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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
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476
« on: April 27, 2023, 16:31 »
I was able to redeem my code (shortly after they were issued). I would assume this is just a bug - like the one where tax forms weren't available for a while - where they aren't treating it as a high priority problem.
477
« on: April 26, 2023, 07:53 »
Just when you think SS's reviewing standards can't fall any lower...
478
« on: April 25, 2023, 18:51 »
480
« on: April 23, 2023, 17:17 »
Canva has released a "report" on the visual economy. It reads to me like a marketing piece for Canva - the survey behind some of the so-called stats seems very squishy. 85% of decision makers say pictures are cooler than words... Teaser https://canvavisualeconomy.com/Report https://www.canva.com/design/DAFfSbzYlmY/iWAW-iVnR1q925CeYOV8CQ/view?utm_content=DAFfSbzYlmY&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelinkSample customer testimonial from the CMO of reddit "Canva has been a valuable tool to speed up and streamline our creative team's processes. It helped our creative team shift their time from one-off bespoke requests to high-leverage brand systems and programs. Weve saved over 21,000 hours of design time in just six months after the internal adoption of Canva" The very busy moving chart that says that Brazil has has the most Canva designs published of any country seems to illustrate how pointless most of this is - as far as I know Brazil is still pretty much the same as before it lead the world in published Canva designs. I didn't know that 90% of global business leaders use digital whiteboards at least once a week - exhibit M in the pointless factoids parade... At some point I just couldn't take it any more so I stopped reading  But you may have a stronger constitution than I do...
482
« on: April 23, 2023, 13:19 »
I always wondered why iStock doesn't have a tool that would tell you what you would be earning if you were exclusive with them at your current sales levels. I understand it is not totally straightforward in that exclusive assets can be more expensive which might impact sales. but they tend to keep it more of a mystery than it need be.
Ages ago there was a spreadsheet a contributor did that predicted based on your current sales (tracked month by month) when you'd reach certain milestones and I think it had something to show what you'd earn as an exclusive. But that was before the current rules about the Essentials & Signature collections. If you were to become exclusive, anything you submitted while an indie stays in the Essentials Collection after you become exclusive - you just earn the higher royalty rate on the sale. Newly submitted content goes into the Signature collection https://contributors.gettyimages.com/article/5273?article_id=5273"...any content you submitted to us while non-exclusive will not change collection, however, your Essentials content will be exclusive as well. All files will earn your higher Exclusive royalty rate." FWIW, I think you would not do well to become an iStock exclusive now (not you personally; anyone)
484
« on: April 20, 2023, 13:55 »
...Account closed for Twitter Posts? I'll assume they also blocked you from Twitter access to their pages and removed your posts?...
They had blocked me from their contributor and main accounts on Twitter, but you can see and read (though not respond) if you are not logged in (in an incognito window). Same with LinkedIn. They couldn't remove my posts because they weren't made as replies to their posts (after they blocked me) but the hashtags made sure they were found and lots of unhappy contributors were amplifying the noise in the middle of 2020 when this all blew up. Stuff like this: https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1296943168185700352
485
« on: April 20, 2023, 08:39 »
There is a table of the account fees - click through a link from the page explaining the new scheme. I read through it and then canceled my account. I make a little bit there (and to be fair, I did not actively market my stuff there) but they're clearly signaling they want the casual shop seller gone, so I am obliging them
486
« on: April 19, 2023, 12:51 »
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/04/19/2650115/0/en/Stock-Photography-Marketplace-Vecteezy-Enters-Into-Exclusive-Deal-with-Shutterstock-to-Further-Unlock-Visual-Storytelling-Content-for-Marketers.htmlI wondered why SSTK was down today (71.33-2.39 (-3.24%) As of 01:35PM EDT. Market open.) and the first article on Yahoo's page for their stock was a link to the announcement above. That doesn't show up on SS's press release page for whatever reason. There's not a lot of detail about what exactly the deal means. Buzzword salad says: "With this partnership, the millions of designers, marketers and entrepreneurs that regularly visit Vecteezy in search of affordable stock imagery will have access to even more files through the high-quality Shutterstock images that will populate alongside those already on Vecteezy. This partnership increases the total number of premium and relevant results on Vecteezy and creates a shared pipeline of high intent visitors between the two brands." Looking at Vecteezy's paid plans, you can get up to 73,000 images a year for $108 - and note the "unlimited" downloads that allows up to 200 downloads per day!! Do the math and that would come to a price of $0.001479 - about 0.15 (note that's fractions of a cent) It's possible the stock market is gloomy about Shutterstock today for some other reason, but we may learn more next week (Apr 25) when they reveal their Q1 2023 results.
487
« on: April 19, 2023, 11:45 »
I currently earn nothing from Shutterstock as they closed my account when I protested their 2020 royalty cuts, but the same was true for them before I became an outcast.
Were you banned just because you wrote to them that you are against lowering payments?
I had been posting a lot on twitter about the reduction in royalty rates and they closed my account twice. The first time ostensibly because I'd changed my profile picture in violation of their rules (which I hadn't - my profile picture was the same boring headshot it had been for ages) and the second time because of my public comments: "We disabled your account in consideration of your public comments regarding Shutterstock. While we respect your opinion, it may not be a good fit for Shutterstock to represent your content. In section 4 of the TOS, Shutterstock reserves the right to terminate an account in Shutterstock's discretion."
488
« on: April 17, 2023, 08:28 »
Mat Hayward has shared his email address in many threads in this forum - I'd suggest contacting him that way if you'd like his assistance: MSG thread on support delay
489
« on: April 15, 2023, 12:05 »
I knew nothing about LAION and thought I'd search to see what I could find. According to Wikipedia, LAION is a non profit but "...its creation was funded by Doodlebot, Hugging Face and Stability AI, the AI company behind the funding of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, which was trained on it". Here's LAION's own web site: https://laion.ai/From their projects list, they describe "LAION5B High-Res" as "A subset of the LAION5B database, with high resolution images oveer 1024x1024, containing 170 million samples." Is this really just links as the lawyers' letter claims? https://laion.ai/projects/That's not what this TechCrunch article says: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/12/a-startup-wants-to-democratize-the-tech-behind-dall-e-2-consequences-be-damned/And LAION's own description contains the following: "We thank our sponsors hugging face, doodlebot and stability for providing us with computing resources to produce this dataset! We also thank the-eye.eu for hosting the image embeddings and a copy of the whole dataset". You don't have to host "image embeddings" if all you have are links to other sites on the web. https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/An article from April 7th in The Byte says that Stable Diffusion has serious financial difficulties. Whether or not that will have an impact on LAION I have no idea. https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-risk-going-underHere are links to the other sponsors/founders: https://huggingface.co/https://doodlebot.ai/https://stability.ai/
491
« on: April 15, 2023, 09:12 »
...But instead of removing his images, Laion has sued Robert for damages for wanting to have his files removed
I used Google Translate to read Robert's very interesting article (so I'm hoping it's a good enough translation that what I read in English is accurate). I think the lawyer's claims that his client did nothing wrong are, IMO, weak at best. However, the lawyer is not suing Robert for damages. The English translation says (emphasis mine) "We would also like to point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) of the Copyright Act if unjustified copyright claims are made against her." So I think this is a thinly veiled threat designed to get rights holders to back off - they can assert those claims, but they haven't done so yet. Regarding the basic approach of their defense, they are saying they only gathered links, not content, so there's nothing to remove and no harm done. "The content behind a link can only be accessed at the linked location and not elsewhere, so that in particular there is no duplication in the sense of copyright." If you built an AI model using those links to access the publicly available images - on a stock agency web site or on any website displaying legitimately purchased or wholly owned images - I'd argue that use of the images facilitated by those links was outside the terms of any license granted by any stock agency. Isn't the role of the entity providing the super-convenient database of links analogous to handing over a set of keys to all the houses in a town so a third party can go look around, take pictures, maybe borrow a few things for a few hours? The database of links is a useless waste of time unless it facilitates a third party's access (for AI dataset training purposes). This is a racketeering-type operation where the fact that there are lots of tiny pieces each of which looks harmless on the surface tries to disguise the overall purpose. Using copyrighted works to train AI without compensating rights holders.
493
« on: April 14, 2023, 08:48 »
Thanks for enquiring Rob - I wonder how long it would have taken them to remove the collection if you hadn't asked? It's really disheartening that Getty will hand over royalties to the bankrupt EyeEm - I understand their contractual obligations, but I have to wonder if they could have removed the EyeEm collection from sale immediately and started talks with TalentHouse/EyeEm to try and get the payments to contributors directly. There were posts here about contacting Getty to remove EyeEm files as they weren't getting paid - months ago - and Getty refusing to. Really shoddy treatment of contributors. https://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/getty-takedown-request/
494
« on: April 14, 2023, 08:25 »
I also have some $0.33 and theoretically shouldn't have any income under $0.38 - but there's no way that's because of the tax form, because that's up to date. All this is now no longer transparent and traceable at all agencies.
For me (I get 38 min. for subscriptions) the 33 royalties have all been "custom". There was a discussion about this here when the new Creative Express and a pro version were announced - Mat said we get a percentage of what the buyer pays . I asked if there was a minimum and Mat repeated that we get a percentage. Fortunately, so far, there have only been one or two per month at 33 https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/announcing-adobe-creative-cloud-express/This was a theoretical setup from the "unlimited" subscriptions - it's possible the 33 come from that, but there's no way to know https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-announcing-pro-edition-for-creative-cloud-for-teams-and-enterprises/msg563172/#msg563172My spreadsheet tracking (simple) stats now monitors the minimum and maximum royalties in a given month, so I'll see if anything goes below 33
495
« on: April 12, 2023, 16:20 »
I've opted out - thanks for the link or I'd never have found it.
I have images at Pond5 which is largely pointless as they don't sell images very well. I don't believe I've seen any email from Pond5/Shutterstock explaining what would be happening with AI training in advance of it actually happening. They get half points for offering an opt out after the fact, but that's offset by no information whatsoever about how the amount was arrived at.
I am not surprised to read posts about people happy to take the money and ask no questions, but remember later on if you don't like the end results, that you said OK.
Before you say OK, think about the folks who said OK to Canva's 6 months of double earnings and then later weren't happy to see the bottom drop out of the licensing that paid them well in favor of the fractions of a cent for the all-you-can-eat buffet where Canva keeps most of the subscription revenue.
Agencies bait the hook with a little cash, provide little or no transparency about what they're doing, and because the agencies have been squeezing contributor earnings so relentlessly of late, contributors feel they have no option but to take the crumbs offered.
496
« on: April 12, 2023, 13:48 »
I wish I could say I am surprised, but SS has been allowing low quality filler for some time - I suppose they think it impresses investors to see growth in the collection size. The quality of this - totally aside from the repetition - should have resulted in rejections   No one in the UK or US would put the currency symbol after the number, and these items are JPEG so moving things around isn't as easy as with a vector. And nonsense like this (percentage is floating with no reference at all):  Not to mention that I've seen a lot of sale signs over the years, and I've never seen 91% - ever. And I agree that the ones that say they're trendsetters and superstars likely aren't. It's like those web sites that tell you how many people have bought an item in the last hour or how it's almost sold out - marketing BS. This has high usage?  
498
« on: April 12, 2023, 08:54 »
Sounds to me like you can. They have probably been inspired by dribbble doing a similar thing.
I just went to take a look at dribbble and noticed that their marketplace is "Our marketplace of digital assets helps independent designers earn a living doing what they love while giving you the perfect building blocks for your creative projects, all powered by our sister site Creative Market" I didn't realize Creative Market had been acquired by dribbble in 2020 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dribbble/company_financialsNot certain that Creative Market's licenses are used for dribbble purchases, but the names are the same and the "learn more" link on dribbble goes to a Creative Market page. https://creativemarket.com/licenses/general
499
« on: April 11, 2023, 13:49 »
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trillium-capital-issues-open-letter-to-getty-images-board-301794027.htmlI can't imagine any of the suggested actions Trillium lists would bring about anything good for the business long term or contributors, short or long term. Getty did two rounds with private equity owners and IMO current woes can be traced back to that * era. Sale to a "strategic buyer" seems unlikely - they ended up with the SPAC deal because they couldn't find one of those as I recall. "A substantial cost restructure and reduction in labor should be announced and implemented by Getty." - Royalties are costs to agencies... Paying down debt sounds great, but they wouldn't have all that debt except for the prior iterations of looting. And as for a debt restructure so they can do stock buybacks, I'm left speechless (not really - it's a terrible idea for everyone except those hoping to sell their shares and get out). They also ding Getty execs with doing a poor job courting the investor community and think they need to buy more stock on the open market so they have more "skin in the game". Getty's stock is down 6.55% so far today - I assume as a reaction to this investor letter? Not much that contributors can do about this, but it's worth staying aware of the businesses which license our work.
500
« on: April 11, 2023, 09:43 »
I missed this blog post announcement from March 9th: https://www.behance.net/blog/sell-downloadable-assets-on-behanceI took a look around to see what fees the platform charged for items sold there: https://help.behance.net/hc/en-us/articles/13356478351387-FAQ-What-are-the-fees-The payment processor (Stripe) takes a cut, but Adobe takes only 30% - versus we get only 30% for licenses via Adobe stock. That left me wondering about more than having an outlet for file types I can't license via Adobe Stock (I have some PSD files at Pond5 for example, which is great except for Pond5 sales being more rare than hen's teeth). This blog post says you can still license on other sites (i.e. it's not exclusive): https://www.behance.net/blog/get-paid-on-behanceFrom the above (emphasis mine): "You can specify the type of license, set your own price for each asset, and continue to monetize on other platforms." Does this mean I can license items on Behance that I also license on Adobe Stock? I'm thinking of a scenario where the JPEG is licensable on Adobe Stock, but a PSD with some additional features is for sale on Behance? The license offerings are different (simpler) https://help.behance.net/hc/en-us/articles/7416981176603-License-Types-for-AssetsThe FAQ makes it clear that transactions are between the seller and purchaser - i.e. Adobe doesn't get involved (other than collecting the platform fee and "... we will promote your content to our audience of 40 million members. "). From the link below "All transactions on Behance are between the purchaser and the creator. If any issues arise or you want to request a refund, you should contact the creator directly" https://help.behance.net/hc/en-us/articles/12810196558107-Learn-more-about-transactions-on-BehanceI'm not sure about investing the time in setting up shop on Behance, but it'd be nice to have something in the FAQ specifically addressing any issues that apply to Adobe Stock contributors who also sell through Behance
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