Politics! BAPLA wants to take over from DACS and control distribution. They want to grab money and power claiming it's on behalf of members. What will follow is only BAPLA members will be paid.

Rex did this before they were owned by SS. Read the whole story before making a wrong conclusion or accusing people. This is a partial investigation of Rex and one employee embezzling with forgery, but people jump to accusing SS?

Read every word, then read this. http://tinyurl.com/qavypbt

I've read both documents and my original statement still stands,

"Anyone who submits to Rex, owned by Shutterstock, may want to read this article from the EPUK. Basically, an emoployee/s of Rex have been filling in and Fraudulently signing forms claiming the DACS money without the Contributors permission "

At no point did I say it was a SS employee, only that Rex was owned by SS.

I certainly wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw them but, DACs is probably the most trustworthy of them. EPUK has done a great job in the past for standing up for photographers rights so I have no doubt they will continue this battle on until we have answers. The trouble is, Libraries & Photography councils etc all see photographers as a way to make money and when they see this big pile of money, they all want a bit of it even though it's not intended for them.

It all feels like there needs to be some proper regulation put in place but, then the politicians will get involved and no doubt they'd add quangos with an agenda to filter some of that pile of cash towards them.... for managing it of course!

In either event, Fraud has been committed and Rex (SS) needs to open their accounts to investigation to ensure this is not a wide spread thing within their company otherwise trust & share prices could tumble further!

Anyone who submits to Rex, owned by Shutterstock, may want to read this article from the EPUK. Basically, an emoployee/s of Rex have been filling in and Fraudulently signing forms claiming the DACS money without the Contributors permission http://www.epuk.org/news/rex-a-gross-betrayal-of-trust And we're supposed to trust Image Libraries! I just hope the Police are involved and a proper investigation is carried out!

I would say that is borderline/ not that bad compared to uploading the same icons over and over again. Different buyers could need ones saying "customer service" or "good idea". As long as they are keyworded correctly and the search algorithm is working. Lots of buyers wouldn't know how to customise it themselves

I would go further and say it is a smart move. The images cost far less than the time it takes a designer to add the words himself. If a designer can find an image that looks good (which some of those aren't though) and it contains the words they need then it makes financial sense for them to download all the versions he needs and save a sh*t loa of time (money) in having to produce them himself. Their client of course will be charged for the time it would have taken.

When searching for images etc you rarely find these appearing at the top of the search results.... in which case, I'd rather concentrate on what I'm doing rather than worrying about what other people are doing in completely different genres of images.

The icons and cannabis images on the other hand seem more than a little excessive!

Quote from: Elenathewise on September 27, 2015, 20:52

Excellent post HalfFull - I think this is exactly what's happening.   "...there is a a cut off that slows sales down once a threshold is met" - that's what I see. Which brings me back to my original question - does SS decide how much to pay each of us and we're just getting a salary? It sure feels like that to me. What's the point of improving then and growing your portfolio? Motivation - down the toilet...
Time to move out of this business.

For the last seven months I have been within. 5% give or take of my monthly threshold. Amazing! having siad this I really don't mind being on a monthly salary as long as its a good salary. LOL. so I can't complain.

As far as improving, growing your port, uploading?  well thats gone down the drain long time ago. What we are seeing now is exactly a carbo-copy of what happened with the traditional photo-agencies back in the mid 90s followed by a few years and then it all collapses.

I don't think we are seeing the collapse of the business just a business finding the limitations of it's current ranking system. This system works great when the business is growing fast and the increase split over all it's contributors is increasing each month. Now, with the volume of contributors and the slowing growth (in terms of revenue coming in) and the still massive increase in terms of contributors / images they are having to cut the amount of earnings to some.

They are still working on the principle of trying to please everyone but not really pleasing anyone. The bigger earners will feel they are being held back, lower earners will be happy to begin with until throttling comes in. Lower earners who supply a lot will wonder why their earnings don't increase in line with the growth of their port etc etc.

The system they employ means people earn well from the beginning (sales come in quickly) rather than seeing very little for months until image and contributor ranking builds up based on sales (without promotion). This more traditional approach of rewarding increased rank based on image popularity only means there will be fewer individual contributors at the top, not as varied selection of images (but still plenty, 1000's contributors still) but the ones that don't cut it will fall quickly and ultimately stop supplying, while the successful ones will continue to supply, possibly in greater numbers. This of course speeds up the demise of the less successful contributors as images are pushed further down.

The type of growth curve from this type of ranking is a very shallow to begin with but will steepen quickly once images move up the ranking system faster. Like a rolling snowball it can gather pace quickly. There are a few agencies out there that work with this more traditional approach.

SS will have to decide if it wants to continue to please everyone (and fail) or reward those whose images climb up the ranking system without assistance (and reduce the variety of contributors). Continuing the way they are going now will ultimately result in them losing more contributors from the middle to top as they will be full time and looking for increased earnings from their increased portfolios.

I believe SS are at a crossroads and they'll have to revisit how they rank contributors as FT starts eating into their client base more and more, which will in turn will mean contributors at SS will notice this capping more and more.

Month ended with a 24% increase in $ over previous BME with an 18% increase in vol of dls. They continue to impress with their consistency of improvement in terms of $'s and Vol. This is before the changes with adobe have had a chance to take effect (old sub contracts etc need to expire before moving to Adobe).

51 yesterday and double figures first thing today. Not bad..... it would be amazing if they weren't sub price and a little higher but, not going to complain at the volume they are pouring in at!