All I can say is that you will be very, very, very disappointed in the quality unless you're ready to spend serious $$$.

I believe the Insta360 Pro ($3,499) is the only solution that is somewhat affordable and can give quality comparable to a standard (HD) camera. Definitely lower quality, but comparable to a cellphone or action camera.

The cheaper 360 cameras look truly TERRIBLE. Clips from those cameras MIGHT get accepted right now, because 360 is still a new thing, but not for very long.

Yes, this happens, and it's one of the main reasons they delay the sales reports 3 days at Pond5.

This can be done in any online store. Well, actually, in any store. Just like shoplifting and pickpocketing it happens all the time, but of course it sucks when it happens to you...

I will check out OPUS, as music is my main thing and most of my living income.

But it's not Spotify or iTunes that take most of your money. It's the record labels. As an independent artist, I get 70% almost everywhere. And once again, the good places to sell music is where millions of people go to look for music. This means iTunes, Apple Music and Spotify (and YouTube). 100% of $1 is still less than 70% of $10,000...

It looks interesting though, and I will have to do further research to form an educated opinion.

A developer paid 10,000 bitcoins for 2 pizzas in 2010 and that would now be worth over $48 million dollars.  So it isn't as simple as it being a huge gamble for everyone. 

What? I would say that is the very definition of being a huge gamble. One of the biggest gambles in history.

And currencies are already traded like shares, in the case of the USD, USA is the "business".

And share prices are set by PEOPLE's beliefs in a business (and many other psychological factors), which of course usually are connected to how the business is doing, but not necessarily.

There are countless bio tech companies that have zero revenue, lose money for years, while their stock is worth hundreds of millions. This is based on someone's HOPE for the future (or educated guess).

I don't think so, if we have our own site, we all have to pay for our own hosting, like Symbiostock that hasn't really worked.  The alternative is to all pay for one site and that's never worked on a large scale.  Then there's paying for marketing and it's just another site like all the others with no USP that's attractive to buyers.  Having our own currency is a USP.  Using blockchain technology for many things, like protecting copyright, is something other sites don't offer.  It's tearing up the way things have been done so far and coming up with a different solution.

Yes, but you make it seem like the servers and everything related to them are free. They have to physically exist somewhere. The only real difference here is the currency. And for regular people, that is not something positive, unfortunately. You have a currency that could change its value 50% over one day. Since people who buy stock products work regular jobs and get paid in regular currencies, there is an exchange that must happen at some point.

And is marketing free? No, you have to market where people look. Today, that's Google. They do business in USD last time I checked.

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Alright, keep us posted. How much do they generally charge? I mean, it must be worth it to be exclusive, right?

I can't remember 30 or 35% commission. I find it a bit low for exclusive content.

I find it insulting for exclusive content. It's low for non-exclusive...

You have to forget everything that the current sites do.  It's something completely different.  There's some really smart people developing blockchain technology solutions, I just hope some of them like selling stock images.  I can see how it would be much better than anything we have now for both contributors and buyers.

It's not some sort of magic. It's just another way to send money (and avoid taxes). Marketing, storage, uploading etc. is still relevant. Storage can of course be "in the cloud" in a peer-to-peer system, but SOMEONE must store your images, and that someone would have to be you at first, meaning if your computer is not online, your images aren't. There must always be a server somewhere storing the assets, and when you go into the hundreds of millions, that costs money.

Marketing must still be done. How will the general population know about it? Why do you think Shutterstock/iStock show up as soon as I type "stock...". Because they spend millions and millions of dollars making sure they do.

They only seem to sell old images.  I stopped uploading new images a long time ago.

Yeah, it would be hard to sell new images since you don't have any. 

The dream is something that achieves this without humans....whether thats a practical possibility this side of the launch of the SS Enterprise I'm not knowledgable enough to judge

Yes, maybe in a 100 years.

By the way, the default sorting option is Popular in the Shutterstock search engine, making it even less likely that some results are removed when they reach a certain number of sales...

I said that a better word instead of "cap" is "monthly allotted income".
I am not talking about fakes sales at SS, rather about a sort of tap that is turned sometimes on and sometimes off. Bear in mind that this may also be beneficial for me: when my tap is on and I get plenty of sales it is also because someone else's is turned off at the moment.

The behaviour of Fotolia is very similar to SS: I get the same income at the end of each month for 5-6 months in a raw, then I go a step up in earnings (5-10% more) and then again 5-6 months at the same levels.
SS and Fotolia are certainly the most sophisticated search engines.

No, they're not.

And the tap you're describing is called natural variance. Buyers are PEOPLE. There are people with projects and ideas behind the computer screens buying clips. Not robots looking to reach the exact quota of field aerials every week. People don't do the exact same things every day, but over a longer period of time, with enough people, behaviors average out.

P5 sales are much more erratic (loads of up and down from month to month), sales are not concentrated in a few files (like SS and FT), but much more spread around. Files start to sell after a very long time (at least one year) and the files that are sold are generally ones that I consider good ones. In other words P5 behavior seems to be the most "natural" one.

Why is that natural?

VB (now SB): I had 4 sales the first month I joined (welcome aboard package), with about 50 files, then for 2 years I had 2 sales per month, every single month (with a portfolio growing to almost 3,000 files). Never sold the same file twice there and the quality of files selling there are the bottom of the barrel: if I uploaded a totally black clip it would probably sell there. This September sales went totally crazy and I sold a huge amount, but I fear that it is another welcome aboard after re branding.

Yes, makes perfect sense. You don't think it could have anything to do with INCREASED marketing since they rebranded? Use LOGIC.

Two of the main point in agencies search engines are: 1) avoiding to present constantly the same content to customers - 2) having as many contributors happy (so that they keep bringing fresh content).

I think you are wrong on both points. The point of the search engines is to present the content that a buyer is most likely to buy, so they don't go a competing site.

What do you think makes the most sense to a business (not a communist business)? To give a little to everyone (and intentionally upset good content producers), or to make the GOOD, STRONG sellers happy so they continue to invest money and time into producing quality content? I believe in option number 2, which makes capping sales a very counterproductive idea.

I would suggest you do this:

List a number of common searches (like London, timelapse, new york, smile, happy people, etc. etc.).

Search for them every day using 2-3 different browsers, logged in, and logged out. And you can use a VPN to change your IP address.

Screenshot the search results every day for a month.

Come back with the results.

Here's a hint: the clips I have that are popular show up at the same spot (more or less) no matter what browser, what IP, what part of the month, or the year, I test the search. And guess what, when they have enough sales, they move UP. Not down. ALL microstock search engines reward recency and sales.

If your theory was valid, they would be hidden sometimes. By the way, all microstock engines are MUCH, MUCH more primitive than Google/YouTube. I can assure you that.

I pulled all my photos from Pond5 a few months ago and video sales went up.  Video sales were already going up but I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on!  My advice, everyone should delete all there photos immediately.

Oh no! The virus has spread! 

Soon we'll be hearing that Fotolia not only decrease sales, but they actually shut down accounts of footage contributors who also upload images. It makes perfect sense!

For me, only one feature is important: The ability to generate sales. If a site has that feature, I'll happily spend 10 minutes tagging each clip. If it doesn't have that feature, I'll happily forget the site exists.