Sad to see the race to the bottom creep into more and more sites. P5 exclusive sales seemed like a last safe area. I mostly stopped uploading stock video a couple years ago when Shitterstock subscription services cut my income there by over 75%. P5 exclusive was the only place I uploaded after that, but it was just a few clips, with few sales. To me, it's now simply not worth the time and effort to shoot and upload stock, period. If others have a system by which it's worth it to them, cool. I would expect the trajectory of lower and lower commissions to lead to professional content creators leaving in droves, but I guess we'll see.

On Shutterstock I'm sometimes getting paid as little as 38 cents per video download, so it's no surprise to me that my income from the site has dropped each of the last few years - down 58% in total compared to the same YTD period in 2020. Declines have been steeper than with other agencies. I think it's reprehensible for a company in any industry to increase its profit share by drastically cutting the income of its suppliers. Now my commission at Adobe has dropped to $2-3 per video clip sale. These ongoing commission cuts show the industry to be highly unstable, so I've stopped shooting stock and am focusing elsewhere. Hope SS doesn't make Pond5 lower their commission, but it feels inevitable.

My Shitterstock earnings dropped 17% from Jan-Nov 2019 to Jan-Nov 2020. Pond5 earnings rose 20% in same period. Adobe rose 15%.

Shitterstock earnings dropped 42% from Jan-Nov 2020 to Jan-Nov 2021. Pond5 earnings rose 8% in same period. Adobe dropped 44% (no idea why).

Haven't added to Shitterstock since they cut earnings for contributors, have only increased my clips on Pond5 and Adobe by maybe 5% in same period.

There will come a day when Shitterstock earnings become so low that it makes financial sense to become exclusive at Pond5. Will happily switch to exclusive at that point because Shitterstock is a truly reprehensible company for the way they devalue contributors and take more and more of contributor earnings.

If you want to take action: https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/stop-uploading-to-ss-join-the-action

Also recommend a couple Facebook groups to link up with more folks dedicated to pushing back on the Shutterstock commission cut (some of those people are here as well). We're stronger unified.

Stock Submitter Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/groups/261369748434285/
Shutterstock Contributors Worldwide: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1686048705011055/

I'm in. 800+ videos.

Also recommend a couple Facebook groups to link up with more folks dedicated to pushing back on the Shutterstock commission cut (some of those people are here as well). We're stronger unified.

Stock Submitter Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/groups/261369748434285/
Shutterstock Contributors Worldwide: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1686048705011055/

A couple Facebook groups to join to link up with folks dedicated to pushing back on the Shutterstock commission cut. We're stronger unified.

Stock Submitter Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/groups/261369748434285/
Shutterstock Contributors Worldwide: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1686048705011055/

Agree that this race to the bottom in pricing inevitably kills motivation for us to spend time (and especially money) to create good content. The agencies are incredibly short-sighted - they'll start seeing the quality of submissions decrease to nothing but easy, cheap content, and over time the really good shots they already have will become dated. Can't see this ultimately being a win for anyone.

I'm watching my sale prices on Shutterstock. So far I have enough big money sales to average out the $1-$3 sales. But when/if it becomes mostly cheap sales, I'll dump SS and stick with just Pond5 and Adobe.

Quote from: izzikiorage on April 16, 2020, 19:05
Started a petition. Hopefully it'll atleast show that the community is united

http://chng.it/nnMxDD9gFX

Do sign it

Sent from my HD1901 using Tapatalk

Thanks for starting this! I signed and shared. I encourage others to take 5 seconds and do the same, and also email SS at [email protected] to let them know your response.

It's fair to call out SS for massively reducing our pay and not allowing an opt out. P5 allows an opt out of Hyperstock, and other cheapo places we can opt out of by not joining at all. If this makes a sizable dent in my SS pay, I will stop uploading to SS and let them know why. It's their choice to do what they're going to do, my hope is that if enough good contributors stop uploading because of low pay then SS will see their content quality decline and buyers favoring Adobe. Ball is in Adobe's court now.

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on April 15, 2020, 18:29
And as the royalty percentage will remain unchanged, anything that makes SS more money will also make their contributors more money.

Wrong. Subscribers often will not max out their downloads, but SS still makes their money on the subscription fee while contributors get their income cut by roughly 85% per DL. You're missing the obvious - SS chose to make more money at the direct expense of contributors.

This is a huge step downward in the race to the bottom. At $3 a DL, we lose incentive to hire models and take the time to create great content. Certainly there's no sense that agencies are trying to make this a sustainable business for the long term.

If I see a big dip in revenue because of this, then I'll only upload simple content on SS that I think is worth $3. All my good content I'll submit only to better agencies. If other agencies chase SS to the bottom, it may reach a point where's it no longer worth it to generate content specifically for stock.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on March 28, 2019, 18:05
Look.  It's been done.  It didn't work out. 
http://aspp.com/stock-artists-alliance-closing/

Interesting. That's at once inspiring for all that they accomplished and disappointing that they eventually shuttered. It's not entirely clear from the letter why they shut down. That does not mean, however, that contributors cannot organize in a different way. Even a simple website with a blog can attract a following if it's relevant, and in turn help spread the word about agency practices and host calls to action.

Quote from: swisschocolate on March 28, 2019, 17:38
Why build a separate website when we have this forum? What a new website will change exactly? And how will we discuss things there? Make another forum?

It is already a place "where contributors can go to get information about the state of the industry and the actions of different agencies", isn't it?

Yes, but there are thousands of topics here, easy for any item to get overlooked or forgotten, and since it is intended for discussion/disagreement it's impossible for it to also be place for a coherent, unified message. I'm not suggesting a new forum, my thought was a site targeted on summarizing information on agencies and their practices (good and bad), helping contributors to make informed decisions, and with an agenda of using collective contributor influence to maintain stock content value and promote fair practices in the industry.

Quote from: cobalt on March 28, 2019, 16:18
So personally I don't really see a reason to be afraid. The Getty dominance is broken, Adobe is a friendly entry to the market and SS has a lot less drama than many other places combined.

I thought the same, until I heard about how Getty and Shutterstock are driving down prices by being willing to cut deals with big buyers, selling footage for peanuts and putting pressure on other companies to do the same. If that is true, then those agencies are ground zero in the price war. Not to mention the $1.50 commissions for Shutterstock sales on Wix - every time I get one of those it's a hot needle of anger.

Cathy, you might be correct in your prediction that nothing happens beyond talk. It is, again, a huge organizational task to build even a small coalition and a website and start attracting visitors. I am willing to donate some time and money to be part of that, I hope enough others are too. To be clear, what I was calling "stupid" is the frequent complaint from people that nothing CAN be done, as if there's some unwritten law of the universe that stock agencies can't be influenced by contributor voices, period. It is simple math - if you have enough people, you have influence. Doesn't mean we can change the laws of supply and demand or bring companies under our thumb, but some influence nonetheless. We have influence right now by doing nothing - agencies are influenced by our inactivity to do what they wish. We probably agree on the scope of the challenge, but I get irritated by small-minded people (not you) who thoughtlessly say it's impossible. Organizationally difficult is not the same as impossible. Someone mentioned it's like herding cats. True. And how many cats are already herded onto this site? People will go to sites and groups that hold value for them.

Quote from: Chichikov on March 28, 2019, 15:31
Q How do we push agencies like SS, istock, getty to offer a fair share of royalties
A We cannot

Q How do we work with the agencies to prevent the race to the bottom
A We cannot

Q What agencies are inherently unfair - low pricing, very low royalty, that should be boycotted
A We cannot

Q How can we create enough of an impact to make the agencies correct this
A We cannot

Amazing how self-defeating some people are, so incredibly lacking in vision. Just because something hasn't been done doesn't mean that it cannot be done. It's common sense that a large collective response will have some impact - indeed it already has in the past with the Dollar Photo Club and then recently with Storyblocks. So many losers said nothing could be done to affect Storyblocks when they cut commissions, and then days later Storyblocks doubled its sale prices. Contributors en masse told Pond5 that exclusivity shouldn't have to necessarily include existing clips, and Pond5 responded by allowing for separate accounts. Nothing is fixed in stone, it's a matter of organizational work. A huge task to be sure, but to simply say "cannot" is plain stupid and pathetic.

This is a much-needed, common sense idea. The first step is to start gathering contributors around the purpose of having a collective voice. What that "voice" then communicates to the agencies can be decided as a group and will surely change year by year. But the basic point is to have a large enough group of informed contributors that we can enter into conversations with the agencies and have an effect on how the industry runs.

I imagine a website where contributors can go to get information about the state of the industry and the actions of different agencies, and where contributors can simply click a button to join the group. We have to be realistic about what we can accomplish when small, but as the group grows to critical mass its influence will grow as well. Issues can be presented on the website, and contributors can vote on what's most important to them and what actions should be taken. Beyond that, just having a website that is geared toward informing contributors about the industry can be very helpful for contributors trying to figure out the best choices for themselves.

My two cents is that we will need a core group of people to create a plan, start a website, and donate time to find and steer contributors to the website to join the group.

Totally agree that the best thing we can do to protect and support ourselves long term is create some kind of collective voice, whether that's a formal union or loose collective. Some people are going exclusive with Pond5, for others it doesn't make financial sense - either way, it's a no-brainer that it would be tremendously beneficial to have more (any!) bargaining power with the agencies. Right now we're at their mercy, and even if you like a particular agency, make no mistake that they are much more concerned about their profit than yours. We need to level that playing field.

The line from Pond5 is that the buyers looking for exclusive content are generally companies concerned about branding, such as agencies (as opposed to social media buyers or lower end corporate work). They want clips that are not on ten different stock sites, and I guess not as frequently used. I don't entirely understand this. Whether a clip is exclusive to one agency or not, it's still "used goods." And for us contributors, we of course want our clips to sell as often as possible, which seems to be at odds with what buyers are looking for when they shop for exclusive content. The only point where our interests align is if a buyer requests a permanent buyout on a clip, which will be an option with Pond5 exclusive - this would be a multi-thousand dollar sale. Of course, a contributor will have to do the math to see how much money is worth giving up years and years of repeat sales.

The Town Hall showed a graph showing that exclusive content has double the "average revenue per clip" compared to non-exclusive. However, they did not detail how they did the math on that, and we have to consider that exclusive clips may in general be of higher quality. I view this whole endeavor as a grand experiment with a lot of variables. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out and what its effects on the industry are.

Not uploading to sites that sell low and pay crap is a huge thing contributors should do. But it gets trickier when it comes to Shutterstock, which pays well on some sales and a pittance on others. It's not clear what Pond5 and contributors can do about that (or Getty), but if we don't collectively think of something the price war will slowly hurt us all.

Just had a 45 minute phone call with Jason Teichman. Wish I could say I was able to convince him to keep non-exclusive commissions at 50%, but the best I can say is that I argued it a half-dozen ways (literally) and gave it my all. As he explained it, the situation at Pond5 is that in the last couple years they've increased sales and marketing by millions of dollars, and it has increased sales, but at the same time they're constantly getting under-bid by Getty and Shutterstock, who are more focused on photos and will sell their videos at greatly discounted prices to big buyers. The price war that collapsed the stock photo world is occurring in the footage world, and he sees exclusivity as the best possible bulwark against it. For non-exclusives, he says marketing expenses and price competition have made it impossible to maintain 50/50 splits. I have my arguments against that, such as that cutting commissions will lead to price increases at Pond5 and people signing up with more agencies, both of which will hasten the price war. And of course cutting commission kills trust and partnership. I think he genuinely understood and empathized, but in the end he said from a financial perspective there's no way they can continue a 50/50 split when the competition is so much lower. Disappointing for sure. On the plus side, it was good to get more insight into what is happening in the industry. And I give him credit for spending 45 minutes in conversation with someone who was criticizing his decisions. The one big thing we agreed on is that the commoditization of footage is the death knell of the industry. How to fight it is an evolving question, but he was receptive to my point that Pond5, while viewing exclusive content as a way to maintain value, also needs to work more with non-exclusive contributors on solutions to maintain the value of non-exclusive content. So glad I deleted my videos at iStock years ago.

Thank you. I entirely agree - whether someone plans to go exclusive or not, it's in the best interest of every contributor to send a message to agencies that it is never OK to cut our earnings. That's not something we can be apathetic about.

If you haven't already, please sign the petition against the commission cut and share with everyone you know: https://www.change.org/p/jason-teichman-pond5-don-t-cut-the-already-low-compensation-for-stock-artists

I have a phone call this afternoon with Jason Teichman of Pond5. He talked in the Town Hall about how this business runs on trust. I'll definitely be making the case with him that cutting our earnings is a serious violation of trust, in addition to the other negative effects it will bring.

Curious how going exclusive on Pond5 makes financial sense for anyone. I ran the numbers on my 2018 earnings - Pond5 was slightly more than 25% of my earnings, so even at 60% commission and even if my sales at Pond5 doubled, it would still be an overall 36% loss of income to go exclusive. Not even close to making sense. Are others making so much on Pond5 compared to SS, Abobe, etc. that the math actually works?

Also don't understand when some people say they won't make their current content exclusive but they'll make their future content exclusive. If it's an overall loss to make you current content exclusive, it's going to be the same for the footage you shoot next month.

Time will tell, but I doubt that's a working long-term strategy. I think buyers are pretty conditioned to pay around $80 for an HD clip ($40 commission at 50%). Jacking that up to $100 for an HD clip ($40 commission at 40%) could very well bring a drop in sales.

This 10% cut in commissions means a 20% cut in the amount of money we take home. If you formerly made $50 on a $100 sale and now only make $40, that's a 20% drop in earnings.

I'm very much against uploading footage to bargain basement agencies. It's bad for the whole industry and should not be ignored. I mentioned I'm in favor of Pond5 enforcing their rule about not letting contributors sell the same clips for peanuts on Envato, Bigstock, etc. And right along with that, Pond5 needs to realize that by cutting commissions they're pushing people to upload to other sites to make up for lost income. So they're feeding the price war they say they're against. Just one more point I plan to share with Jason Teichman in trying to get him to see that lowering commissions is not only unfair but also detrimental in the long term for several reasons.

What other thoughts do people have about the commission cut? Please keep 'em coming.

Let me narrow this down a bit in relation to the upcoming conversation with Jason Teichman. My specific grievance is the 20% rate cut for non-exclusive contributors. I hope that exclusivity helps maintain value and pricing in the market overall (as Pond5 expects), and certainly it warrants a higher royalty percentage than non-exclusive clips. But that does not have to coincide with lowering the commission on non-exclusive clips, which is unjustified and grossly unfair to content creators. Since going the exclusive route would be a net loss for many contributors and therefore a non-starter, all Pond5 is really doing is taking money from our pockets and lowering the incentive for people to create quality content.

I contend that if Pond5 thinks exclusivity is going to be fantastic, they should do it without penalizing non-exclusive contributors with a rate cut.

I also contend that their concerns about stock footage pricing collapsing the way stock photo pricing collapsed is not a wholly accurate comparison. The markets are different, the uses and buyers in many cases are different, and I would simply point out that the HD single clip price at Shutterstock has been $79 since at least 2012. That has become the market norm adopted as well by Adobe, Storyblocks, and many users on Pond5. To maintain that, the big agencies need to go to war on bargain sellers like Bigstock, and also make it unprofitable for the irresponsible people who contribute to sites like that. It's already in Pond5's user agreement that we cannot sell the same content for a substantially lower amount on other sites. I'm all for enforcing that for the good of the industry. If someone is selling an HD single clip for a few dollars, Pond5 should match and lock the clip price on their site, hopefully encouraging that user to abandon those bargain basement sites that hurt the whole industry.

Any thoughts specifically about the 20% rate cut for non-exclusive contributors?

I received a personal response from CEO Jason Teichman, and we will have a phone conversation soon to discuss the matter. If contributors would like me to ask certain questions to him or make a certain point beyond what I've expressed above, please let me know.