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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
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652
« on: March 07, 2022, 15:55 »
Pond5 sent email this morning about their steps to support their ~8,000 "Ukraine-based" contributors: https://link.pond5.com/view/561817e318ff43206f8b5fadg1dp3.1ebt/8a7ee87dIn other news, DepositPhotos' collections (links in the original post) have grown - there are really heart-wrenching images and videos from as recently as March 6th. I don't have anything official, but a member of the stock coalition posted this (I assume email) he received from Shutterstock: "To our valued contributors, We are heartbroken as we watch the escalating war in Ukraine and hope that you and your loved ones are safe. For me, the injustice and suffering caused by this war is personal. I was born and raised in Ukraine until the age of seven, and I feel a deep connection with all of you, our Ukrainian community. Shutterstock recognizes the emotional and financial impact that the war is having on so many, and we want to help. To support our community, we will be sending an additional payout to our Ukrainian contributors this month of $250. The payout of these funds will shortly follow the normal March payout. Please note these funds will be distributed to all Ukrainian contributors that are already receiving a payout this month. Thank you for being such a valued part of our community, and we wish you continued safety and health. Sincerely, Stan Pavlovsky CEO, Shutterstock"
653
« on: March 06, 2022, 23:40 »
654
« on: March 03, 2022, 12:36 »
Dreamstime are giving Ukrainian artists 100% royalties:
https://www.dreamstime.com/blog/protect-ukraine-57556
Cant do better than that!
I didn't know they'd done that (although I did see the Ukrainian-colors heart on their logo on the site). Good for them - it's the second time they've offered additional support to contributors (the Covid-19 uplift in royalties was the first). Shutterstock could follow Dreamstime's lead, and given the higher volume of sales, that would likely provide even more cash in hand to Ukrainian contributors...
655
« on: March 03, 2022, 12:21 »
Shutterstock says it's making a direct donation to Ukrainian contributors: https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-stands-support-ukraine-immediate-donationNot clear to me exactly how they will implement this offer, but the press release says: "... by making an immediate donation of $1 million to provide direct assistance to Shutterstock's thousands of contributing photographers, videographers, 3D artists, illustrators and musicians in Ukraine.." If anyone who might be eligible for this assistance knows more about how Shutterstock is distributing this assistance, it'd be good to hear - and possibly useful to others who might want to receive assistance but don't know how.
657
« on: March 01, 2022, 00:47 »
The $75 fairy must have been busy February 28th  I received one too. My portfolio is now invisible, so I assume the download happened a while back and the invoice just happened today. Shame the $250 fairy didn't visit!
658
« on: February 26, 2022, 13:20 »
I had to chase up the sale - saw the image in use but no sale in my list.
Can I ask you how you do that Jo Ann?
I mean, if I understand it correctly, you saw the image in use, credited on your name via Alamy, but did not see the sale in your report?
I assume you use Google search alerts, but matching new entries with sales reports is still a lot of work?
Maybe not for Alamy, as sales are rather slow, but if you do this for all agencies... Impossible to keep track I would say.
Unless I'm missing something here.
I don't do anything thorough or systematic, but I have a couple of Google alerts set up so I get email when one of them triggers. Many uses don't include my name though, so that covers only a small portion of uses. In the Alamy case I was credited by name with the agency - it's an image that's sold a lot, so if I hadn't seen a specific agency credit I wouldn't have had a clue. Once in a while I use Google image search for best selling images to see where I find them - largely because it helps me understand how the images are used (which is helpful in figuring out what might be good to do in the future). I keep "tearsheets" in a folder when I do this. It's not a regular activity - too time consuming.
659
« on: February 25, 2022, 22:14 »
Refunds do occur from time to time at most agencies, but Alamy is in many ways not like other stock agencies. I'm in the process of leaving Alamy after 15 years, so I don't feel positive about the changes in the last year or so.
Some of the things that have always rankled are the huge time lag between a customer downloading an image and it even showing up as a sale, topped off by the very long waits for the customer to pay for the image after that "invoice". In one case a delay in getting paid meant that I received a lower royalty rate. I had to chase up the sale - saw the image in use but no sale in my list. When they used it my rate was 50% of the sale but when it was finally "invoiced" it was only 40%.
Alamy support's response?: "Really sorry but unfortunately the commission is calculated at the time of invoice rather than publication date. We understand this is frustrating but lots of customers report uses after publication date and this is industry standard."
In a world where all the other agencies record the sale when the download happens, it isn't industry standard to do what Alamy does. Waiting up to 6 months to be paid (I think 9 months was my personal longest wait) happens quite often - not because of refunds but because you don't get paid until Alamy gets their invoice paid in full.
Alamy makes all sorts of accommodations to its large customers - and I'd guess that's where the lower price by way of a refund and a new sale came to be.
Bear in mind that as Alamy lowers its prices (retroactively as you found or for initial purchase) this affects your ability to keep the current 40% royalty rate.
660
« on: February 23, 2022, 11:40 »
Just a heads up. I have received an email claiming to be from DT that was actually a fishing email trying to get me to open up an attached file. Be on the lookout and double check senders.
I received one of those yesterday - it got flagged by gmail and I deleted it. I suppose that means that somehow a contributor list with email addresses got to scammy people, but I don't remember hearing about any data breaches at Dreamstime...
661
« on: February 22, 2022, 18:08 »
... the author copies other people's designs and uploads thousands!
SS replies that it is not identical content 
Help report spam!
I'm not sure what help you were looking for, but people whose work has been copied (directly; a true copy, not just "inspired by") are the only ones who can submit a DMCA takedown notice. Shutterstock has no shame. If you do a search for heart doodles there are nearly half a million results! Most of it looks like image spam to me. Deduct some as there are images so badly keyword spammed that vectors with no hearts or doodles show up too. These were the keywords on a tee shirt vector about being yourself or being a bear (that showed up in a search for heart doodles): baby, banner, birthday, black, boss, boy, brush, calligraphy, card, celebration, cute, decoration, decorative, design, doodle, element, family, funny, girl, graphic, greeting, handwritten, happy, health, hearts, holiday, illustration, infection, kids, lettering, little, mask, party, poster, princess, print, quarantine, quote, ruined, saying, shirt, sweet, symbol, t shirt, text, toilet paper, type, typography Similar garbage for check mark, click here... I'm honestly not sure - other than hounding them if I found someone had uploaded any of my work as their own - what we can do with an agency that doesn't care enough to properly inspect the images it accepts into the collection.
662
« on: February 19, 2022, 18:58 »
My Alamy portfolio shows 0 images today. My dashboard is still accessible though with a few strange items in the display - for example recent sales are gone. It says I have no recent sales, but they are there in the Sales History & account balance. I assume payment will be on March 1st at the earliest, but a number of recent sales haven't cleared, so they may wait until everything has cleared to pay me.
I had Monday marked in my calendar as the 45 day (ish) mark from when I asked my account to be closed, so it was about as Alamy said.
663
« on: February 18, 2022, 22:17 »
I thought crypto was anonymous? 
No - at least not in the sense of a record no one can examine. As the article detailed: "Public blockchains like Solana (and Bitcoin and Ethereum) have the benefit of allowing anybody in the world to follow the money, since every transaction is tied to an address and records are permanent." It is anonymous in that making the claim to have made the purchase on behalf of an unspecified third party can't be verified. But then we're talking about an enterprise that thought it was OK to lie about the number of floors in a condo development... From a Nov 2016 NY Times article: "Or take the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the hotel and residential building on Columbus Circle that was, pre-Trump, the 44-story Gulf & Western office building. Mr. Trump improved the structure so thoroughly that it managed to stretch into a 52-story tower, even though it stayed, strictly speaking, the same height. Because new apartment buildings usually have lower ceilings than office buildings, Mr. Trump explained in 1994, the 583-foot building was about as tall as a conventional 60-story residential building." "Then there is the Trump World Tower on the East Side, built in 2001, which enraged antagonists as varied as Walter Cronkite (whose views it blocked) and the United Nations (whose height it dwarfed). At 90 stories and 900 feet actually 70 and 843, according to Buildings Department records the World Tower was once billed as the tallest residential tower in the world, until it was overtaken by a skyscraper in Dubai" https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-glamorizes-his-buildings-by-misnumbering-how-high-the-floors-arehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2017/05/03/donald-trump-has-been-lying-about-the-size-of-his-penthouse/?sh=912a7d71ef82https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/donald-trump-penthouse-size
664
« on: February 18, 2022, 15:52 »
...If what is shown on Yuri is actually true, that must be incredibly frustrating. Uploading almost 3500 images every month and having 24 downloads after three months...
To put Dreamstime's current situation into perspective, I made more sales (both units and $$) in November 2006 than in the whole of 2021 And I have uploaded (resumed after a break when they offered the Covid bonus as I thought it worth supporting an agency making that gesture)
666
« on: February 18, 2022, 14:52 »
667
« on: February 16, 2022, 12:24 »
I still don't understand why the agencies don't try a pricing model where an image's price increases as its download numbers increase. They will make more, the contributor will make more.
This is exactly what dreamstime does.
Level 1 = 0 downloads
Level 2 = 1+ download
Level 3 = 5+ downloads
Level 4 = 10+ downloads
Level 5 = 25+ downloads
And, yes, I love this model.
Nevertheless, it has to be said that you can't earn big money at dreamstime because not enough sales come in. I have not even managed 3,500 downloads in the 10 years. Even if the RPD is good there, hardly anything comes in.
Interesting! I am not on Dreamstime and had no idea. How does it end up "dollars and cents"wise? What do you actually earn for a download of a "level 1" image vs. a "level 5" image?
When this was introduced (many years ago) I had high hopes, but it has not worked out well at all. In the beginning, high level images sold via subscription netted a 70 cent royalty versus 35 cents and part of the "bait" when persuading contributors that subscriptions were a good thing (Dreamstime had previously been credits only) was that increasing subscription sales would boost your images' level and thus increase your earnings when credit sales happened. But subscriptions canibalized credit sales, the higher subscription royalties went away and I now earn much less at Dreamstime per year than I did. As an example of the rare credit sale, last September I had a level 5 image sold for $7.82 royalty (18 credits) but that is the exception
668
« on: February 16, 2022, 12:13 »
I had inquired about something similar years back and the answer was that there are various discounts offered in various situations that can lower the amount per credit or the number of credits the buyer is billed for. If I recall, they wouldn't detail the specifics for any particular sale, just the way things operated.
670
« on: February 15, 2022, 17:10 »
That's a coincidence - see this post and the several following it - about just the same issue. It isn't happening to me, but if two contributors are seeing it, there must be something amiss https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/the-blue-bar-is-back!-adobe-stock-bonus-codes-are-available-in-the-portal/msg573017/#msg573017
671
« on: February 15, 2022, 14:02 »
I've uploaded a number of files to Adobe Stock in the last few weeks, all edited and keyworded in Photoshop 23.1.1. I've had no trouble with my keywords being read by the upload process. I just checked the last dozen or so approved images and all the keywords shown are correct - the ones I entered.
You'll need to see what else might be wrong, but it's not a general problem with keywords in the latest Photoshop. I should note I keyword in English and possibly there is a problem with accented characters or something else related to non-English words?
672
« on: February 15, 2022, 13:35 »
...So, real royalty earnings % is:
2013 0.59/2.35= 25.10%
2015 0.75/2.85= 26.31%
2017 0.88/3.24= 27.16%
2020 0.83/3.79= 21.89%
2021 0.76/4.30= 17.67%
17.67% (not 30 or 35% of level 4 o 5) is very close to Istock's actual 15% ... a real theft against contributors.
No argument that it's hard to get accurate numbers for contributor royalties. From the Q1 2019 earnings call, Shutterstock's then-CFO (Steven Berns) said " Contributor royalty expense was approximately 26.3% of revenue, which has remained relatively constant as compared to prior quarters" In the Q2 and Q3 2019 earnings calls, the interim CFO said that royalties continued to be "approximately 26% of revenue". Things go quiet after that This quote from Jon Oringer in Q4 2019's earnings call rings so hollow in light of the June 2020 slashing of contributor royalties: "We started the Company in 2003 as a scrappy start-up, but quickly established ourselves as a great business. We were profitable on day one and have been every year since. Since that time, we have become a clear leader in the space and achieved numerous accomplishments over the years. Most recently, we celebrated the remarkable milestone of paying $1 billion in earnings to our global network of contributors. We're proud of the success our contributors have achieved leveraging Shutterstock's platform, and are thrilled to share this accomplishment with our global community, our fellow creatives, including artists, photographers, videographers, and musicians. I want to thank all of our contributors, who made this historic breakthrough possible. While this is a massive achievement, we have not forgotten our roots." I couldn't help but visit Twitter this morning to note the irony of an article about Shutterstock's improved competitive position being illustrated by a stock photo from Getty's Unsplash! https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1493648921435914244You can't make this stuff up!
673
« on: February 14, 2022, 15:15 »
I'm 0 sale since 2022 until now why? 
For me: "Summary for 01 December 2021 to 14 February 2022 ( 11 item(s) totalling $57.57 )" That's better than your situation, but according to Alamy, I should be over $250 with that many sales and clearly, that's just not the case with all the recent low-ball sales. I suspect Alamy as a business is struggling and that we're seeing lower value and more intermittent sales as a result. They've never been high volume (for me) but they were always better than in the last 8 months or so.
674
« on: February 14, 2022, 15:09 »
I've no idea who the author is - I don't follow SPAC much and think it's most likely a bad idea to try and bypass typical IPO reporting and checks - but I thought this was interesting https://subspac.substack.com/p/gettys-spac-deal-is-two-decades-inVery quick gloss over Getty's history, leaving out how many times it squeezed contributors (both of Getty Images and acquisitions like PumpAudio) or its sideline in sky-high demand notices for image uses it deemed to be unlicensed. Or licensing public domain images, or... The dig at iStock - that it licensed low quality photos for $5-$10 - is missing the point. Lots of iStock images were at least as good as lots of Getty images - that's why iStock did so well. Getty did have amazing stuff that none of the microstocks had, but huge piles of Getty's "everyday" stock images weren't any better than anyone else's but still licensed for a premium. But I digress Interesting that the SPAC blog says that Getty's total addressable market is quite a bit smaller than Shutterstock's investor microsite claims its TAM to be. Getty: "The current addressable market for Getty is estimated to be $3.3 billion and grow to $4.8 billion by 2028" Shutterstock: "Stock Imagery $4.2BN, Music $1.3BN, Video $0.7BN" Talk of "margin expansion" shows up in the blog post and in Shutterstock's recent earnings call - all the agencies are on that page  For an overview of SPACs: https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/spac/#:https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp
675
« on: February 11, 2022, 11:48 »
...One comment to the numbers in your chart: You have the numbers Shutterstock reports as "cost of revenue" marked as royalties.
As I understand it, this number ("cost of revenue") contains the royalties paid out, but also other items. I have not found any information to separate those items....
I don't have any data on the other items in cost of revenue, unfortunately. Those who do aren't publishing any more Remember the Contributor earnings report? https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/contributor-earnings-reportThe last time (I can find) that Shutterstock crowed about contributor earnings was the blog post about paying out over $1 billion to contributors - in 2019 https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/1-billion-contributor-earningsMy guess is that we won't see charts like that in the future as investors and insiders don't want to hear about their large "cost" (i.e. us) any more. The numbers from the billion dollar earnings blog track similarly (but slightly lower). If I get any better numbers from anywhere at any point, I'll update the tables. Prediction from my broken crystal ball: contributor share of earnings will continue to decline at Shutterstock
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