censored my post by removing the cold hard facts, information which took several months to gather. Documentation taken directly from the SEC & Insight Venture Partner sites, it reduced my post above to just one persons opinion, which it is not.

Granted most people do not want take the time to uncover the reality of the situation and most people will not take the time to read nor understand it. However I posted a good deal of information that is relevant and important to contributors as business people and most contributors do not have the time or inclination to do their own research or read threads about SSTK stock.

Leaf left the longer post above that Jon wrote, but removed the actual documentation that is crucial to understand just who we are dealing with, when making business decisions regarding our future.

I am sure shutterstock much prefers the censored version which leaves the false perception that Jon is still in control of shutterstock intact.

Not to discount any research that went into it, but is there really anything being hidden from us? Most of it seems pretty much on the surface for us to see right in front of us.

If that is the case I do not see anyone here discussing it. For instance in this thread most seem to feel that Jon is still making the decisions at shutterstock, when that has not been the case for some time.

I have never seen anyone mention that Insight Venture Partners worked closely with Jon, to recruit the new executive team at Shutterstock, in particular the President, CFO, CTO, VPCD and other mid-level managers. http://www.insightpartners.com/assets/Uploads/SuccessStory/Shutterstock.pdf

Or that Jeff Lieberman a Board Director At Shutterstock, Inc. and an Independent Director at Shutterstock, Inc. is also a Managing Director at Insight Venture Management LLC.

I have never heard anyone here mention that Insight Venture Partners Tech Support mentored and worked closely with shutterstock's existing technology development team prior to James Chou CTO joining Shutterstock to develop a new search.

Or that Insight Venture Partners Introduced James Chou who is now Chief Technology Officer at Shutterstock, to Shutterstock from Insight�s network. He is the person responsible for overseeing and developing the new search at Shutterstock and they have been overseeing it's development from the beginning.

I have never heard anyone mention that David Fraga VPCD- Vice President, Corporate Development at Shutterstock was Previously an Insight Venture Partners Employee as an Analyst at Insight Venture Partners

http://tinyurl.com/mubpw4m

I wont recap what I found when looking into insider trades in regarding to Insight Venture Partners in its various renditions or insider trades for the new the member of new executive team at Shutterstock which Insight Venture Partners had a key role in appointing.

I remember reading the announcement by SS regarding this and they said that their ability to provide the fastest and most accurate search results to customers is part of the secret of their success, and if they gave exclusivity to some contributors, their images must take priority in the search, and this would interfere with getting the right image to the right customer. (I hope that makes sense ... please correct me if I am wrong).

So, it is not win-win-win situation for everyone - the customers lose, SS lose and only exclusive contributors win. So its not a good idea all round.

http://jonoringer.com/2013/01/13/why-going-exclusive-as-a-microstock-photographer-doesnt-work/
Snip

January 13, 2013
Why going exclusive as a microstock photographer doesn�t work.

Shutterstock has gone through many iterations to become what it is today. I started with 30,000 of my own images � and today we have a dynamic marketplace with over 20 million assets, 35,000 active contributors, and more than 550,000 customers. Today Shutterstock is the volume leader in the stock photography space, selling more than 2 images per second.

The marketplace for imagery that we�ve created could have gone in several directions, but we�ve learned a lot about both image buyers and image sellers over the past 9 years. I often get the question from buyers, sellers, investors, and press: �why don�t you encourage contributors to become exclusive at Shutterstock?� All of our competitors that are close to our scale offer exclusivity, but we do not. The answer seems simple to us, but it�s complex if you aren�t as close as we are to the business. The bottom line is that as a microstock photographer it just doesn�t make sense to be exclusive to any one agency. Here are the reasons why:

1) No longer is content the only competitive advantage, data is also a large component. To some this may not seem intuitive. We sell creative assets and at first glance one would think that having exclusive assets would be an advantage. We add over 10,000 images each day to our library of over 20 million images. We�ve sold over a quarter of a billion assets over the past 9 years. We have an incredible amount of data on these downloads. We know what search leads to what image, and at this point we can practically read the user�s mind in 14 different languages. Shutterstock is the volume leader, and therefore we are the data leader. In several languages we use the data we have to display the best search results for any given query. We obsess over search success � and if we can reduce the time it takes to get from search to download by a tenth of a second, we win that day. We iterate over and over and use whatever data we have to continuously find the best image for the customer. The best image for a given search isn�t one that another agency doesn�t have, it�s the one that will get chosen and downloaded. Out of over 20 million images, with 10,000 more each day, we�re likely to have the image you need. We believe that if we can get the right product to the buyer the buyer the quickest, we win in the end. Having exclusive royalty free content is of no advantage when a buyer is going to choose where to buy a photo � it�s getting a relevant photo the quickest. To see the user of this data in action, go ahead and try a search on Shutterstock � and compare it the same search on our competitors sites.

2) As a democratized marketplace, we believe in fairness. From the start I have believed that fighting for business will make Shutterstock the best product. By selling more of a contributors work, we build lasting relationships that are built on sales � not contracts that tie you to your distributor. If a contributor can make more with a certain image at another agency, then they should sell that image at another agency. This attitude makes the Shutterstock marketplace stronger in the long run because we have to continuously fight for both sides of the marketplace. At Shutterstock we take nothing for granted, and we like it this way.

3) As a marketplace, in order to guarantee that the buyer gets the right photo every time they search, no photo can be more special than another. Every single image at Shutterstock will cost the same once you have bought a subscription or image pack. This is unlike any other photo marketplace.

Image marketplaces that offer exclusivity to contributors must favor certain images. The sort order of each search has to favor exclusives in order to keep the exclusive relationship. If you aren�t selling more images at a higher price, why will they continue to stay exclusive? Are images that are held exclusively of better quality or more relevant to the search? This isn�t the metric to measure a specific search on. Are images that make the most money for the contributor or the agency the best image for a specific query? No. At Shutterstock we get to concentrate on one metric � search success. While other agencies sort their search results based on maximizing revenue, we maximize on search success.

4) Since all images are royalty free, exclusivity isn�t an advantage to the buyer. An exclusive image doesn�t mean that the image was used less than a non-exclusive image.

At Shutterstock we have a long term view. We believe that the image the customer wants is the best search result. By keeping things simple, not favoring exclusive images, and iterating on metrics like search success, we feel like we will be more and more successful for both our buyers and our sellers over the long term.

Jon