@Matt

Please answer my question very clear. I've 550 images nominated, will I get the payment for these in 1 go or it will be paid partially?

I'm not Mat, but he already has made what happens clear. Adobe Stock will make decisions on your nominations, so they could accept 0 to 550 of of them. When they decide you get credited and they will be deciding in more than one intake between June 23 and Sept 30

https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/adobe-stock-upfront-royalty-payment-opportunity/msg564630/#msg564630

I haven't decided whether to participated but I did take a look to see what had a "nominate" button next to it.

If a file has zero downloads, even if it was uploaded in the last couple of months, it appears not to be eligible. Many that have one or two downloads do have a nominate option - but some which have just one or two downloads do not have a nominate button.

Are all zero download images excluded, even if they're recent?

For recent images with one or two downloads, why are the ones selected or not selected? Is it subject matter or some other internal stat that we can't see (like views, or presence/absence of keywords)?

I submitted a support ticket about this on May 7 and received a reply from Zak saying "please wait a day or two and try again." - they'd had a lot of similar sounding problems already reported.

I tried several more times and on May 14 updated the ticket saying I had essentially the same problems as before.

I included a screen capture of my Fetch shortcut showing how it was set up and noted that whether the "Kind:" drop down was set to File, Folder or Unknown I saw the same error. I also included the Fetch "transcript" so they'd know exactly how the session went. You might want to include that if you submit a ticket.

Zak replied that he'd escalate to his team to see what was going on.

Haven't heard anything since.

I could upload using the web site (I have haven't tried lately but I assume that works), but I held off so I could try again after a fix with the same files that failed beforehand.

I will update here when I get a resolution.

This morning's email included something from Adobe Stock encouraging me to enhance by creative workflow using Search. What caught my eye was the line:

"Try sort by "Featured" for high-quality content first"

I thought I should check out some searches where I know my images come up on the first few pages to see how they fare with a "Featured" sort.

Unsurprisingly, in four test searches (by Relevant, Featured, and Downloads), many fewer of my images showed up on pages 1-5 (i.e. in the first 500) in "Featured" than did in either Relevant or Downloads.

I tried to figure out what the criteria might be (such as recent but with high downloads) but I see no pattern. Given that customer downloads have to count for something (and that I haven't been with Adobe Stock all that long - end of 2016 I was allowed back) I'm not sure what the yardstick is for high quality.

I kept detailed notes, but perhaps Mat can explain what the goal of this search is? In practice it seems really arbitrary. I tried a search for a topic I have no content in to see what I thought of the "Relevant" versus "Featured" results and I honestly think the page of images shown is much less good - visually, in terms of usefulness as a stock image, color/composition/tone. It was better than "Most Recent" in that the content was actually on topic, but not much.

An unrelated thing I noticed while doing test searches was that if I used the "Exclude people" search filter, all my property-released house pictures disappeared from the results. There are no people in any of them so they should all have been visible. Is it  possible that some recent changes have introduced a bug?

Does anyone else with property-released images see theirs disappear if they select "Exclude People" from a search? As I see lots of other images - house exteriors from the street where the house is the only subject (i.e. not a street scene) and where I have to assume there's a property release - perhaps it's only a subset.

I wrote to Alamy support on April 12th about a sale from January 11th that hadn't cleared yet and from the boilerplate they sent in the acknowledgement email is this:

Seen your image being used but the sale is not listed yet?
 
Some customers report usages to us over a set period of time. If you�ve seen your images being used it can take up to 3 months to appear as a sale in your account. If you have a sale that remains unpaid beyond this timeframe please be aware that our credit control team will have a record of this and will be chasing the client for payment accordingly.

They said they were "still chasing" and hadn't forgotten about it. Possibly it was a coincidence but it cleared a day or two later.

... Not much agencies can do about them....

That's just not the case.

First, the agency can be more careful about verifying new accounts. Might cost the agency a bit more in staff and time, but doing a terrible (and cheap to the agency) job just leaves the contributor as the lone victim. The customer has the image (even without a license, but in practical terms that's usable unless the agency actually did any kind of follow up for use of unlicensed images).

Second, the agency could easily choose to bear the loss - as Shutterstock did for years - as a cost of doing business. That's why agencies get the majority share of the buyer's money.

Given all the other moves Shutterstock has made, it's clear their main goal is keeping profits up and making investors happy; spending money on doing a good job with security and credit card transactions doesn't fit that goal.

I think I followed all the directions, but my FTP app (Fetch) isn't able to connect. The error message is:

SFTP connection to "sftp.contributor.adobestock.com" could not be opened because a requested file or folder was not found on the SFTP server

If you entered a file name, folder name, or URL, you may want to check its spelling and capitalization.
Server responded: �4221_1620348766180�

I'm not entering any URL or folder name though, so I don't know how I can correct this.

My personal views on NFTs are that it's more a tulip bulb bubble crossed with the Dot Com boom/bust.

Buzzy, excited talk generates more of the same - NFTs are enjoying their spotlight - including a link posted elsewhere today about a would-be rights managed stock licensing site:

https://www.uniquestock.io/?fbclid=IwAR0dGQjy1XPUXEfKoK_8d5LUqbKwLUCNZHbb4xTA6d0-I7SaDxkMiaFWZZk

I think the key sentence on that front page is "We are also looking for buyers of rights managed images"

If you don't have buyers, you don't have a business. I don't think the reasons for the decline of rights managed licenses will go away with a new mechanism for licensing work. NFTs can't fix the problem that Royalty Free licensing is much less hassle to purchase and frequently cheaper. They also can't eliminate all the tracking of uses beyond the license time or terms that goes with Rights Managed.

As Adobe Stock expands into new countries such as Egypt, we are building collections, starting with a selection of high quality images from our top sellers. We are adding regularly new content as we expand our efforts in developing the service offered into these countries.

Thank you for the explanation, Mat.

I still don't really understand what is happening in these "expansion" markets though. I looked at some regions and a couple of different portfolios and what I noticed still doesn't make sense to me.

1) it appears that all the "new" markets get the same content. I looked at Malaysia (my), Egypt (eg), Turkey (tr), Indonesia (id) and Saudi Arabia (sa) and all of them saw the same subset of artists work for the portfolios I checked. So it isn't about fitting content to specific needs in a given country.

2) I thought it might be bestsellers over the last year or two, so for my own portfolio I looked at top sellers over the last 13 months (I'd have done 2 years but I can't given the constraint of 13 months max), but that doesn't explain the subset I'm seeing either.

3) Given that it's more work to present a subset of the site to a market than just show them what every other country sees, and given the content isn't tailored to the country, why is the collection being reduced? Imagining myself as a prospective buyer, I think I'd be discouraged by having fewer choices, and as a contributor, I'd prefer my work be offered to customers worldwide.

4) In the "new" markets, keywords are not shown, but in US, German, French, etc. versions of the site they are. The new markets are showing English for the interface, so it's not a translation issue

5) The Free section is there in the "new" markets and is more heavily represented (in terms of proportion of the total available in established markets) - 42,814 versus 78,356. Over half. That feels to me as if the free section is being treated as more "high quality" than paid content from the rest of us. That may not have been the intention, but the end result seems very skewed.

The site has closed - there's another post about that somewhere here. I can give you the address I used when writing to them Feb 1 2021 to ask them to close my account, but they never replied - [email protected]

I received the email this morning too, but I have no idea how they selected these items. I was just looking through some of the free photos to see what sort of work (all looks good - i.e. it's not rejects from the regular collection).

You'd think that the agency would notify contributors about a change like this, but unless I somehow missed an email, this was the first I heard about it.

Free content, money for the platforms/distributors and if there's anything left, throw a crumb or two to the people who made all the stuff!

The only good news for me is that Pond 5 is so terrible at selling photos it won't make any difference. It might look very different for music or video contributors though

For now there is a written mention that video assets are not included in this edition. ...

Right now, "premium" collections, video, templates, etc. are not included. But look to Shutterstock's example and take a wild guess that it's only a matter of time before more things are included.

Shutterstock used not to offer video subscriptions, but then they did. They they were expensive, until they were producing small (under $1) royalties when dowloaded through the API from various partners.

Now, with the "Flex" subscription, Shutterstock is including everything - video, audio & effects as well

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-launches-flex-subscriptions-a-customizable-royalty-free-plan-for-small-and-medium-sized-businesses-301268299.html

https://www.shutterstock.com/business/flex-subscriptions

I know Adobe isn't Shutterstock, but I can only imagine that the new "unlimited" Pro Edition is in response to Shutterstock Unlimited from a few months back. IMO, it's only a matter of time