I can see the old retail loss leader sales hook at work here with OLD being the operative word. This is the equivalent of my local supermarket proffering free bits of cheese and pineapple on a stick or slices of stale pork pie on a plate as a means of drumming up more business. Rubbish.

+10

I'm not a business annalist, and I won't pretend to be. I'm saying that we're confident that the public domain project will bring in buyers and sales for everyone because experts with more years of experience than I am old have looked at the numbers and stats, and their experience and analysis tells them that this is a great move for everyone. I absolutely believe that.

clip to watch on bs metrics - http://vooza.com/videos/crap-metrics/ 

This might cheer a few of us up. Man photobombs stock photos....In actual fact, the "bombed" images are pretty good concepts in themselves.

on.mash.to/1yEacz2 

ha ha this is great...thanks for sharing! 

All this does is add to the conditioning of people to demand free images. It is nothing more than a move that will further cheapen the imagery market and take microstock into a new low.

so true... but why would P5 care about that 

more signups for P5 = more numbers to show off to the VCs = more funding to get and join top tier millionaire club 

Would folks who downloaded these free clips actually buy something afterwards?... that's the Q :-)
 
p.s. meanwhile ... "This helps tell our story," CEO said. "We know there's been a lot of activity in the sector, but we think this project will help let people know that we're the good guys." *Crain's NY Business

        

My pond5 sales is down in January.  Shutterstock sales finally surpassed for the first time since I joined SS about 2 years ago.  Is this the trend?  Are the buyers switching to SS from Pond5?  Or is it just me?  Anybody seeing the same trend this month?

 
"By all accounts, Pond5 has been doing quite well recently. The New York-based company saw revenues of $19 million in 2014, up from $12 million in 2013, and has relocated to 30,000 square feet of swanky new office space in Manhattan�s posh SoHo neighborhood. It�s also been on a bit of a hiring push, adding a VP of finance in October and looking for marketing and operations executives."

I guess we got all our answers today via TechCrunch    http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/pond5-issues-80000-free-media-assets-with-the-launch-of-its-public-domain-project/

Oh well...30,000 square feet swanky office in posh NY hood had priority than actually selling our media files. Employing VP executives prior to folks who will actually pick up phones when buyers battle time zone .... hmmmm
 

For those of you who's sales are up, at Pond5 or elsewhere, congratulations! Rising sales are always something worth celebrating.

I'm afraid I can't help you with your sales elsewhere, but if they aren't where you'd like them to be at Pond5, I do have some helpful advice to share that I hope will help.

If you have more high-quality media, definitely continue uploading more of your work. Our customers know what's good, and the larger your high-quality collection, the more recognition you can have with our community. Buyers are always hungry for amazing content! Many of the most successful sellers at Pond5 are all users who are consistently uploading new material on a regular basis.

For your clips to be easily found, accurate rich info in titles, descriptions and keywords are helpful. How you title and keyword your work is very important. If you spam your keywords or titles, it will only hurt your visibility. So doing this in more detail, but ACCURATELY, has a significant 60% SEO (search engine optimization) weight on the search results.

We also always recommend that you promote your work to up your exposure. Pond5 can't promote your individual account for you, we have far too many artists for that to be feasible, so we focus on promoting the whole website. But it's always good to market your individual account too. You can create a Collection bin showcasing your footage, and then simply copy the link, to add that to your website or social outlet. Here is a link to our Knowledge Base article explaining this: What are collections? - http://help.pond5.com/hc/articles/200944893-What-Are-Collections-

Another option is just to simply post links of your clips all over the internet. You can even add some of your clips to our "free clip promotion" and this will also help get your name out there.

You are also welcome to explore our Artist Resources page. - https://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=artist_resources

Here you will find tons of very valuable metric information, such as what kinds of files comprise what percentage of site sales, the most commonly searched keywords, and so much more information that we think are useful for our artists.

And lastly, if you use your Referral Links, you can even make 5% on all purchases or sales made for the first year of people who sign up using the links you give them. That's another way of thanking you, for sharing Pond5 with your friends! - https://www.pond5.com/referral

I work in customer service myself, so if you've ever written in to us then you may have worked with me before. You can always write in to us at [email protected] or call us at +1(646)233-2155. Our phone support hours are 10am to 8pm eastern, and if your call goes to voicemail please do leave a detailed message. There are only one or two people answering phones at any one time, so we make it a priority to return calls with messages left as quickly as possible, typically within three hours. You can also always write to me directly if you like, at [email protected].

That's great!
Thanks for telling us what we need to do to increase sales. 
Could you please tell us how P5 is going to increase our sales, if at all?

You said: "Our phone support hours are 10am to 8pm eastern, and if your call goes to voicemail please do leave a detailed message. There are only one or two people answering phones at any one time, so we make it a priority to return calls with messages left as quickly as possible, typically within three hours."

For European buyer that means from 4pm to 2am exclusive, not to mention Asia.   
After 8 years on the scene and after massive $61 million investment received 6 months ago you still have only 1-2 people answering phones from 4pm to 2am CET?   

Good luck to all the buyers and our sales too. 

But hey, Jonathan... this is not your fault buddy...I trust you work hard for your salary and follow the instructions given. Thank you so much for your shout! I will get in touch soon.

I know a payment processor that handles and sales taxes on behalf of sellers of digital goods...

Do share if you know...

So what?  It's an ad to encourage buyers - almost all the agencies do this from time to time.  What is your point?

Are you even a P5 contributor?  If not, then why are you complaining?  And if you are a contributor there and hate them so much then why not just drop them?

I am just amazed and upset how ALL micro stock companies easily use our files to get investments and earn huge amount of money while not give much in return. That's all. 

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on November 07, 2014, 02:46

They don't need to sustain the growth in the collection. If they stopped accepting images today they could probably still keep growing the business for years.

sure, screwing their own suppliers which are also buyers in many cases, just like iStock did ... what could ever go wrong ?

besides, agencies are not a search engine, they're not google, they don't need to keep in store billions of images that never sold and never will, they can pretty much set a limit like 50 million pics on sale and periodically delete the non-sellers, if your image never sold once in 5 yrs what's the point of wasting time and storage space ?

claiming to have xxx millions of pics is just a marketing strategy after all, there's no technical reason to do that considering only 20% of the images are maybe selling decently and the remaining 80% could be wiped out and nobody would ever notice.

+10

Given the slow pace in curating, I wonder if it is about to be sold to some bigger players??

Or ready to offer us 60% 70% 80% so we ALL sign up with them and join their life of leisure? 

Quote from: SSContributor on January 17, 2015, 02:22

To get $10 in Brazil is not bad at all. 

...maybe if you life in the countryside of Bahia. In Sao Paulo $10 is the tip for the guy who parks your car lol...it is much more expensive than the US there.

Hmmm... Average Monthly Disposable Salary (After Tax)   
NY - 4,260.82 $      
SP - 865.09 $   

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Brazil&city1=New+York%2C+NY&city2=Sao+Paulo&name_city_id1=&name_city_id2=

Consumer Prices in Sao Paulo are 36.47% lower than in New York, NY
Consumer Prices Including Rent in Sao Paulo are 54.28% lower than in New York, NY
Rent Prices in Sao Paulo are 72.67% lower than in New York, NY
Restaurant Prices in Sao Paulo are 44.41% lower than in New York, NY
Groceries Prices in Sao Paulo are 49.47% lower than in New York, NY
Local Purchasing Power in Sao Paulo is 55.59% lower than in New York, NY

If you get $10 in Brazil as a contributor, it will def last longer than in USA.
Solution to pricing - move to less expensive country! ;-)

This acquisition might increase general sales and therefore bring more $ to contributors too. Some buyers only purchase from super respectful companies and SS is building that image well.
I still hope SS will finally address a raise request asap!