Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on February 25, 2022, 22:14

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.

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...

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.

...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)

The last NFT issued by these grifters was reportedly bought by the grifters themselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vpx8/analyzing-the-very-bizarre-sale-of-melania-trumps-dollar170000-nft

Tossers!

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.

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

...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/1493648921435914244

You can't make this stuff up!

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-in

Very 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

Shutterstock announced their end of year financials this morning and although there were some good numbers, for investors, the stock closed at $85.68, down $7.66. The market overall was only a little off, so the sentiment appeared to be that Shutterstock's growth wasn't what investors had hoped

https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2021-financial

Their investor "microsite" has been updated with some slides and videos (I watched a couple but there's no new information and they are so stilted and awkward, I don't recommend them)

https://content.shutterstock.com/investor-report/index.html

You can read the transcript of the earnings call at Seeking Alpha - again, lots of buzzy nonsense for the most part. A taste (from Stan Pavlovsky):

"As discussed last quarter, e-commerce organic growth was low-single digits in the quarter, and the slowdown partially reflected the lapping of new e-commerce subscription products launched in 2020. Further, as we increasingly transition to a subscription led model, we have seen softness within our transaction customer segment, which uses our products on an ad-hoc project by project basis."

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4485857-shutterstock-inc-s-sstk-ceo-stan-pavlovsky-on-q4-2021-results-earnings-call-transcript

The enterprise segment appears to be showing signs of life; more new products in the e-commerce section that should lead to "organic growth"; the FLEX subscriptions appear to be doing well. Metaverse, AI and computer vision got a mention and Shutterstock plans "deeply embedding ourselves in our customers' workflow". They bought back $27 million in stock during 2021 and plan to buy $100 million per year!

"All submitted content is reviewed by AI technology and human experts to ensure the highest quality, integrity and licensability" That is apparently a "Global Marketplace Network Effect". As I mentioned, buzzwords galore.

Their earnings per share for 2021 were $3.48 and their guidance for 2022 is $3.65 to $3.80. That made me wonder if more squeezing of contributor revenues might be coming, but then I thought about something Stan Pavlovsky said:

 "...we believe that our new creative power tools powered by PicMonkey will drive an increase in high-margin recurring subscription revenue, adding further stability and visibility into our revenue base"

In the investor site there's a chart of various markets they think they can play in - increasing their TAM (total addressable market) gets mentioned a lot. Of their existing business - stock images, music and video - imagery is the biggest at $4.2 billion with 5.2% growth (not sure if that's the market growing or Shutterstock's share of it - or just some random number). But "Creative Software Tools" is nearly twice the size at $8.2 billion, with 8% growthl

I think Shutterstock wants to grow subscription products that don't have any royalty costs associated with them: "Shutterstock's global creative platform, Creative Flow, includes the scale and embedded relationships with leading social media platforms enables our customers to generate high quality creative work, allowing us to capitalize on this emerging opportunity." That's a cut and paste - I can't explain exactly what they might have meant!

This is right underneath a bullet point: "Shareholder Returns Driven by Revenue Growth, Margin Expansion, Capital Return and M&A". Remember that margin expansion means primarily cutting royalty expense for the existing stock business. More on that in my chart, posted below.

There was more happy talk about using AI and data to sell services to customers and the value of all the data Shutterstock gathers from metadata on the content and searches customers do. Even assuming they can get some good software tools out of the three AI companies they acquired in 2021, the fact that huge amounts of their metadata is spammy rubbish will really hamper any efforts in that area (IMO).They have never really addressed keyword spam/stuffing/errors although they know it's there.

I found it interesting their their subscriber revenue in Q4 2021 was slightly lower than Q3 2021 - historically Q4 has always been the big quarter (there's a chart on the investor microsite). They say there was growth of 14% but that's over Q4 2020 (and 2020 followed a typical pattern, although everything was lower -pandemic and all).

The chart below is similar to one I posted earlier in 2021, but covers entire fiscal years from 2013 to 2021. It only include things that affect contributors - how many downloads, how much royalty expense, how many contributors, etc.

Bottom line is not a surprise - Shutterstock's business is growing revenue & profits, but the contributor's share of that is lower - 35.9% of revenue in 2021 was paid out in royalties. That's lower than in any other year from 2013 on. At the end, I tacked on another way to look at this. Contributors have grown from 55,000 in 2013 to over 2 million in 2021 (according to Shutterstock's financial reports). I know that lots of those contributors don't do much but when you look at the royalty payout on a per contributor basis, it highlights just how much thinner the reduced royalty payouts are being spread.

Tighten your belts

The PDF and JPG have the same data; I didn't realize the forum couldn't display the PDF

Edited Feb 15 to add a link to this investor news which talked about Shutterstock's competitive position strengthening and illustrated the article with an Unsplash photo! You can't make this stuff up...

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/bernzott-capital-shutterstock-sstks-competitive-position-is-strengthening-1027404/

I learned a new term from this article about NFTs and rampant plagiarism and theft on OpenSea - lazy minting. It's easy to create listings because you don't actually put anything into the blockchain unless you sell.

The bulk of the article is about how difficult it is for people whose work has been ripped off, especially if it was a large volume of work, scraped by bots, when you have to file individual DMCA take-down notices. There was a suggestion that worked for some to use Google (OpenSea's host) for the takedown notices as they responded faster

https://www.theverge.com/22905295/counterfeit-nft-artist-ripoffs-opensea-deviantart

https://twitter.com/Hapiel/status/1474039458366373890?s=20

I believe their terms say 45 days.   I just want to know if it will actually take some follow-up from me, or if just sending that email request to close the account will get the job done.

I put an alert in my calendar for February 21st - when my 45 day clock is (probably) up. There were two emails sent & I don't know when the clock started.

I have looked a few times since I started the clock to see if my portfolio is still visible (it is) and I had a sale show up at the end of January (for all of 93 cents!! That will net me 37 cents) but the download could have occurred a long time before the sale posted. In other words, I don't know if my work is still for sale during the 45 day clock, but I think it is.

Given the time it takes sales to clear, I don't know if there will be another month or two to wait after closure before I get paid. I've taken CSV files of everything for my own records.

I'll post here when the process is complete (or if it has any twists & turns I didn't expect)