So when should I contact Alamy about sale being not reported. I found one of my images on Buzzfeed, article is from June 27th. So it's now been more than 4 months and still not reported?

I'm glad you received confirmation that they need to get this billed, but more importantly, they need to get you paid for this use. My experience with the delay between billing and payment is that it can take months. Given this customer just "forgot" to acknowledge a use 4 months ago, I wouldn't assume prompt payment once it's billed.

The good news is that there's no worry about Buzzfeed not being able to pay

If you didn't already reply to customer support, I'd suggest writing back now. First, thanking them for their confirmation of the download, but then pointing out how long it has been since the use of the image and suggesting that "as soon as possible" is too vague. That you need Alamy to make getting you paid for this a priority, given their error in the usage being ignored for so long.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to have an automated system that sends notices to customers who download images and after (let's say) a month, don't report a sale. There could be boxes to check for "Didn't use" "Oops, forgot to report it" and "Project ongoing" so it'd be simple to manage. For a genuinely forgetful customer it'd be an assist, and it'd put all customers on notice that Alamy does expect them to pay if they use images.

I would cut Liz's suggested time to every couple of weeks until you get paid.

On Tuesday, Shutterstock announced their Q3 results and on several measures beat Wall Street's estimates. Stock ended up for the day. Today (Wednesday) there was some sort of anxiety and the shares ended at 117.44 (-$6.87  or 5.53%). In general, management's actions have kept Wall Street happy and that's still much higher than a year ago.

https://investor.shutterstock.com/static-files/086ac986-a1de-4ef2-bf06-3c177314a566
https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-reports-third-quarter-2021-financial-results
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/10/26/shutterstock-inc-sstk-q3-2021-earnings-call-transc/

Shutterstock didn't include PicMonkey's numbers yet.

The Enterprise Channel has apparently risen from the grave and grew by 17% ("... bookings momentum and great performance at Shutterstock Studios"). They noted increase sales commissions to go with the Enterprise growth.

Gross margin improved by another 0.7% - they noted a gradual return to paid downloads but said it didn't impact their gross margins (I assume because of the lower minimum royalties, but they didn't say why).

They changed their guidance for the end-of-year numbers including this comment "Revenue of $765 million to $770 million representing 14.75% to 15.5% annual revenue growth. ...annual margin expansion of 100 to 150 basis points above our previously provided range of 100 basis points of annual margin expansion."

Any time they talk about increasing gross margins by 1% to 1.5%, contributors should look out for reduced royalties - contributors are the cost of goods and thus need to be shrunk

They now have a FLEX subscription on the web site - think cut price on-demand packages (but you have to be careful to cancel as it will renew each month if not). You get 25 points per month - Images are 1, Videos are 8 and Music is 4. With no annual commitment, an image costs a buyer $2.76, versus $9.80 for an on-demand product. Not sure how a video for $22.08 will appeal to video contributors - compare that to $71.80 for an HD clip or $119 for 4K (with subscription).

From their support page, "FLEX 25 comes with no restrictions on image size or footage resolution, however, it currently excludes Select footage and PremiumBeat."

There was lots of frothiness about Creative Flow and its components - Shutterstock.AI...blah, blah...content organization...blah, blah...create and collaborate. Also larger and faster-growing TAMs (total addressable markets) including "... the $8 billion TAM for creative applications". They want to transform Shutterstock "...we should be able to accelerate our growth beyond the stock content market segment"

In the earnings call, questions were about slowdown of the growth rate and Stan deflected with some words about their data business to "... generate a pipeline around image recognition and data products, particularly for platforms that are building artificial intelligence models".

A question about Creative Flow was what users were asking for and how did this compare to competitors. Stan Pavolovsky's answer is primo content free corporate speak:

"So, if you can take millions of pieces of content and take that down to a handful based on recommendations, tied to our first-party data, that's an incredible win for our customers. And so the acquisitions we did as part of Shutterstock. AI in addition to our existing image recognition data is allowing us to launch these products with the recommendations, with content recommendations. And so that's really the kind of what we call the secret sauce to how we're transforming the company. But effectively. It's, we are moving into our customers' workflows with tools centered around storage, centered around planning, centered around image our editing, but we're doing it all with recommendations upfront."

They were asked about the new FLEX subscriptions and how those have performed and why introduce more. The CFO said that they were seeing increased "wallet share" especially from enterprise customers.

Another question was whether any of the other market "headwinds" - advertising, supply chain, etc. - were affecting Shutterstock's markets. CFO said not really.

And I've done a Q3 chart showing changes from a contributor perspective. Overall downloads are still down (they report them as up because they're comparing to Q3 2020, not all time) and royalties down on an all-time basis, but up 0.1% compared to Q2 2021. But compared to Q3 2020, even though the revenue per download rose nearly 11%, contributors' share (royalties) declined by 0.02%

Do a search for Envato Elements. There are lots of threads about it from the last few years. I left Envato before they set up Elements so I don't have any personal experience to offer, but do consider that the special offer is only for 90 days, and not permanent.

Lots of sites (including Canva; their boost was for 6 months) have used temporary earnings boosts or guarantees to entice contributors into a new royalty model. If you are concerned about your income from that site over the long haul then try to figure out what the income might look like after 90 days.

...
I wonder what Shutterstock does with the money from a closed account with stolen photos. Would they pay back the customer who bought the photos, or compensate the people whose photos were stolen? 

...
I don't think they pay any compensation to the copyright owner. I assume that they just keep the money. In many cases you can find an identical image in four or five portfolios. There were lots of those examples. How would they know who took the Image. Especially in the case when the person who took the picture doesn't even offer at shutterstock - that also happens often enough. I have also never read or heard that a contributors was compensated.
[/quote]

I used to be with Shutterstock (contributor #249) and recently had to contact them about a photo of mine that had been uploaded to SS by a thief. In my contacts with SS I asked for an accounting of how many times it had been sold and how much I was owed as royalties. The image was marked as "Commonly used" when in the thief's portfolio.

I have never heard of them compensating the owner in the case of theft, but figured it couldn't hurt to ask. That image was in my SS portfolio before they closed it (and I suspect they still have all the records of my account and portfolio), so there's no issue about who owns the image. As you might expect, I have not received an accounting and I haven't been paid anything

I would like to say that my account has been restored following their investigation.

Thanks everyone for the messages and I guess it's worth waiting a few more days before truly panicking and reaching out to the forum...!

Very glad that there was a positive outcome.

It might help for future readers if you changed the title of the topic - perhaps to something like "SS account suspended with no notice, but restored after leisurely investigation"

This nonsense of 21 cent "gross" license prices became real for me today - three licenses, each at 21 cents with my net at 8 cents each. Even the sad sack Shutterstock pays better than that!

I can get my head around high volume subscriptions with low per-use royalties and a minimum payment to contributors - what Shutterstock used to do before they switched to pandering to the stock market. But Alamy is so low volume for sales that the 40% with no minimum royalty plus a massively long wait for sales to clear is a terrible package.

If these pathetic royalties increase (or if the higher royalty sales decrease too much) it may be time to bid Alamy farewell.

Shutterstock (and other sites) have broader license that sell for 22 cents, so it's not clear what "too low" means given the current market.

Alamy's days as a higher end, RM and RF agency are long behind it and they're selling microstock-priced licenses these days. I haven't had anything that low there, but I know I've heard others complain of this type of under $1 license, so it's not unprecedented.

Yeah man, I only sold one image in one month! This free convention seams to have backfired...

I'm no fan of the Free section (which started out at 70,000 a year ago and is now over 878,000), but I have not noticed it eating into my sales.

Not sure what type of media you license - mine is almost all photos - but that might make a difference. People from some countries have seen big drops after Adobe started handling "regions" differently and excluding large chunks of the collection - there's a thread about that here if you want to read the details).

Looking at my September 2021 compared to Sept 2020, Adobe stock sales were up 37%; even if you compare 2021 to 2019 (i.e. pre-pandemic), my sales were up 32%. My portfolio hasn't grown much (i.e. this isn't about a vast increase in size).

Long term, I think the free section is a very bad thing for contributors, especially of photos. Short term, I'm doing OK.

Continuing the 'Hummer' thread from the SS forum which will soon expire in late October. Hopefully, there will be some wildlife discussion here and all manner of other topics too. And also a place for people from the old SS forum to hang out.

For those of us who were not regulars on the Shutterstock forums, could you outline what the topic/purpose of the Hummer Thread is?

For anyone who's not keeping a tally of how large the free section now is, with this latest increase, it now totals 873,762 items, 825,371 of which are photos.

Photos represent just shy of 64% of Adobe's entire collection, but in the free section, photos are over 94% of the total.

Either that means photos are popular with Adobe's users, or it's that photos are now the loss leader and it's the other asset types that Adobe hopes will continue to make money. Or something else entirely

Vectors, for example, are 20% of the entire collection but only 3% of the Free section; videos 8% and 1% respectively.

In addition to work from existing contributors, I see more new artists who only have work in the Free collection - I assume where there is a niche they see as unfilled?

Oct 20, 2021: Edited to add that the free section is a little smaller, I assume because the year is up on some of the original content and it has returned to the main collection. Today, the total was 831,910 - 792,820 photos and 18,583 vectors (down about 8,000). Illustrations were about 20 fewer and videos about 1,300 fewer.

In addition to the problem of getting totals, with royalty free licenses, you have no way to map total downloads to total uses. One license could mean many hundreds of uses if it was a large company using the image in many ways over a long period.

With rights managed licenses, you can answer those sorts of questions, but I'm assuming you are licensing RF, not RM.

Also, for them to copyright or get a registered trademark for their logo, using work that was previously licensed as RF may pose legal problems.

Rather odd for support to backtrack on their initial answer, but I did a Google search and Bogdan Dudko is the sales team lead at Deposit Photos according to his LinkedIn profile

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdan-dudko-7a654b6b

I had some 38 cent purchases in September - I think it's the date the buyer purchased their subscription that counts, not when the image is actually downloaded.

DT's page on their charitable programs says the Covid uplift for contributors ran through the end of August 2021

https://www.dreamstime.com/supporting-community