Quote from: gnirtS on June 01, 2020, 04:03

From a technical point of view there's no way you'd implement a major change to billing, selling and everything else when not everyone is there to oversee it.

You do it when all staff are available to fix the inevitable problems.

Yes but this is Microstock so I wouldn't necessarily count on them to do the obvious

Well this is true.  From an IT perspective you'd try to do it at the quickest possible time.  So Saturday.  You have all the staff available at the time on overtime and 2 days to fix the inevitable problems.

But payments and anything else financial with SS are always manually triggered on the next working day after a cut off date.  So i wouldnt expect this to be any different.
Given the server farms and clusters they use it might even take 72 hours to filter through the network.

I wouldnt even be overly surprised if they simply "rebalance" everyone a week or two into the month.

Even if they change subscription plans our cut at level 4 is still $0,38 per sub no?

What am I missing here?

The 350 and 700 image sub packs the level 4 cut works out a lot nearer 10 cents than 0.38.  SS have merely said it "wont be less than 10 cents" for new sub rates.

From a technical point of view there's no way you'd implement a major change to billing, selling and everything else when not everyone is there to oversee it.

You do it when all staff are available to fix the inevitable problems.

The new scheme has unlikely to have gone live yet given SS staff are still in bed.

Fom what older contributors have told multiple times, the algorithm seems to benefits old contributors. A lot of oldtimers have confirmed that newly uploaded work does not sell at all for them, while their old images, that have been selling for 10 years+ continues to sell. 

I suspect its more likely image ranking.  Images are ranked (search hits, click ratios, sales etc).
Older contributors with older images simply had more chance of selling due to the small library size at the time.  As a result those images ranked highly and remain so compared to the huge influx of unranked new images.

Alamy, AS and others we know rank images.
So i dont think its a per contributor ranking, more than fact that an older image thats sold before is going to have a lot longer and more opportunity to rank higher.

The forum is a totally separate system to the SS account itself.
Anyone can set up a new forum account even if they dont hold an SS account.
All you need is an email address.

On facebook somebody pointed out that they have really bad reviews from customers.

I think that was me

Must admit ive been submitting for 10 years this month (yay. anniversary....) but id never really looked at them as a company.  I just assumed they were doing OK, never looked into buyers side and just submitted.

It's literally only after these changes i started exploring their reputation and the trustpilot is shocking.  As is a lot of twitter.

I expected bad reviews from contributors, that was exected but to be honest, potential customers dont care at all about that.  Not their problem.
What i wasnt expecting were the uniformly terrible reviews from CUSTOMERS.  That is a problem.

The same problems crop up constantly.  Charged early for services, hidden and outright nasty terms and conditions, unresponsive or rude support and so on.  Not just a few times.  Hundreds of times.
Another potential issue is maybe the *type* of customer.  A lot of complaints are along the lines of "i signed up for a free trial for a month because i wanted some free images for a website then got charged when i tried to cancel".

If a lot of their customers are only after 1 month of freebies and fully intend to cancel they again have a problem.  Those are not the customers you want at all.

Over and over again you see "free trial is a scam.  autorenew is a scam.  Charged 4 days early.  Double charged and support blamed me for clicking twice.  Keep taking money 2 years after cancel.  Fraudsters.  Deceptive business practices.  Everything a business shouldn�t be! ". 

Theres one "Shutterstock are selling my stolen images" as well.  And thats just the last 3 months of reviews.

Those aren't my words, not my accusations - they're direct quotes off the last few months customer reviews.

I found 1 good review from a happy customer.  The other 4 good reviews ironically were people happy with the service because they managed to cancel in their free trial without being charged!

I know happy people seldom love reviews and unhappy ones usually do but ive not come across a company with as many uniformly bad reviews on there from actual customers before. 

570 reviews.  5% are good or excellent.  93% are poor or bad.

If you were a buyer and considering a stock site, would you seriously consider them after browsing that?

So for me the company despite being a massive, bloated entity could actually be in trouble:-

(i) A huge number of customers are *extremely* unhappy with them.  Reputation is important and theirs is not good.
(ii) Quite a few "customers" are after quick freebies with no intention of actually subscribing long term
(iii) They've seriously angered contributors
(iv) Time and time again huge portfolios of stolen images for sale with slow or very slow action to address it
(v) The library in general is a mess.  Tagging, similars etc
(vi) share price is on a constant downward trend
(vii) competition is getting stronger (AS etc)
(viii) Microstock itself could be in a depress state for a while due to covid etc.
(ix) The unpatched security bugs allowing anyone to steal images or videos at will which have been around for a few years and still sadly work and documented even on youtube.

Its not likely to vanish any time soon but its time at the top might be drawing to a close.  None of the things above point to a good outcome without a severe change of management and shakeup.

Lets put it this way, if you were a small business in the market for a sensible stock subscription package, after doing research would you choose SS ?  If you're an individual, the same question?
Or a major company?

(yes i was bored enough to read through about 30 pages of reviews before realising they were all the same).

Quote from: gnirtS on May 30, 2020, 00:10

I got banned from the forum very early on after posting a PM from the moderators telling me to stop asking questions.   Fair enough, was expecting it.

So far at least my account seems to be up though.

wow... this is brutal... where is freedom of speech?

To be fair its their forums so their rules, they dont have to have freedom of speech....legally!  (Morally however...).

It seems looking at the huge SS thread the moderators have gone into hiding and not posting now BUT are hiding posts behind the scenes.  The thread has dropped in length 3 pages suddenly with no admin posts at all so they're censoring in the background whilst ignoring the points made.

I suspect most SS contributors on their forum are unaware this group exists so its an easy way of closing them down.

Im not complaining about being banned - i was PMd and warned to stop asking questions because it wasnt constructive.  Obviously i disagree with that statement.  Then said if i carried on they'd hide my posts.

So knowing full well i'd get banned i thought it better to share the PM so people could see how they were handling this.

What is disturbing that on here and their FB groups some people are reporting their accounts have been terminated as well.  That hasn't happened to me (yet?) but thats a very disturbing new low for them if true.

They've just introduced a potentially lethal new policy for contributors and censoring them on the forum is one thing but if they're actively closing accounts as well that really is bad.

Do they really expect people just to say  "10 cents? cool. Thanks!" and accept it?

I got banned from the forum very early on after posting a PM from the moderators telling me to stop asking questions.   Fair enough, was expecting it.

So far at least my account seems to be up though.

Wait until January then instead of the 30% you get now, you'll get 15%.
You can sell a 30 cent timelapse!

It seems that they hired some indian click farm to spam their apps with positive reviews on Gplay. Just when you think they can't sink any lower...

Possibly one of their outsourced reviewer factories got told to leave a review each.

Question.  Since it's "percentage of price paid", say you have a 100 image sub for $100.  If the buyer only downloads the one image, did he pay $1 for that image, or $100.  Because if it's the latter, then there go immediate sales reports.

They've clarified that on the monster thread.  Its going to be what you expect.

You get the share as if they used all their images.  So the smallest amount.  SS keep the change.

Anyone considered seeing if Petapixel want to write something ? ( https://petapixel.com/contact/ )

They've had prior articles covering Shutterstock and others.