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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
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576
« on: August 09, 2022, 10:40 »
So the first of my PNG files was approved this morning, but it's puzzling that while it shows as PNG for the format when viewed from the contributor side of the site, when I do a keyword search on the buyer side, the file type shows as JPEG, so while it might get purchased anyway, the reason for uploading it (and arguably a large part of the value to a buyer) is invisible.
Is this just a temporary glitch?
If Mat wants to take a look, the file number is 521901724
Another rather odd anomaly. I had two PNG files approved this morning, both illustrations (I have uploaded some isolated photos too, but those are still in the queue), both of which appear on the buyer side as JPEGs.
If I turn on the "isolated" checkbox in a search, the umbrella image (521901724) shows in a search but the wildflowers in a vase (522096417) does not.
It's not keywords as the wildflowers in a vase has the isolated keyword and umbrellas does not (both have the transparent keyword). I can't see any obvious reason these two PNGs would behave differently in a search
577
« on: August 08, 2022, 19:26 »
An update basically to say that nothing (that I can see) has improved with the keyword suggestions. It would be completely wrong - misleading for the buyer - for this image to have most of the keywords suggested. Christmas, candy, bow, cane, valentine, food, xmas, candy cane, gift...Interesting that although it picked out red, it didn't get white or blue (the other two colors in the ribbon). It could have picked Bastille Day or another celebration from a country with red, white and blue flag colors. And as far as choosing heart, the data set this was trained on must have included the world's worst images of hearts 
578
« on: August 07, 2022, 17:28 »
That's funny - I had uploaded something earlier and never even noticed that I have some PNGs that I had done for other sites, so I just uploaded one as a test to see how it goes.
580
« on: August 01, 2022, 17:12 »
I read the information Freepik provided about their new calculation (from the link above) and it seems pretty straightforward - the diagram makes it pretty clear: https://support.freepik.com/servlet/rtaImage?eid=ka03V000000Y1uY&feoid=00N3V000001WcHX&refid=0EM3V000003DfDjIt seems that the big change is that before they took all subscriptions as one big pot and then divided up 50% of that. Now, each subscription is tallied individually so that you could be a big winner, as a contributor, if your images were downloaded by subscribers who didn't use many images that month. Likewise you could be a big loser if your downloads were from a subscriber who used a lot. A hypothetical example (assuming I've understood this correctly). There are two monthly subscription prices, one if you pay yearly and one if you go month-to-month. I've rounded these to make the math simpler and taken two extremes of download numbers to highlight how the system works (in other words this isn't likely to be exactly what you'd see. Subscriber A pays $20 a month and makes 10 downloads that month Subscriber B pays yearly, $12 a month, and makes 100 downloads that month Downloads from A pay $1 each (50% of the subscription goes to contributors) Downloads from B pay $0.06 each. Freepik's share is the same in both old and new scenarios - 50% of $32 or $16 Under the old system, 110 downloads would pay contributors $0.145 each Under the new system, if you had four downloads from subscriber A, you'd receive $4; but if they were from subscriber B it would be $0.24. From the old system you'd have received $0.58 for four downloads Obviously you would likely have a mix of heavy and light users so it could come out about the same. With all of these schemes to share a percentage of the revenue, the agency is sitting pretty no matter how many downloads subscribers make. It's the users who lose out if more files are downloaded unless there's a (reasonable) minimum royalty How a royalty scheme prevents any type of fraud is a mystery to me. If there's fraud they should tackle that by stopping it, no?
581
« on: July 30, 2022, 16:41 »
I really don't understand what game is being played with Getty's stock - or what any of that might mean for the operations of the company (or for contributors to the company) - but on Friday a crazy jump in Getty's stock price occurred. It closed Thursday at $10.50 and closed Friday at $26.15 This article showed up in my Google alerts and suggested "Speculators believe they have a short squeeze opportunity with Getty based on an inadequate float of public shares." https://investorplace.com/2022/07/gety-stock-alert-getty-images-rockets-200-after-spac-merger/I don't understand the threads on this subject at Stocktwits (just that it sounds very hyped up and unstable to my untrained ears) https://stocktwits.com/symbol/GETYAll this after one whole week as a public company again... Edited Sept 1 to note that GETY closed today at $14.42 (its high while the crazies were buying was $37.88). A major shareholder, Neuberger Berman Group, sold over 3 million shares on August 29, but not sure if that was behind the drop. Edited Sept 12: GETY closed today at $11.77. I think the game players have moved on...
583
« on: July 27, 2022, 16:05 »
Shutterstock posted its Q2 2022 financial results yesterday (July 26) and in the earnings call, tried to put an upbeat spin on results that missed what analysts had been expecting. The stock ended the day at $54.40, down, but not as bad as the early morning reaction which had it at $50.04. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-shutterstock-is-falling-hard-todayInvestor relations site: https://content.shutterstock.com/investor-report/index.htmlPress release: https://investor.shutterstock.com/node/12451/pdfEarnings call transcript https://seekingalpha.com/article/4525885-shutterstock-inc-sstk-ceo-paul-hennessy-on-q2-2022-results-earnings-call-transcriptPerhaps the disappointing financials account for a reduction in the amount of capital SS projects it will return to shareholders in 2022. It was $132 million in the Q1 estimate but is now $105 million - that's still almost double the $58 million returned in 2021. Not sure it's good news for contributors, but it could have been worse if they'd kept to their earlier number when revenues were weak. Even though revenues increased, that appeared to be largely a result of acquisitions, not any growth in their existing business - at some point they'll run out of things to acquire "E-commerce revenue growth was primarily driven by revenue generated from our acquisitions of PicMonkey and Pond5. Revenue from our Enterprise sales channel increased 15% as compared to the second quarter of 2021, to $79.5 million, and represented 38% of second quarter revenue in 2022. Enterprise revenue growth was driven by our multi-asset product offerings and continued momentum in Shutterstock Studios and Shutterstock Editorial. Enterprise revenue growth also benefited from our acquisitions of Pond5 and Splash News."Subscriber revenue in Q2 was down from Q1 ($84.7m vs $85.4m) even though up over Q2 2021. In the earnings call, the new CEO boasted about the number of customers: "...on our marketplace, 2.1 million customers purchased content from a community of 2.2 million contributors. That's a contributor base that is larger than our nearest competitor by 4X.". In the Subscribers chart from the investor site, it says Shutterstock has 368,000 subscribers in Q2, up from 359k in Q1 (and they note that those numbers excludes PicMonkey, Pond5 and Splash News). Not sure where the rest of the 2.1 million came from as I'm guessing the enterprise business is smaller numbers than the e-commerce business. As far as the boast about number of contributors goes, I think it's fair to say that all those hopeless portfolios of less than 500 unsaleable images mean nothing to the agency's success or a customer's view of the freshness or quality of content. I took a look at new photo content on Shutterstock just a few minutes ago and some of it is truly dismal - there is good work there too, but their boast about having the best/largest library would be more interesting if they tightened up their inspections: "... we have the freshest content from around the world with 5 million to 10 million assets being added every single quarter. Our content library is by far the largest and deepest by a significant margin with 484 million creative and editorial images... In short, from a customer perspective as a result of Shutterstock's extensive growing library and ability to service the right content it means that Shutterstock is the go to destination for your content needs whether for example you are a creative professional, a small business owner, or a marketing professional. ... Ultimately world class content is the lifeblood of Shutterstock's business and the reason why we are the dominant player in the market."Whether or not the analysts bought this view of Shutterstock's place in the market isn't clear, but the first question was asking for detail on why Shutterstock was confident that their content was going to bring about the results they predicted. This was the CEO's answer: "We've got the leading position in contributors, the leading position in content acquisition. We've done some acquisitions to further bolster our position in content and we understand that getting the right content and putting it in front of our customers so that they can actually convert better, drives the fly wheel forward. "The answer from the finance guy about which customer segments looked to be strong & growing vs. weaker mentioned Shutterstock moving from serving creatives to offering tools so that anyone could be a creative. That translates to me as competing with Canva which as far as I can see is the leader in that area. He mentioned "... tools first, template driven design tool subscription...", Creative Flow, which launched last month https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/introducing-creative-flow-create-with-confidencehttps://www.shutterstock.com/pricing/creative-flowNot sure what image use as part of Creative Flow means for contributors - possibly a subscription royalty? Hennessy was asked a question about how SS was going to manage growth and this word salad was his answer: "When I talked about investing for growth in our channels, we're going to obviously make sure that our core continues to be healthy. And in places where we see now new opportunities, and again, we talked a lot about enterprise, there are large scale customers that want what we have. And we're going to enable that, and we're going to enable that fast because as we enable that quickly, that widens and deepens our competitive mode. So that's really what I mean, but we will be responsible stewards of our investors' capital and the capital that we kick off from our business. And, again we'll stay the course in terms of delivering high value for our shareholders and long-term margin expansion."
584
« on: July 05, 2022, 09:52 »
I left Alamy a few months back over the bottom-of-the-barrel sales & royalties coupled with them cutting the royalty rate if their low-ball sales dropped you below $250. Excluding distributor sales just makes the new deal even worse - what's next; only count sales reported on Sundays??
Please let us know what they tell you after you argued the toss. It's possible their lawyers are as incompetent as their software people (the erroneous storage fee nonsense when they made the royalty rate changes) and they'll need to be more specific.
Tossers!
585
« on: July 03, 2022, 15:24 »
I don't think you have a complete picture of Adobe Stock's customer base. I don't have details - Adobe does but I doubt would make things public - but I can see from my own royalty reports that what you outline isn't accurate. Royalties labeled as "custom" come in part from large corporate customers and while they aren't the $100+ amounts of SS's SODs (at least I haven't see anything like that), they are between $1.20 and $1.30 each. Likewise, your view of Shutterstock's clients appears off base - their own investor presentation (from last quarter on the investor microsite) has a breakdown of their customer type (by business size) and they say large companies are only 19% of their business: https://d3kqgz5iyf5gxy.cloudfront.net/Investor+Report+Q4/Customer-Breakdown-by-size.png
586
« on: July 02, 2022, 22:59 »
There are comments in the Alamy forum that this is a bug - an obsolete storage program that surfaced when they made the changes for the new 20% royalty rate July 1. Several people say they reported it, but perhaps the more reports the better?
Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk
587
« on: July 02, 2022, 10:18 »
I'd think this would be analogous to a cross between an illustration and a 3D render. Definitely not a photo.
If you use images of your own as reference for things like an eye, then that would work like a photo reference for an illustration. Property releases for your own photos used in other works and, depending on how much of the person is used in the generated image, possibly a model release for the person in the source photo.
I don't think there is anything currently in use at agencies to indicate you have the rights to the software that generated an image when it's not one of the commercial 3D products. Perhaps a property release from you for your own software?
588
« on: July 01, 2022, 13:27 »
Another contributor (not me; I left Alamy earlier this year) reported that Alamy's answer to their query about how they could still be getting cheap distributor sales so long after opting out was that the sale was from much earlier (before opt out). Distributors take a long time to report sales to Alamy.
589
« on: July 01, 2022, 13:24 »
I have been licensing stock in one form or another since 2004 and I think the OP is 99.99% wrong about what's changed over the years to substantially reduce income opportunities for contributors.
Most of the specifics have already been itemized above, but I think it boils down to the fact that the broad licensing model - that you can greatly expand the market for licensing imagery if you simplify licensing and lower the price from Getty's $500+ fees - was wildly successful.
Big success meant that people looking only at the money to be made - and largely ignoring careful curation of collections, enforcing keyword and quality standards, and other steps that would ensure a sustainable business - rushed in to ride the wave of the newest success story. Shutterstock going public and Getty being trashed by two private equity owners were two examples of businesses transformed to focus 100% on siphoning out as much cash as they could for owners/shareholders in the short term.
If there was any impact at all of people publishing books or blogs or YouTube channels about how to get rich quick as a stock contributor, it was minuscule.
590
« on: July 01, 2022, 11:05 »
The current size of the free collection is much lower than it was in April 2022 (when it was 1,054,293 items including 817,193 photos). Not sure if this will grow again, but it's now just over 765k total with 544k photos.
A number of the large initial contributors to the free collection - Wavebreak, Pressmaster, Wirestock, Rawpixel, Freepik for example - have reduced or eliminated their free content
591
« on: June 30, 2022, 16:19 »
592
« on: June 30, 2022, 12:34 »
594
« on: June 29, 2022, 19:14 »
I feel compelled to add one more example of suggested keywords. I cannot imagine how this mundane image got so misinterpreted.
I know I don't have to choose wrong/spam keywords, but it just seems that there's something fundamental amiss when a photo of pallets of paving stones in a driveway gets suggestions of sea, beach, boat, sky, and pollution (among others). I included a full list of my keywords to show they can't have been behind any of the off-base suggestions.
I think a few suggestions were closer to reasonable, even though I didn't use them - such as tree, concrete, waste - but I hope somehow those working on this feature will look at how utterly wrong the AI's guess at the image's objects was, not just note that I ignored the suggestions.
595
« on: June 26, 2022, 22:40 »
Uh oh Jo Ann, what happened to your shower!
Either an alien invasion, or spontaneous disintegration of tempered glass Fortunately I wasn't in it at the time - it sounded like a gunshot had gone off in the house. As with all house-related things, never miss an opportunity to find a stock image or two as a result!
596
« on: June 24, 2022, 09:51 »
...RPD alone tells you nothing - it's the actual income that matters - it can come from either high RPD & few DL or low RPD and many DL - therefore RPD is irrelevant as a measure
There is one way in which RPD is a very useful metric for contributors. Is it increasing or decreasing over time? If an agency is increasing downloads by cutting prices and slashing royalty payments, overall income for contributors can go up, for a while, especially for good portfolios with very saleable work. The problem is that you can't keep that up for the long term - at some point you can't grow the volume more and the price cuts/discounts have lost any effectiveness they once had. Growing monthly income totals with a falling RPD can be a sign of an unsustainable situation.
597
« on: June 21, 2022, 22:26 »
I thought I'd upload a second file with very different content to see how the suggestion tool managed compared to the earlier example. Better, but still had problems with suggesting things that weren't in the image.
Description: "Merrymeeting Lake with early morning sun peeking through the trees"
There were minor details such as suggesting summer (lower case s) when I had Summer (initial capital) already included. I had trees plural and it suggested tree as well. I'd quibble about park (because it isn't; and there's a property release as it's a home, so that should be a clue); mountain (I had hills and I'd have put mountains if they were higher).
Bigger issues were suggesting beach, bench, chair and table which aren't anywhere in the image. And suggesting sea and river for a picture of a lake is just spam, as is suggesting spring and autumn for an image keyworded summer.
Getting good keywords is hard, but having bad keywords on images will just frustrate the heck out of buyers. If I'm looking for a New Hampshire lake in Autumn and this picture shows up, it isn't helpful.
What about adding to the interface to let the contributor mark bad suggestions, at least for a while, to help train the tool to do a better job?
598
« on: June 21, 2022, 21:25 »
I uploaded a file this afternoon - fully keyworded - and looked at the suggestions, wondering if there was anything I might have missed.
All of the suggestions (except for the word red which was already in my list) were completely wrong - not marginal, just wrong. You can see the screenshot of that part of the UI along with a thumbnail of what I uploaded.
Description: "Shattered glass covers the shower floor after the door exploded, leaving the bathmat in a pile of glass pieces"
Will the people who implemented this be looking at uploads over the next few weeks to assess the usefulness of the tool's suggestions? If keywords are uploaded (and you can see some of mine), does the tool consult those to assess whether its guess about the image content is on the right track or off in the weeds?
599
« on: June 21, 2022, 10:23 »
If you read what they're advising, it's to use Google image search to locate an instance of the image in use on someone else's (presumably paid use) web site. Short of telling every web site not to use any stock images or to remove Google's image search, I'm not sure what you think anyone can do...
If you look further down (I don't blame you if you didn't read the whole thing, it's pretty poorly written) they also link to pirating sites that let you search all the image libraries and automatically download watermark free work.
Oops! Sorry about that. I did read a long way, but not to the end. I don't expect agencies to act, but that's who to complain to. The agencies' business is what's being targeted; we're just the collateral damage. In the past, when the full-of-image-bundles gigs at Fiverr openly offered bundles of iStock and Shutterstock images - in some cases even offering to get specific image numbers for the gig customer - one or both agencies worked with Fiverr to get those gigs taken down. The agencies didn't work all that hard though as explicit mentions of agency names went away for a while, but the image bundles didn't. And now you can see agency names explicitly used (except for that one gig touting "Gutty image" - I guess he's afraid of Getty legal eagles) https://www.fiverr.com/partho214/provide-you-royalty-free-stock-photos-for-any-businesshttps://www.fiverr.com/bethi26/provide-high-quality-stock-image-stock-photohttps://www.fiverr.com/aarshawon/find-any-type-of-premium-quality-stock-photoshttps://www.fiverr.com/guru17328/give-you-any-stock-photoshttps://www.fiverr.com/joy892/provide-your-stock-imageMy point with the above is that although the agencies should tackle sites promising a way to let you steal versus license stock images, it's unlikely they will take any/much action.
600
« on: June 20, 2022, 18:08 »
If you read what they're advising, it's to use Google image search to locate an instance of the image in use on someone else's (presumably paid use) web site. Short of telling every web site not to use any stock images or to remove Google's image search, I'm not sure what you think anyone can do.
If anyone uses an image without a license - and with so many free images now available, it's not clear why that isn't a better option as it's safe and legal - they're at risk. Established companies are unlikely to put themselves at risk this way, and that's where the bulk of our business comes from
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