Hey guys,
what is the downside of uploading to 20 sites instead of just uploading to the top tiers?

I'd say you should stick with the top and middle tiers unless there's someone new that you think has a good strategy.

The big disadvantage of spreading your work everywhere is that many of the agencies behave very, very badly. It is in our best interests to keep an eye on them to know what they're doing, who they're partnering with and what changes in terms/prices/something else we need to be aware of. It's just too hard to keep a close eye on so many agencies, and given the largely useless returns from the smaller sites, I don't thing they're worth the time to keep an eye on.

You can read through threads at MSG about shenanigans from the agencies - this isn't some sort of paranoia on my part, but having lived with the ugly experiences since fall 2004.

For the small agencies you do choose to contribute to, (1) make sure you can delete your own work (so that when they don't reply to support requests and you want out you can get out), (2) make sure you know who you're dealing with - they have your valuable content and you don't want them shipping it straight to a torrent site, and (3) only go with those who have easy uploading and low payouts - you want to minimize the time you spend given the low likelihood of making anything significant.

...As stated previously, we do not support MSG as a dedicated support channel, though members from our team will come in from time to time to clear up any confusion and answer questions....

Scott, I appreciate you making an effort to address the concerns we have about the recent TOS changes.

No one has asked you to treat MSG as a support channel. I assume you come here to "talk" to us where we hang out because it's in your interests to do so. Pointing out that you don't have to come here may be factual, but comes across to me as a bit condescending.

Please note that the answers and explanations we�ve given previously on these topics are forthright and accurate, including what's in the blog post.

The information may be that, but it is far from complete. I think the reason there has been so much discussion here was not because people  didn't believe you, but because it seemed there had to be more to it. Repeating talking points doesn't help address that issue.
 

...When Shutterstock provides unwatermarked comp images, they are only provided to trusted �large accounts� that pay much higher prices than other Shutterstock customers. Comps are not offered through the subscription model. As a result, you receive higher royalties when a customer purchases the image. The pricing of these images can be in the hundreds of dollars. You receive the corresponding royalty based on your earnings tier (up to $120 or more per download).

This is one of the issues involving unknown licenses for unknown amounts of money and our content. Shutterstock has been doing this for a while now and I think it has all the elements of the much discussed Google-Getty deal - the contributor who owns the work being licensed has absolutely no information about the deal being done. The difference is that so far, Shutterstock appears to be doing "better" deals that Getty did. That doesn't alter the fact that Shutterstock has effectively given contributors no way to control how their work is licensed beyond leaving the agency.

   

The premier license is a variation of our standard and enhanced licenses, but contains individually negotiated terms as well as expanded rights that have been explained in this forum in the past...High royalties are often the result of a negotiated agreement with volume buyers such as large advertising agencies... Because the above items are individually negotiated with each large account, for competitive reasons and because of confidentiality restrictions, we do not publish the details of each license or transaction.

You haven't explained anything about the rights in the past - you've just stated each time that you can't explain because it's confidential.

We own the content you license, and yet you're saying you can't tell us anything about the terms on which you license it? I have assumed thus far - because nothing bad has come to light - that these terms are pretty reasonable, but I am not happy about there being no way for contributors to get details on these transactions. We don't need the names of the buyers - we don't get those for any other sales - so I don't see where confidentiality has any bearing on giving us more information.

We (contributors) have no rights to an audit in the current TOS, so we have no way to check up on what's going on inside this "black box" that Shutterstock is operating with the high end clients. This is a very different situation from the transparent setup that existed  at the beginning when I first signed up. We knew what the prices were and what the licenses were - now we don't.

...The intent of this new requirement is to prevent the disclosure of specific information to competitors of Shutterstock. ... It would violate the Terms of Service, for example, to provide a Shutterstock competitor with specific information related to your sales or your total earnings.

But that's not what the clause in the TOS says - it's much more broadly written than your explanation above. It says "Confidential Information shall not be disclosed to any third party other than representatives, agents, attorneys, accountants, auditors and advisors with a bona fide need to know, who shall first agree to keep the terms confidential."

Given that these forums are public and anyone can read the posts here, including staff at competitor agencies, effectively we can't discuss specifics here without "disclosing" to competitors. As another contributor pointed out, you don't spell out who gets to decide who needs to know what and what would you do if a contributor disclosed something you were unhappy with. I assume close the contributor's account?

If your intent is narrower than what's in the revised TOS, then you should change the TOS. As it is, it's vague, overly restrictive and seems in conflict with all the public disclosures you do as a company about your earnings. If this is all an overreaction to Yuri Arcurs leaving and the information he was able to give to Getty, then it's really shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. Most of us are much smaller fry who don't have the volume to be of much interest to your competitors.

You have the big stick in your hand - that you reserve the right to close our accounts at any time for any or no reason "...for convenience." You revise the TOS with several new restrictions - including a hold on our content in the event we decide to walk because we don't like those restrictions. You sell a lot of licenses for most of us and that has bought you a lot of contributor goodwill. Taking away our control of our content - our content, not yours - erodes some of that goodwill.

You say you strive to be transparent and open with contributors - this isn't it. It may be that you are being fair in the deals we don't get to know anything about, but it would feel fair and supportive if you'd be transparent enough to let us see that versus just saying "trust us".

Other than people over a certain age and at Christmas, I think the whole greeting card business is heading the way of the buggy whip and spittoon!

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/birthday-greetings-now-sent-over-text-and-twitter/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/american-greetings-small-card-companies_n_3000946.html

I sent site mail so the photographer can also weigh in - it's always best when the copyright holders fuss directly.

You need to find out from your host what your user name and password are and how to set up FTP. For bluehost it's ftp.your_domain_name.com

Once you can log in and look around to see the default files, you've done that part.

Then you're ready to set up the directory for your FTP uploads to go to. In the WordPress Stock Images section (ladybug) click on Upload Images and you'll see the FTP directory for your site as a full path organized like this:

/home_some number/probably_user_name/your_public_root_probably_public_html/wp-content/plupload/uploads/

My FTP client lets me specify the directory to connect to, but I can skip all the stuff up to my public root and just put the path from the WordPress installation, /wp-content/plupload/uploads/ in the above example

You will get more timely responses if you post in the Symbiostock forums rather than here...

Here's the thread on the Symbiostock forum that talks about this.

http://www.symbiostock.org/topic/53/resolved-trouble-downloading-images/

http://www.symbiostock.org/topic/30/upgrade-your-php-to-53x-you-wont-crash/

You can use cPanel at your hosting company's site to check your PHP version and change it if necessary

I don't know.  I don't think video doesn't sell at $450 because it's expensive.  I think it's not a big seller because people don't want to watch stock videos.

This is a funny diss of stock videos - my favorite is about 2 minutes in (the realtor voice over)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/what-if-gettys-terrible-stock-videos-had-sound

Perhaps!  I see no problem in them offering it, just them removing the perpetual license.

I'm using CleanTheme 2.0 not the basic child theme, so I'm not sure how my page sidebars might differ from yours, but it's not the page name but the template that will determine which areas you have in which widgets can go.

I have Home Page (Above Content), Home Page (Below Content) and so on. There is a Categories widget, but I'm not sure how I'd find out its shortcode (if there is one)

So far I've only uploaded JPEGs but there are some issues with memory limits on the server with larger images.

See these threads in the Symbiostock forum (which you should join as it's the best place to ask for technical support)

http://www.symbiostock.org/topic/92/image-processing-issue/

http://www.symbiostock.org/topic/103/changing-max-upload-file-size/

For multiple hundreds of dollars per sale I might be ok with the borrow before you buy, but no for 38 cents or a handful of dollars. The micro stock model means you can afford to buy a medium size unwatermarked for a comp

At the very least I want to know more about the terms. Alamy's model has had many contributors finding uses that aren't paid. Why would SS customers be any different?

Supposing they were about to implement the insane royalty chart from BigStock at Shutterstock? That would get people talking - and perhaps they'd want that not to happen. I used to make $xx and now I make 1/10th of $xx...