I dont really feel compelled to explain myself to people who hide behind anonymity, demanding transparency.

I am not surprised you would avoid the question.

Down AGAIN for me.  SS it is time to put a nail in this Bug that crops up frequently.

Quote from: heywoody on November 24, 2013, 06:31

I don't think the incompetent reviewers argument holds water, SS are simply more picky than the other mainstream sites and can afford to be.

I agree that they are more picky, however, it still doesnt explain why some contributors get so many rejections when their work is impeccable, and its hard to believe that with a portfolio of 2000 images and being a 5 year contributor to SS, all of a sudden you produce crap.

I dont believe in an automated process either, so it must be the reviewer then?

I have been thinking about this. Laurin Rinder has been a reviewer at SS and he says he would judge the image as a whole, i.e. if it had shadows but it added to the composition or story, he would pass it. I think if you have a young inexperienced reviewer, he would reject that same image, because it has shadows, not understanding that the shadows are part of the composition.

Just my two cents.

Rinder did/does not review at SS.  I agree new reviewers may reject images that a more seasoned reviewer would accept. And they may also reject imgaes that a bot would flag when a more seasoned reviewer would find them acceptable.

Some sites pay more for rejections, the premise being that the reviewer should take more time to examine the image before rejecting it.

Quote from: gbalex on November 19, 2013, 07:50

Quote from: scottbraut on November 18, 2013, 19:55

Hi All,

The contributor site should be fully up and working now. 

We'll continue to monitor the site and verify that all is OK.

For updates, please follow @ShutterstockReq on Twitter or email us: [email protected].

PS - Nice to meet you too, Leaf!

Best,

Scott
VP of Content
Shutterstock

Thank you Scott,

There has been no update on SS regarding ports that have images that are not showing up in different regions of the world.

Can you give us an update for this issue and have you found the reason this has been occurring and found a way to fix it?

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=132935

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=133076

Dear gbalex,

Your reminder is appreciated.  The issue you requested an update on has been resolved so, thank you for raising it up again to our attention. 

All: As always, the best way to report issues to Shutterstock is via the following email: [email protected].  Doing so will help us track, escalate to the appropriate tech team here and follow up with whether issues have, indeed, been resolved properly.

Sincerely,
Anthony Correia
Director, Contributor Success
Shutterstock|Bigstock

With respect, bug threads like this on Shutterstock should be a wake up call for Shutterstock support.  The problem for one contributor has not been solved and it is clear from the questions admin is asking that they did not read the thread. As a consequence shutterstock support has not been able to solve the problem nor understand the issue.

Both of the people reporting bugs in that thread have reported the problem to support who told them that it was a client side browser issue.  Support did not address the problem and left it up to contributors to help each other find out what regions of the world the images were not showing up  broken in. 

Contributors were forced to do the job that support should have done because you left them no other recourse if they wanted the images to be available for buyers to purchase on Shutterstock.

In addition you have other contributors in that thread who have reported other serious bugs to support with no resolution.

I would say Shutterstock contributors receive a much better response if we post our issues here on Microstock Group.

The IP address has changed twice in the last two months and SS is now hosted @ Ultradns Corp.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=shutterstock.com#last_reboot


Hosting History
Netblock owner    IP address    OS    Web server    Last seen Refresh
            
UltraDNS Corp 800 San Mateo Drive San Mateo CA US 94401    204.74.99.100    Linux    UltraDNS Client Redirection Server    13-Nov-2013
Shutterstock 60 Broad Street 30th Floor New York NY US 10004    199.96.162.11    Linux    UltraDNS Client Redirection Server    14-Oct-2013
Shutterstock 60 Broad Street 30th Floor New York NY US 10004    199.96.162.11    Linux    Apache    26-May-2013

http://myip.ms/view/ip_owners/14605/Ultradns_Corp.html

My patience ran out several years ago after patiently waiting for shutterstock.com to fix the serious site bugs that have been plaguing some but not all of shutterstock's contributors for years.

I would highly encourage you to dig down to the root of the problem and allocate the manpower and financial resources needed to finally fix these serious site issues.

Today so far is one of my best days in a while. Site is up you just can't go to http://submit.shutterstock.com instead go to https://submit.shutterstock.com . Go ahead and log in and you will get the chain again as it brings you back to the standard http version of the site. change it once again to https:// and you are good to go and can check your stats.

Which just goes to show that the chain image is to keep contributors out until they have things sorted out.

I am seeing the opposite. The weekend is drastically down over normal and not one sale for 36 hours.

I got in for a few seconds and saw that I have many more sales than usual, then it was down again. What's up with that?

Thus the chain image, they don't want us to know just how mangled and defective the site has become.

Should have invested in keeping the site in good working order over the years instead of a posh New York Business address.

Craptastic sales this weekend and I have not been able to reach either shutterstock.com or submit.shutterstock.com for over 4 hours.


It's not just you! http://www.shutterstock.com looks down from here.

It's not just you! http://submit.shutterstock.com looks down from here.


Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /forum/viewtopic.php.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused


Unable to connect

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at submit.shutterstock.com

Quote from: luissantos84 on November 11, 2013, 17:30

Quote from: Ron on November 11, 2013, 17:21

So they lose 150k images, they add that back in half a week, and there are a ton of copycats. Maybe a few buyers buy the name, but I think the majority dont give a hoohaa on who shot the image. Not for stock. Art would be different.

right, both around 100k, like you just said half week of approvals at SS, there are 4 or 5 big "lifestyle" contributors at SS that will take care of their downloads, BTW they must be quite excited

Exactly. SS losing 100K images out of 30M will not be noticed. They'll add that many new images in about 4 days.

To be honest the 'photo factories' are pretty much going round in circles anyway. They are just shooting the same, relatively few themes, over and over. So are most of the rest of us too. There's precious little original in stock, especially nowadays, and any successful artist or image will rapidly be 'flattered' by an army of clones and similars.

I'd be a lot more concerned if we ever saw Monkeybusiness become 'exclusive' to Istock but I'm pretty sure that will never happen. Yeulet is a sharp business woman as she proved when she sold Bananastock to Jupiter for $20M. I'd trust her judgement in such matters over Yuri's all day long.

You guys can bash Yuri forever but you need to pay attention to who they are targeting for marketing spend.  If they were not worried about contributor poaching they would not have put out an industry ban on discussing income etc. and they would not have extended the time images need to remain on the site.

I think SS intends on using marketing spend to port enterprise sales to BS, if you don't shoot business you will not notice much of an uptick at BS.

Snip

Global sales and marketing expenses were $14.9 million or 25% of revenue, an increase of $1.6 million over the prior quarter. We continued to strengthen our regional marketing efforts, increasing spend in new marketing channels around the world and reducing spend in less productive channels.

Snip

Direct sales to enterprises continues to be one of the fastest growing parts of our business, roughly doubling year-over-year across agencies, publishers, media companies, large corporations, both the number and size of deals increased. Let me give you three examples of some of the larger deals we did in Q3.

Snip

While we�ve been traditionally more U.S. focused in this channel, we�re pleased with our recent progress outside the U.S. and we continue to expand enterprise sales efforts internationally. With the addition of London and Berlin office as well as new hires in several other markets. We�re really excited about our early progress there. In summary, we�re pleased with our performance in Q3 and with the foundation we�re laying for the year ahead.


Snip

Enterprise sales continue to accelerate and grow nicely and that obviously is also a combination of both a growing market and shift of share from other players. But I would tell you that ratio is probably not radically changed from the last several quarters.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1820992-shutterstocks-ceo-discusses-q3-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

Quote from: luissantos84 on November 11, 2013, 15:19

SS is reporting growth since the first day, when are they going to decrease if I may ask?

My guess would be ... when they are no longer able to take customers from other sites - or when and if other companies start winning back customers from them - even at cost. But, of course, there are plenty of ways in which they can string it out even with diminishing customer growth.

The market for cheap microstock subscription content is not growing - the sites are trading customers with each other and the total pool of customers is not growing. The stock commentators are getting this wrong IMO. Also remember that the stock (i.e. shares) market is trading on very low volume.

SS did well in a new and growing market and then, in recent years, by taking customers from other sites. But they are basically over-exposed to microstock subscription IMO.

My guess is that things will seem great unless or until stock market prices start to change direction - and for the past few years prices have been underpinned by government liquidity. The thing you always have to remember is that there is no new or different economy. It is always the same patterns we saw with other companies, in other economies. What goes up relatively, comes down. Always.

You make some consistently good points.  I also think you hit the nail on the head in regard to trading customers with other sites.  IS just secured two contributors who pull a huge number of buyers. They also needed to fill the void that Sean left.  If they go for more of SS's HCV contributors and target large business accounts the table could turn faster than most might imagine.

Ignore the fact that only a select group have the bridge and that no one can join these days as the program closed.

SS implemented the bridge program so that they could funnel over files from SS that fit a long term BS target demographic.  I am sure that if you fit the demographic for the business's that SS hopes to develop business relationships with, you will still get an invitation. After all it has always been by invitation.

How long do you suppose the BS division of SS will be able to pay .38 at the subscription rates they are charging?

Enough of BS strategics, they are only one small piece of the overall picture.

I am not doing anything, just repeating what I have said before. You are constantly side stepping and asking me questions I know nothing about. You ignore my questions as well though. Your link to your comment clears nothing up. Its pointless to keep going in circles about this.

You have a battle to fight with SS, and you are doing that anonymously. You have an agenda, I dont.

Last comment on this.

I state my beliefs clearly and mince no words. It is quite clear where I stand on the issues I discuss.

Good luck on your attempt to become SS Ambassador, maybe it will give your port a boost.