"We are sending this email to let you know that we've accepted 1 asset(s) you nominated for the Adobe Stock free collection. Congratulations! We've added an upfront payment of US$  to your overall earnings balance."

Oh, thanks so much. 1 approved photo out of 500 and for as much as a whooping US$ (I guess it's 5$?). Alright, next please.

So the inversion between AS and SS finally happens. I wonder (and hope) that it will continue onward, and is not just a one-off change due to short-term boycotting. I also hope and wish to AS to find the way and survive this dramatic royalties cut by SS and keep up their business viable and profitable without cutting our royalties (or at least not as much, and by providing other possibilities to offset the revenues).

It looks like SS is badly loosing sales to AS based on this forum's poll results:



I don't know if it's going to be a one-off effect due to a lot of people who boycotted SS in June and who, respectively, reported none to little sales, or whether it's a general trend that will continue further on, with AS soon overtaking SS as the Top 1 selling agency:

Quote from: Shelma1 on June 16, 2020, 10:56
It's now clear to me that when we opted out of DPC Shutterstock bought boycottshutterstock.com and immediately set about doing whatever they could to limit damage contributors could inflict to their numbers. That's why they were so obsessed with building a huge library without a care for quality.

What's the story about this boycottshutterstock.com domain? It's funny that it redirects to the main Shutterstock homepage instead of showing some neutral placeholder not connected to SS itself.

Quote from: Dumc on June 10, 2020, 16:15
Didn't he just disable them?

Disabling means that they are not available for licensing/sales but are still kept on the servers, right? So once you re-enable it in the acciun t settings, they should normally come back all, correct?

Not that I'm planning to re-enable my port anytime soon, just for information.


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I wonder if the 0.10$ sales that everybody does lately irrespective of their level is just a mistake at SS end, after all it's a drastic change for their accounting and management systems too (not defending them!). I remember iStock did so many of such accounting mistakes in recent years, sometimes they even apologized and made refunds... Its should be more clear in a few days whether the same happened to SS, maybe there will be another "corrigendum" and "apologies" email from SS soon... Or perhaps I'm too naive?

P.S. To be on the safe side, I decided to deactivate my account for the time being, just not to be saddened to see 0.10$ sales propagating the sales report...

Wow, pretty breaking news and utterly sad that even SS has to go that low.

What I didn't understanding from that email is whether the new pay rate percentages will apply also to subscriptions sales (for which we now receive a fixed pay based on lifetime earnings). If that's the case, I already see 0.03 cents sales as with Istock.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on September 20, 2019, 13:03
In case anyone is looking for the way to close your account, it's this:
In esp go to Account Management and select the "contact us" tab.
When it asks you to select category. choose Agreement. Click on "next" and select close account.

First of all, congratulations with your wise decision. Thanks also for your tips on closing down the account. Could you please clarify two more points:

1) do you have an idea how long does it take them to pay out the balance once the decision on closing down the account has been made? Is it during the next payout cycle (20th of the month) or much later?

2) I remember when reading the agreement some time ago that in case of termination they have a right to keep selling all of your portfolio for 6 months and only then delete all of your assets permanently. Is it still the case? Don't have the guts to go through all the legal text but perhaps iStock informed you about this at the time of closing down the account.

Many thanks.

Quote from: Mir on February 16, 2018, 10:51
How could I opt out of partner sales, I can't find such an option.

You need to go to your dashboard's Account Settings --> Payment Details, where you will find a tick-box with "Yes, include my portfolio for sale at 123RF API Partner Sites."

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on March 02, 2017, 16:36
Not sure when they'll actually pull the portfolio, but yesterday I asked 123rf to close my account.

I wonder if you could share your experience with closing your account at 123RF. Namely, how quickly they do this once you request it, and whether there's any grace/waiting period when you portfolio remains active/visible, etc. Thinking of closing mine too, in light of close to nothing revenues since last year and their recent scandalous decision to cut the rates/tiers without prior notice, etc. Thanks!

Hi Mat and all,

What is the difference between this new feature and the way whereby I can insert all keywords, copied from elsewhere (e.g. notepad or other keyword management program), into the first keyword box and clicking "enter"? In this way all keywords will be automatically inserted each into individual box. That's what I've been doing for quite a long time and I don't see how the new feature is anything more new than that one.

Also, I remain somewhat disappointed that this new feature doesn't appear to allow editing keywords (and titles) in a batch mode, so that I could keyword several similar images from the same photobatch at the same time. Unless I miss something. I think that's the feature that would be the real time-saving tool.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on November 20, 2017, 04:56
Look at your April vs May vs July for example. Looks like 50% swings are not unusual for you at all actually. Doesn't the hollow chart indicate stock performer predicts a pretty standard November for you by the end anyway? (I don't use it anymore but if I remember rightly that is what that bar is supposed to be right?)

Thanks. Sure, there are swings, likes everywhere else, my case with FT is not exception. The question is how much of a swing do you have. My average downward swing (i.e. a fall in % compared to previous month) is 25%, with the biggest so far being -50% (which happened during my third month of sales at FT when things were not stable with port increase etc.) I estimate that November 2017 will see a 70-80% drop (currently -76% to October 2017, with 8 working days remaining, some of them being public holidays). Isn't too much of a swing?

And the hollow chart indeed is a prediction by StockPerformer for the month, but I'm not aware of its algorithm (how they update it), and I can tell you that that hollow bar will stay very close to the filled dark bar you saw in my original post based on the performance up-to-date. It just doesn't fill up to honor what StockPerformer predicts now.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on November 19, 2017, 16:01
If you only make a couple of hundred dollars or less/ month you are going to see big fluctuations like this.

Can you please explain why would there be less fluctuations be it any other level of revenue (dozens of dollars or thousands of dollars)?

With a certain level of revenue at FT being almost stable for the last 2.5 years (my case), the drop in sales this month that I mentioned in my previous post is unprecedented to me, hence I started this thread to see if anybody else experiences this (so far I haven't felt it is the same for a lot of you).

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on November 17, 2017, 21:10
The short answer is no, I don't, but you want to compare this November with last November, not with October 2017.

That's fair enough, I agree.

While it remains to be seen how the full month of November will compare to previous years when the month is closed, based on the current status (18 days of the month) I'm down 50% compared to the same period of 18 days in November 2016 and down 65% compared to 18 days in November 2015. Needless to say, that my port increased substantially over the same time, and that I didn't do anything unorthodox just overnight (e.g. uploading different type of assets, or deleting large chunk of photos, etc.) to potentially cause such a disturbance to my performance. With less than 10 working days remaining (or even more due to looming holidays as mentioned here), I can be certain than my November 2017 will be very very much down compared to the same period of the last two years.

This looks very similar to what the SS did in April this year when a lot of people including myself saw a drastic fall in sales just overnight (my sales levels got to pre-April 2017 just recently). And similar to what IS/Getty did sometime this summer when they reshuffled the database to put new and newer images on top of search, making all others (including myself) who didn't upload in while (for good reasons) just miserable (a fall of more that 50%).

I just somehow thought that Fotolia/Adobe Stock wouldn't go into that extreme...

Quote from: steheap on November 17, 2017, 17:02
Sorry - normal month for me - perhaps even a bit better. And to add to your misery, we have Thanksgiving in the US next week so a loss of good buying days from that holiday.

Steve

Thanks, Steve. Could explain in part such a drop, since this is also a case for me with Shutterstock. I somehow expected November to be on par with October which historically is my best-performing month.

I know how some of you hate this kind of topics, but this one appears to be out of an ordinary one (at least for me), and I'm on a verge of freaking out: my sales at Fotolia/Adobe Stock have almost stopped in November, with a projected drop in sales vs October by -20% (or considerably more if the trend remains) and could be my worst ever month in 2.5 years (port of close to 2K images). As you can see, in my case fluctuations month to month with FT/AS are common, but November is something special (remember, we're in 17 November, with less than 10 working days left in this month).



Does anybody have a similar situation?

Probably something usual for some of you, but in my case it has been for the first time that I had 0 (zero) sales on Thursday (yesterday) and Friday (today) at SS. This is very common during the weekend days (can be rationally explained), but on weekdays - that's a new low. Port of close to 2K.

Anybody else has similar issues to no downloads during weekdays?

Got a standard "we don't feel there is a fit at this time" rejection email today, so those who applied may hear soon about their applications, lookout for your mailbox.


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So did anybody get another invitation(s) since the two from Germany and India, coming so quickly after the service's inception? In my case it's dead quiet which only underpins the suspicion that the first two invites were just a bug/scam.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 29, 2017, 15:27
...so if this deal is a distribution deal versus the API integration deals we've seen elsewhere, this is another anti-contributor move on SS's part

If they will do what they say, and they clearly mentioned 'reselling Shutterstock's assets', then this is a (re)distribution deal, with the consequences you already mentioned. While I'm not familiar with Moovly but it appears they specialize on video content; the impact on photographers shooting mainly photos would be minimal, but those shooting mainly video, should carefully watch this.

Source: http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/09/25/1131896/0/en/Moovly-Media-Announces-API-Integration-with-Shutterstock.html?f=22&fvtc=2&fvtv=1

"Through this agreement Moovly users get seamless access to more than 150 million of Shutterstock's digital assets (including video, images and, music) to make even more engaging and impressive content. Importantly too, this integration provides Moovly with an additional revenue opportunity by reselling Shutterstock's assets".

Reselling? Again, no transparency at all from SS side, no asking or letting one to opt out.

And voila, just another assignment offer in my mailbox. Same (final) customer, same fee ($50 for 5 photos), but location...is in India. I'm located in Europe. No expense budget. This is pathetic and so disappointing.

Coupled with a lousy launch of new stats feature on iStock today, thinking of quitting this business at all.

Quote from: Brasilnut on September 28, 2017, 07:53

QuoteJust got a request so have something concrete rather than speculation $12.50 each for four images.....but very run of the mill  location based. If I happened to live near its something I could do in minutes and probably incorporate into a wider shoot. If they didn't sell they wouldn't identify the brand so I could put up for sale....precisely what this business model is suited to.

In Germany?

I got the same, apparently. Would be a breeze of a shoot if I lived there or had visited. Just general cityscapes.

Same here, Germany. Apart from $12 per image, what is amazing is that no expense budget is provided. They know where I live (mentioned in my profile) and that it would take at least one-hour flight or 5-hour drive, the cost of transportation alone would be multiple times the $50 fee. So why sending this brief at all to people like me?

On the good side, they appear to accept one's archive photos if they match the brief, so no need to travel. But chances that I have pictures from that location which weren't published elsewhere are slim.

Does anybody know whether rejecting the offer affects your points compared to, say, ignoring it until its expiry?

Quote from: Pauws99 on September 26, 2017, 07:37
I'm in too to be honest that means the bar is set pretty low. 

I too have access to my account, but I have doubts this means one has been accepted. I'd wait for a formal confirmation.

Moreover, it's interesting to read their FAQ on Shutterstock Custom's Score. In particular, this may give more insight into their pricing models and the potential:

For example, a higher score will put you in a more elite category of Shutterstock Custom Photographers who will be given greater access to higher paying jobs, complex briefs etc. If you have a lower score, you may be given access to more general assignments or assignments with a pay-by-image rate until you improve it.

However, what is more concerning for me is that they appear to request (not desire) a 2-4x number of photos for each requested one, so that their team can select the final ones:

Submitting double images is a requirement, not a suggestion. Our curation team reviews all content from a brief and makes the final selections for the client. Submitting 2-4x your required images allows the team to have options to choose from, and ensures you have enough approved content to fill your assignment. This will also give you a bonus calculated into your overall score. This is a great, easy way to increase your points. Just be wary that all of your content uploaded is on brief, as this is also accounted in your score.

If the assignment is 5 final photos, then producing 10-20 is not a big deal. But if they require to have 10-20 final photos, then it becomes really burdensome to produce 20-80 photos for a single assignment (plus, it also depends on how much they'd be eager to pay for that).

I just don't see how one can survive with this kind of agency's inconsistent behavior. You stop uploading due to horrible ESP system, miserable royalties and lack of transparency, with plummeting revenues,until they fix something. And in the meantime they punish you second time for dumping your portfolio since it wasn't updated in a while,in favor of those who continued uploading new content (and directly agreeing with this whole disgrace).

Wow, people at Getty are probably laughing out loud now seeing all this.


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