Quote from: Not Today on December 05, 2018, 05:59

Quote from: DavidK on December 04, 2018, 20:25
No twisted math logic that I can see. It's a 10 percentage point drop vs a 20 percent decrease in what is actually being measured. Everyone is correct, and we all lose.

So 10% + 20% = 30% loss in happiness? 

Let me put it this way,

Where c=Commission and h=Happiness then,

c-(.2c)=0(h)

No twisted math logic that I can see. It's a 10 percentage point drop vs a 20 percent decrease in what is actually being measured. Everyone is correct, and we all lose.

Just got the email too. Won't bother watching the video though because by now I think II can guess what it says. Alamy is not a big earner for me but stil the news is yet another disappointment in a long list of disappointments in this industry. A 20% royalty cut with a low earner like them though translates into a 100% cut in my motivation to upload there anymore.

Assuming you live in the US or Canada and at the time of sale did not explicitly sell or license your copyrights along with the piece then you can legally do whatever you wish. The question is more of an ethical one rather than legal. I would certainly ask the buyer if they have any objections, particularly if they might be future purchasers of your work.

Quote from: pkphotos on September 26, 2018, 05:21

Quote from: DavidK on September 25, 2018, 20:35

Quote from: pkphotos on September 25, 2018, 19:49

IS are a complete joke these days and I doubt many people are stupid enough to contribute further material. AS is still a very small player in the video market IMO. Therefore SS and P5 still dominate video but contributors are uploading furiously anything they produce, thereby saturating the market

Stupid perhaps, or maybe their work is good enough to actually sell there

You missed the point. Everyone with images/videos still makes sales there, I still make sales there, but very few are stupid enough to keep uploading when the commission we make is 10 or 15%. You're majorly undercutting your work at other agencies if you do.

I couldn't possibly say it any better than the two posts above, but I would add that personally I gave up looking at microstock as a sustainable model a long time ago. To me the long view strategy giving consideration to undercutting work at other agencies is irrelevant at this point.  I follow the buyers now, and I also listen to what those buyers are saying about agencies like SS. If my own stats are showing me that one agency is in freefall while another is actually showing real growth then my own definition of stupidity would be to ignore the growth agency based on some arbitrary notion of fairness. Microstock was never fair. I also look at the aggregate financial totals on a quarterly and annual basis (not daily or even monthly) and I certainly don't care about the volume of files sold. RPI used to be important to me but that horse has also left the barn. I am only interested in the bottom line now.

For the record I did not miss your point at all. I actually agree with you on a fundamental level but I have been at this long enough to know that you will never find the kind of consensus among such a large and disparate group of contributors required to affect the kind of change you are hoping for. So, calling someone stupid for doing what they feel is in their own best interest is, well, not so smart.

Quote from: pkphotos on September 25, 2018, 19:49

IS are a complete joke these days and I doubt many people are stupid enough to contribute further material. AS is still a very small player in the video market IMO. Therefore SS and P5 still dominate video but contributors are uploading furiously anything they produce, thereby saturating the market

Stupid perhaps, or maybe their work is good enough to actually sell there

Quote from: Zero Talent on September 25, 2018, 17:37
Matching Shutterstock subs royalties is another great move by Adobe, after granting us one year of free cloud subscription!

Nice to see those 38 cents rolling!

Next step is to match SS sales volume and, why not, take over #1 position.

Looks to me like they are working on that. One way to speed up the process might be to offer more attractive exclusive content terms for contributors. I for one would take advantage of that by only uploading my best work to AS while spreading the leftovers around to the others. An interesting way AS could build a great library and differentiate themselves even further. As it stands though their terms aren't incentive enough to give up the aggregate.

For me the answer to that is pretty clear. IS and AS are eating Shutterstock's lunch. Shutterstock has made some confounding and bizarre moves in the past months which have alienated a large segment of their buyers, while both IS and AS have been agressively pursuing those buyers. The only commensurate growth I am seeing in relation to portfolio size is with IS and AS, and persistently diminishing returns at SS. SS may still be selling more overall, but the kind of buyers who purchase my work are moving on. For good reason.

Quote from: msg2018 on September 14, 2018, 21:48

Quote from: Pauws99 on September 13, 2018, 07:01
Maybe while they are waiting for something to turn up they will review the pics I sent about 6 months ago.......

They don't want our pictures, they want our money. But eventually they realised nobody is falling for it so they stopped selling tokens.

Exactly. Back when this thread first started I mentioned the fact that to me their entire site felt more like a soft sell to photographers than a genuine attempt to establish a new agency. It's pretty obvious now what they were  up to; just another failed venture looking to exploit a large group of disgruntled creatives.

Yeah, I just got one too. They must be desperate.

Have to agree with SpaceStock, painfully slow load times. Is WP really the right platform do you think? Also, pages are returning with mixed languages. Spanish primarily but I think some Portugese as well. Other than that it looks great with some wonderful work. Lots of luck.

Just curious if anyone here has ever heard of bitcoingallery.com. This isn't spam or a plug of any kind, I am interested because a few days ago my father (an established painter) was approached by the outfit to represent his work both online as well as a brick and mortar gallery in Arizona. It looks as though they represent some heavy hitters in the photography realm too so I'm surprised I have not heard of them before this.

With SS it's hard to tell what normal is anymore.

Quote from: pkphotos on August 23, 2018, 10:17
When was the last time anyone anywhere uploaded something to Istock? Surely at least a year or two now given their greedy unethical commission % and sales prices

The same could be said of many other micros as well. Take the SS $1.50 streaming video commission for example. I'm certainly not defending IS, but at this point I will take any revenue stream available. That's how bad things have become.

Remember too that 15 is not supported on Windows7. Depending on your specific setup you may or may not have to go through some extra hoops to get it to work. Great piece of software though.

Quote from: rene on August 18, 2018, 08:25
Rather good for this miserable times. And almost 4x more than SS!. Incredible.
Something strange is happening, after years of a leadership Shutterstock is dying for me and IS and Pond are competing for the first place.

Definitely trending in the right direction for me too. In my case it's IS and AS who are making up the slack and then some for Shutterstocks freefall. I know there are many people who believe the problem with SS right now is primarily image saturation, but I think it goes much deeper than that. All of the major microstock agencies are saturated, yet for me none have taken a nosedive quite like like SS has. My feeling is that more than anything else buyers are simply shifting away from SS for a whole host of reasons.

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on August 17, 2018, 00:44

Quote from: DavidK on August 16, 2018, 17:11
....but this split should be coming out of agency margins not contributors.

You've lost me. On BB, the different royalty split is coming out of agency margins. And whether on BB or not, the "cost of doing business, promotion, affiliate costs, blah freakin blah" is also coming out of agency margins.

Don't kid yourself, all of this comes out of the contributor side one way or another. The fact that there is room to pay higher commission rates to aggregators, affiliates and factory producers  than workaday peons like myself tells me that this rate structure is actually subsidised by depressed commissions for the rest of us. How can it be otherwise if you can really make more now by contributing obliquely through a third party instead of directly to the source? And Cobalt, if you look at what I wrote again you might find that I said absolutely nothing negative about BB. I was "whining" about the inequity of it all

To be honest, until this thread I hadn't really given much thought to the idea of multiple commission structures and how they could be exploited for the benefit of a larger group of individuals. I always knew of the existence of so called factory producers like Africa Studio for example, but had always (naively) assumed that they were structured more along the lines of SB or something similar where a centralized entity speculatively purchased work outright from individuals. The whole BB thing though has made me rethink that. Does anyone know how factory producers like AS actually operate? What the ballpark royalty difference might be for something like BB?

Yep, that's what we're up against.

I think you'll find the first two on your newer sites list do produce some exciting things, however revenue won't be one of them. Believe it or not those two are sites where people give their stuff away. FOR FREE. That is exciting.

If that is true then I find it disturbing that SS et al can find it within their margins to offer services like this higher commission structures than they offer the actual creators of the work directly. Oh I get it, cost of doing business, promotion, affiliate costs, blah freakin blah - but this split should be coming out of agency margins not contributors.

A friend of mine once told me that the best way to explain it to another was to tell them to log in to their Fotolia front page, click the "my account" button in the top right hand corner, and then scroll down to the bottom where it displays your colour ranking, weekly position and overall position.

Hope this helps your buddy!

Quote from: nobody on August 10, 2018, 21:38
Milestones for SS:

1. Pay us less
2. Pay us even less than less
3. Pay us nothing (100% pure profit for SS and its shareholders)

4. Charge contributors a nominal account maintenance fee for the privilege of accessing their marketplace.

Best of luck with your project! It's always nice to see someone make it out of microstock alive.

 

Just imagine how many more you could shoot if you stopped posting to threads you care nothing about.