Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on February 21, 2023, 15:18

Quote from: Noedelhap on February 21, 2023, 14:21

Morphart posted this in another Canva topic:

Quote from: Morphart on February 09, 2023, 20:41
Hi everyone!

I just noticed this section on Canva, I think it can help to see what revenue we will get or an idea of our portfolio performance :
https://www.canva.com/creators/element then click DASHBOARD.

My calculation of last month (earnings / applied assets) shows an average RPD of $0.008, less than 1 ct per applied asset. When using the number of exports the RPD is even lower: $0.0068

Oh no. I just got the most awful sinking feeling looking at that. I've had hundreds of thousands of DLs.

This is totally unsustainable.

I'm sorry ! I had the same feeling, which is why I posted the numbers here.

YES!, What Noedelhap said: "My calculation of last month (earnings / applied assets) shows an average RPD of $0.008, less than 1 ct per applied asset. When using the number of exports the RPD is even lower: $0.0068"

This is very similar to what I get...They are just using other words like "applied asset" and "export"....but that's a sale even though they they don't call it that - they must think we are dumb...

And they have gone from given us 35 cents pr per sale in the beginning.. To now around 0.68 cents pr sale...

It looks to me they have grown the sales of our assets around a 50-fold in this period and just kept our revenue at the same level and keept the rest for themselves...

Its a system designed to be opaque for contributors with "no sales" and no information on commission structure since our sales is hidden within the SAAS model...

You read that right! Around 0.006$ dollars per license! - its beyond absurd. How can they defend that? How can any contributor accept this? (Calculated as share of contributor pool / total exports)...As they have been growing their business and selling more and more of our images and illustrations, they have kept all the money to themselves and let us share a similar amount every month....

How are they getting away with this?

Quote from: cliffordthebigreddog on September 10, 2020, 08:10
Hi everyone, I hope you are well!

I have posted here a couple of times regarding making a new stock video platform. Things have been really pacing up and we are almost ready to launch our website. Before the official launch, we have organized a pre-launch event for you stock video creators. I've shared the event poster from our facebook page and more details are in the link below. I really hope that you guys would participate -- this is a project we've been preparing for a long time in hopes that it would be a step closer to making a better stock video experience for everyone. So please check out our website, and participate in our Upload Bonus event!

Visit our landing page for more details: www.playstock.net/pre-registration

You can not be serious? No one in their right mind will upload anything before you publish your royalty rates and pricing model. Why not do it here and now??

another tread was already on this...

Quote from: Astrantia on June 04, 2020, 15:52
Oringer is busy selling shares at the moment....

https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/SSTK/insider-trades/

According to this information, this is the first time Jon Oringer ever sells any of his Shutterstock stocks? If so, that is actually very admirable. Even after selling around 1 million in stocks,
Jon Oringer still owns around 620 Million dollars of Shutterstock stocks and around 45% of the company - this should tell us that he believes in his company. It will be interesting to see if his selling continues over the next year or two. With his current holdings Jon oringer is recieving more than 11 million dollars in dividend payments per year, which could partly explain why he does not need to sell often. 

Quote from: Bart on June 02, 2020, 03:53

They believe it's ok to keep up to 85% of the revenue for our work, our many hours of planning, creating, key-wording and uploading artwork, while continually investing in new gear.

Only Shutterstock really knows how much they will keep! if you are at level 1 they might keep more than 85%. The 15% is based on a hypothetical client that downloads the maximum amount allowed in the subscription and that is in fact not the norm.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on May 30, 2020, 11:22

Quote from: blue on May 30, 2020, 10:53

Quote from: somethingpretentious on May 30, 2020, 05:57
If a subscriber uses half of the downloads allowed, the commission paid out to contributors from this subscriber will be half of the numbers posted by Shutterstock.
So in this case, if you are at tier 1 you will receive 7.5%, and if you are tier 6 you will receive 20%.

I think you are misleading : the percentages are fixed (they are what SS says they are) BUT it is the price per file which varies whether the subscription is used in its entirety or not. That's the tricky point !

I don't think it is misleading at all. You will be receiving 7.5% in any meaningful way. What is misleading is saying we will receive 15%.

Otherwise what would 100% constitute? How can we be receiving 15% if for example SS is receiving 13X (roughly in the above example) what we receive? It makes no sense and is just smoke and mirrors.

That's why a core demand has to be that % must mean percentage of what has actually been paid for that license or everything else goes out of the window. We wont even have a foundation to negotiate from and packages can be manipulate to s**ew us on an ongoing basis.

That and the January reset has to go. For top tier contributor that will mean a more than 50% pay cut from December to January. Honestly that can only have been though up by millionaires who have no idea how we peons survive in the real world.

I really believe this is important to understand: The real commission percentages are not fixed even though most contributors talk about them as if they were. Here is an example to illustrate this point:

A client buys a subscription for 199$ per month that allows up to 350 image downloads per month. That is 2388 $ per year, with up to 4200 image downloads allowed.

Consider case 1 where this client uses all downloads. The client has in this case paid 0.57$ per image. At tier 1, 15% would give the contributor 0.085$ per image. But since Shutterstock has set a minimum of 0.10$ pr image you will actually be getting 18% at tier 1. At tier 6, 40% results in 0.23$ pr image download for the contributor.

Now consider case 2 where this client only downloaded 10% of the maximum allowed images. The client has in this case paid 5.69 $ per image. At tier 1, if the commission was truly 15%, contributors should receive 0.85$ per image download on average. At tier 6, 40%, the contributors should receive 2.27$ per image download on average. But this is not how the contributors will be compensated in this case. Instead they will be paid exactly the same amount as in case 1, resulting in an effective average real commission percentage of 0.10/5.69 = 1.8% at tier 1 and 0.23/5.69  = 4% real commission percentage at tier 6.

The truth is that the average probably is somewhere between case 1 and case 2.

Subscriptions are, from a revenue perspective, designed in a way that takes into account that the average client does not download the full amount allowed. Why are we pretending that they do when calculating and talking about contributor commissions? Agencies with this type of commission model have an incentive to push clients towards the products with the largest difference between maximum allowed downloads and actual downloads used by the clients. This way, the agency will pay a lower real commission percentage to the contributor. In practice, this means pushing clients away from smaller image packages and towards larger subscriptions. 

The table may be a fine way to explain how the commissions are calculated, but the percentages at each tier simply does not represent the real commission percentage contributors will receive. This is a fact. Contributors will receive less in commission than the numbers in the table indicate. I don't see how this can be up for debate.

Why are almost everybody accepting Shutterstocks narrative when talking about the new commission structure?

The commission numbers in the table posted by Shutterstock are simply not true, and yet we all talk about them as if they were true. Well, they are not, they are lower!

This is due to the fact that most clients do not download the maximum amount allowed in the subscription. This is especially true for the larger subscription packages.
If a subscriber uses half of the downloads allowed, the commission paid out to contributors from this subscriber will be half of the numbers posted by Shutterstock.
So in this case, if you are at tier 1 you will receive 7.5%, and if you are tier 6 you will receive 20%.

Shutterstock knows the average % of downloads used for all their packages and subscriptions and they would be able to provide the contributors with the real average commissions for each tier.

Don't contributors have a right to know the real commission?

I suggest we do not buy into their narrative and stop saying things like "contributors are getting 15% at tier 1 and 40% at tier 6" when this is in fact not true. I suggest we instead say "contributors are getting 0-15% at tier 1 and 0-40% at tier 6", as this is true.

Quote from: jonbull on March 27, 2018, 18:18
just to say...applied to cavan images at 3 o'clock they send me acceptance mail after 2 hours and contract.
i know cavan images is not as successful or looked for by photographers as stocksy but if thy can in 2 hours..

let's upload something there and see if they sell something.

As I understand Cavan, they are just going to distribute your files on other agencies, dramatically reducing your earnings - why would anyone do that? Hardly comparable to Stocksy.
Please correct me, if I am wrong.

Quote from: helloitsme on January 23, 2016, 01:04
Rookies got to pay their dues so that OGs get paid better, just like in any business.

Seems like the manipulation worked on you, if that is your take on this...We will all get paid less, even the top tier contributors.

Based on average RPI for new files, I would say transgender is best selling right now. Transgender moose, of course, is the key to financial independence.

If I include Istock subscription and Istock partner subscriptions (thinkstock) my RPD for istock is much lower than my RPD on Shutterstock. Istock used to have much higher RPD but right now it is one of the absolute lowest in the industry.

I disagree, you can expect a lot lower RPI (return pr image) compared to Shutterstock and likely also lower RPD (return pr download).

That watermark is an absolute joke. It is almost like they do not know what they are doing. I would not expect this kind of mistake from them.

...

Up sizing is not accepted by most agencies.

The storage fee is just completely weird. It makes it hard to take you serious.

Please make the photo sharing community part optional. You will likely miss out on some top photographers if you do not.

Horrible commissions. Low sales. Bad conditions overall. Most top contributors do no contribute to them and that is for a good reason. It is NOT a well respected agency by most accounts.

I think you are going to have a tremendous amount of keyword spam making your search worse.

A lot of the generated keywords are not relevant. So far I have not found it useful at all and at this stage I doubt any serious stock contributors will use it.

But I definitely like the idea:)

Quote from: ferdinand on May 02, 2015, 18:00
... there s no "object" as category ??!!!!

No, but they now have the long awaited category "risotto"... 

Why not 35% commission on subscriptions instead of 35 cents? What is the reason contributors should not also get 35% on subscriptions?

I think the automatic keywording is very bad idea. Search is everything in Stock today and the automatic keywording will introduce a lot of bad keywords and that will hurt the search.

Yay micro has a similar service. I really dislike how both Yay micro and now StockUnlimited are referring to Netflix and Spotify when talking about their business model. It is not at all the same:

The Netflix and Spotify model is Business to Consumer
StockUnlimited and Yays model is Business to Business

An advertising agency cannot download a song on sportify and use it in a world wide advertising campaign. The comparison is ridiculous.
I