Could someone from Canada share how to fill out the W-8 Ben Form. I filled it out and it was accepted but  I'm still getting messages that I need to fill it out and it is no longer showing in my contributor account.  If you are willing to answer a couple of questions could you message me please.

After 10 years and with the top tier within close proximity, I disabled both my video and image sales (5000+).  It hurt but felt good at the same time.  My time passion and effort are worth more than what they are willing to share.
Adobe has been quickly closing the gap in $ with far less assets anyhow.

All politics and origin conspiracies aside, what the world (the entire world in unison) needs to do is slow this down enough that science and medical personnel have time to figure out what does and doesn't work and how to deal with it.  We need more protective supplies, respirators and health workers to deal with this pandemic.  We need time to find out if plasma antibodies or certain drugs can help heal those infected, & time to develop and test vaccines.  time to develop and make faster and affordable testing kits.  It's happened fast and most of the world didn't take it anywhere near seriously enough in the beginning, or we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.  The question is will we as a species learn from this and prepare for future strains and outbreaks?  when the next new virus comes will we be more prepared, or will every $ be thrown into rebuilding the economy?

The other thing that bothers me is that a lot of people feel safe and invincible because they keep being told that we need to protect the aged and immune suppressed, but there are healthy young people dying as well and the symptoms seem to be very atypical with some. 

Hi Matt,
I can't seem to find an answer to these questions anywhere, and while I think I know the answer, what content is included in each of the giveaways.
For example do animations or motion templates qualify as "video assets"?
Does the photography plan include all assets (including video and illustration)?
Is video that is included in the photography plan then still available to be counted for the complete plan?
Thanks, and also thanks to Adobe for resolving my issue last year and coming through with the giveaway.

This is a bit of a long story so I'll try and make it as concise as possible.

In April 2017 I had just under 200 files on Adobe, mostly synced from Fotolia
I uploaded a large number of files April 2017, which due to a personal loss shortly thereafterI didn't have the heart to deal with.
After the announcement of the Adobe Giveaway I began submitting those uploaded files in 2018
According to my Dashboard I have 960 accepted files (760 were submitted in 2018) and 178 rejected files.
I realized that somehow I ended up with duplicate copies of files uploaded (some double some triple) when about half of my rejections were for "similar files" (actually duplicate copies)  I don't know if this was user error or a technical glitch with the ftp, but due to Adobe's lack of a means of comparing the uploaded images and the accepted ones it is a lot of work to sort through.  I deleted a lot of files that I knew were duplicates, there are still 1100 pending in my uploaded files. Evidently both of those count as non approved in my approval rating even though they were never submitted.

I contacted Customer Support because I thought I should have been eligible for the giveaway.  I come to find that all the files that I submitted and were accepted in 2018 have the 2017 upload date attached not the 2018 submission date.  I was also told that I was ineligible because my acceptance rate was only 32%.  Evidently they use the uploads number against the accepted number to calculate that.

Quotes from customer support

" Uploading images and Submitting images are different. [b]You can upload as many images as you like but if they are never submitted then they will not count towards your approval ratio[/b].
We show that you have had approximately 200 images approved in 2018. You must have had 300 images approved in 2018 to qualify for the Creative Cloud promotion.

We show that you have had a total of 3002 images uploaded over the lifespan of your account. We show that you have had 960 images approved over the lifespan of your account. Our calculations are 960/3002=32% approval ratio. You must have a 50% approval ratio in order to qualify for the promotion. "

From the same rep:

"Any time that you upload any content to your Adobe Stock account it counts towards your overall total of images for the lifespan of your account. It does not matter if you have deleted files, had files rejected or if they are duplicates. As soon as an image hits our system, it counts.

The numbers that I provided to you previously are the numbers that we use to calculate whether or not you qualify for the promotion. There are no exceptions to that. At this point in time, your statistics do not qualify you for the Creative Cloud promotion.

From official rules:
A Participant must maintain an overall acceptance rate of at least 50% on their Adobe Stock content submissions
a minimum of 300 accepted files.....since Jan 1, 2018.

As a long time subscriber of the full Adobe CC package I'm pretty ticked off about this.

In any case, for those of you who are in limbo about why you haven't received the giveaway it could be either one of the two issues that evidently disqualified me. 

I don't think I said that they worked for 5 or 10 cents and hour. However, I concluded that I wasn't making minimum wage after three months, and you pretty much had to be on call after answering a ticket. Nevertheless, the effort it would take to start a scam by getting your friends to send in support tickets would not be fruitful and would be shared with all the workers across the platform.  I can't see that happening.

Which in turn reminds me of how professional photographers felt about microstock.

I'm not going to defend or bash the concept of crowd sourcing, I tried it and it wasn't for me.

But I don't think it provided meaningless support.  Rather it provided contributors with a platform that immediately helped them on a one to one basis in lieu of a semi quasi related cut and paste that was of absolutely no help to their situation and took three weeks to come.  A lot of the support was geared towards why their images or releases were being rejected, avoiding keyword spamming, account setup issues, etc Often it was a matter of directing a contributor to the right information in the contributor support centre or contributor blog.  When there were suddenly a large number of support tickets on a certain technical problem it was pretty obvious there was an issue and anything that couldn't be dealt with on the platform including items that required account access, was immediately forwarded to Shutterstock.  Because the daily mass of other support tickets had been sorted through, Shutterstock should have been able to identify and deal with those issues a lot faster.

In my opinion the contributor support from Shutterstock has been subpar, but I get how difficult it must be to handle the sheer mass of contributors. IMO this platform was a step in the right direction, but the compensation which was set by Shutterstock was completely insufficient.  Unfortunately, as a result it will likely eventually turn into another cut and paste system.

From working alongside and seeing the time and care some of these people put into dealing with frustrated and often angry contributors, it's hard for me to view them in the light they are being painted.   

Quote from: Shelma1 on November 01, 2018, 13:09

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on November 01, 2018, 07:54

Quote from: NorthwestDreams on November 01, 2018, 03:01
I'm a contributor who works with Shutterstock's new contributor support team.

So, how much do you get paid?

Whatever it is, you make a lot more if, for example, a few unscrupulous contributor support people got all their friends and their friends' friends to send support emails about their accounts being hacked, and you get to copy and paste an answer to them. All they need is the email address for support.

The timing just seems suspicious, is all.

If this is the same platform, working alongside of the others and participating in the forums there, I think most did it more because they enjoyed helping than to make $.  Sometimes you could spend two days back and forth with a contributor and in the end not make your measly $1. In addition we got to field a lot of the vitriol angry contributors had towards SS.


So to the OP - Thanks or the heads up and I hope things are better there now that the growing pains are hopefully over.

I have a feeling I know who the person who originally posted this is.  I say that because I  was invited to work on a support platform for a few months and became familiar with the writing style of the other "user experts".  Eventually I quit out of frustration because of the sheer lack of information and answers available to us from Shutterstock. 
If they are indeed receiving dozens of support tickets per hour I suggest you consider it seriously.  Trust me, no one is going to get rich on that platform by starting a rumour.
*EDIT*  That is not to say that SS has neccessarily been hacked, it could well be that contributors using the same password across agencies have been hacked through another agency.

Thank you.

Does anyone have any information on how to go about this or if it is even feasible?