I think they use COVID-19 in a very perverse way as the perfect moment to reduce contributors payment in order to made bigger profit.

Because of COVID most of people are at home and the only chance for them to made incoming is SS, some people is even in a critical economic situation due to COVID, and because of that they will accept 10cents revenue.

COVID-19 the perfect storm for SS

I wonder what would have happened if instead of royalty cuts to boost revenue, SS raised their prices? This is so contrary to the ingrained and  pervasive "race to the bottom" that all agencies are currently doing. Maybe, just maybe it would have worked. They would make more money and contributors would make more money. Contributors would be motivated to produce more and better content. Would they be so bold as to even try? Sure, the royalty cuts boost revenue, but as we all know, long term that is a dead end. SS, be bold!

I think that a raise in image buyers prices could make them less competitive... buyers will choose to buy images in other agencies. In the other hand contributors reduction in sales incoming will also reduce image quality and move the concentration of contributors towards poor countries (by reducing the amount of contributors of those countries where earning 100 usd a month is ridiculous, aka rich countries).

Probably this SS move will specially reduce the new illustration quality, because those artists who still wants to keep upload illustrators will not take 2 or 3 days in a draw, they will just made fast simple draws in order to upload 5 or 6 fast images per day.

Quote from: Mrblues101 on May 30, 2020, 09:25

Quote from: cobalt on May 30, 2020, 08:49

SS was such a great place. What happened? It feels like this is a completly different business.

I think they just can't keep the business by using the traditional payout rate.

Not true. If they hadn't introduced the pay up front annual subscription option (some time recently; not sure exactly when) they could have continued as they were.

If they hadn't effed up their enterprise business - which has nothing to do with the subscription payouts - they wouldn't need to suddenly grow faster in the subscription business. If they had any sort of creativity, they wouldn't have decided to grow by slashing prices, which hurts all of us - all agencies as well as contributors - in the end

If you look at their Q1 numbers, they were profitable but just not growing the way Wall Street would like. This isn't a story of a business on the brink of failure trying to rescue itself.

And then we can look at their massively expensive office space in the Empire State building.

This was *not* in any way a change necessitated by an unsustainable business model. That's a fiction trotted out pretty much every time an agency wants to stick it to their contributors and enrich themselves

If things are like this, then I hate them

SS was such a great place. What happened? It feels like this is a completly different business.

I think they just can't keep the business by using the traditional payout rate.

We are all angry with them and they have been very unprofessional with us, but I think this is a situation of either "we make a drastic change" or "we end up bankrupt"

I'm not defending them, I'm just trying to understand the movement.

I start with them

If they keep working hard and improve them plataform design, they can take bigger portion for stock market

I will re-start upload with them

Regarding to subscription sales, that always was main sale; we never was paid based on the subscription package that buyer buy. There are 4 subscrption packetes:

10 images for 49usd (Packet 1 or P1)
50 images for 125usd (Packet 2 or P2)
350 images for 199usd (Packet 3 or P3)
750 images for 249usd (Packet 4 or P4)

Based on this and the % presented for SS the earnings per sale under new criteria is:

Level 1   0,74 usd(P1) ---- 0,38 usd(P2) ---- 0,09 usd(P3) ---- 0,05 usd(P4)
Level 2   0,98 usd(P1) ---- 0,50 usd(P2) ---- 0,11 usd(P3) ---- 0,07 usd(P4)
Level 3   1,23 usd(P1) ---- 0,63 usd(P2) ---- 0,14 usd(P3) ---- 0,08 usd(P4)
Level 4   1,47 usd(P1) ---- 0,75 usd(P2) ---- 0,17 usd(P3) ---- 0,10 usd(P4)
Level 5   1,72 usd(P1) ---- 0,88 usd(P2) ---- 0,20 usd(P3) ---- 0,12 usd(P4)
Level 6   1,96 usd(P1) ---- 1,00 usd(P2) ---- 0,23 usd(P3) ---- 0,13 usd(P4)

What is better, to have more or fewer keywords? Some microstock agencies suggest having fewer keywords, which helps in image discoverability. Or is it that only advantage for buyers? Is there anyone who uses only some keywords?

We actually dont know how microstock search algorithms works. Each agency have its own alogrithm.

Maybe some agencies gives your images a better postion in search if the image uses less keywords. If not, then there is no reason to dont put as much keywords as possible.

Interesting feedback...

I think this situation is evidence agains the IA reviewing software theory...

You can try Stocksubmitter program

It works with .eps files??

Contact them, they always pay

Maybe you dont fill the tax form, or your payment method is not properly configured.

Hello community

Even when the incoming in this business is less and less each month, for me this is still a profitable business, but this question is not about me.

China situation is getting harder and harder, my good friend is in Hunan province and due to quarantine she is not able to go out from her house. Few weeks ago she was able to go out for food, but now all the stores are closed and the only way to get food is to buy from internet to those government-enabled stores and wait for the delivery. Goverment dont allow them to go out and if police found you on street and you don't have a good reason to be there, you can have serious problems.

The issue is money and food... she have some rice reserve at home and she also have some extra money to keeping buying food online, but if the quarantine is extended things can get ugly.

She is not able to work in the traditional way so i was thinking for her to uploading some illustrations and vector illustrations to ShutterStock; her designer abilities are not at proffesional level but much better than the average of what is currently uploaded by contributors.

The only problem is that i dont know if it is possible to be SS contributor from China. Actually the only way to get access to "western" internet from China is by using VPN. I also dont know if it is possible for Chinese people to get the money by Paypal.

Do any of you have experience in this and could you give me some feedback?

Quote from: HappyBunny on October 08, 2019, 07:40

Now they are really overdoing it. I made one image where the object is isolated on white and one image where the object is in snow and a snowball is next to it. Where is that similar? I had the image with snow and the snowball rejected for similar. I have never made similar images like others where I couldn't even see the difference in the photos unless I looked at it for 10 minutes.

I do mostly editorial video and I am sure it's an AI/software application that's screening their massive database of 600 million files for similar content and rejecting it or flagging it for the reviewer to reject, I don't even know if SS has human reviewers anymore, could all be AI for all we know.

All I know is if pretty much any part of the images in the video are similar to anything already on the site it now gets rejected, I went from about 10% rejection to 90% rejection.

They most definitely are conserving server space.

They totally use an IA algorithm, but i dont think the dont have any human working for the review process; maybe just a few for very specific tasks.

If the algorithm is a learning algorithm or it is updated based in new information, maybe the experience for us will be more friendly in the future...

I started with dt in 2012 and I am now at 85 usd, 2 more years for pay out

Wow, almost same here, i started at 2013 and now at 86 usd...