Quote from: Zero Talent on May 05, 2022, 00:32


"The middleman" is not a "parasite", but a critical component of the market, a component allowing the expertise to flourish, instead of being wasted with collateral activities.
The farmer can focus on farming, and the photographer on photography, while the middleman is bridging the gap between expertise and customers.

Obviously, there are always middlemen trying to push their luck, but the market has a natural tendency to reward those middlemen who understand where the equilibrium point is.

Well agree or disagree, the role of the middleman has changed in recent years. Middlemen used to be tour operators, travel agents, taxi companies, banks, auction houses. Some still exist. I lived on as a golf tour operator because of unique local knowledge and connections but a stock provider telling me which picture I should use? I don't think so.

I have been selling on Etsy lately, not photographs, just clearing a house. Users have called a strike because selling fees have gone up to 6.5%. I compare it to auction houses (typically 29% plus moving and photography fees (harrumph)  and think it a bargain. I compare it to stock sites and my eyes pop out. What is it the stock sites do with a large-scale search that entitles them to so much of contributor earnings?

Distributor sales and discounting for bulk-buyers is unfortunate and has changed Alamy into a gutter microstock agency but I had a 5-year RM sale today for $0.50 for 'personal use'. Surely, by definition, a 'personal use' (advertised as £9.99) cannot be to a bulk buyer entitled to a huge discount?

Quote from: dirkr on January 11, 2022, 17:50
In my case they are clearly labelled as distribution sales (had four of them on Dec 30/31).

Either mine was not a distributor sale or Alamy is disregarding the opt-out. I opted out of all distributor sales last April yet still had a $0.15 sale to China on 30 Dec with (unspecified) $0.11 deduction. 

Happy New Year! I opted out of all Alamy Distributor Options in May 2021 so obviously this does not make a blind bit of difference.

Traced one of these wonderful Chinese sales to its use at http://maya.go2c.info/ so it is not (at least at the moment) being resold. I've had whole websites copied by Chinese operators and they, like this site, generally claim the copyright also.

Given there is no point now in having exclusive images on Alamy, is there a way to globally change all of a portfolio to non-exclusive? I know you can make default settings for future uploads but can you make the change en masse for existing images? Alternatively, as 95% of my Alamy images currently are exclusive, any suggestions for another agency where it makes sense to have exclusive images (these were uploaded to Alamy on the premise that they were different to the bog-standard stock stuff for other sites)?

Quote from: ravens on May 18, 2021, 07:38
]For me this page says, "you can opt out again in April"

It says that for everyone but, as Sue pointed out, it's not true.. you can opt out now as I did.

Quote from: rinderart on September 22, 2020, 19:59
OK...MSG account closed, Im done. be well.BTW. I don't get 10 cents.  got a raise today from SS.

He'll be back. And I'll be pleased. In the years I've been in the group I've learned more about b/w photography from Lauren Rinder (in posting asides, not in actively seeking his help) than anywhere else. In printing, framing and glazing your own images – it's a nightmare. European and the US postal services are incredibly resourceful in finding ways to shatter glass.

Photoshelter offers a selection of printers which works for me as one is close by, professional and takes the risk on things getting broken. I put some arty stuff on FAA and stuck a couple of other items on the end to fill my free quota. What sold? Yup, the stuff on the end. Including a duvet cover. That is how I want my kids to remember me: my dad took a picture so good people wanted to sleep with it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53998711

Interesting 'viewpoint' from Netflix!

Folllowing on from the video API, a similar development for images

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-advertising-integrates-shutterstock-to-help-advertisers-create-high-performing-ads-301096702.html

You can turn the automatic keywording (where it pulls text from the description) off in the tabs above the image but this has to be done at the start of every edit session as it defaults to on. Its uselessness is compounded by keywords only being single words so, for example, "queen of hearts" in your metadata keywords is split into three words which are not even stored consecutively.

I'm sure SS will claim they have to right to that domain name based on the google search results

As you have seen, your $500 a month might mean you require 5000 downloads. No matter how good you are, it is going to take quite some time to create enough images to make that even theoretically possible.

Obviously I don't know where you are and what the position is with your local printshops but you might consider contacting them to see if they have a need for custom design for any of their customers or if it is something they might think about offering. Jobs may be few and far between but each one would equate to an awful lot of stock image downloads.

Quote from: Shelma1 on June 18, 2020, 17:59
The gig economy and crowdsourcing have made it even easier for companies to take advantage of their workers. By classing the people who drive the cars or take the photos as non employees or independent contractors, they avoid paying the benefits required by law and get away with paying hourly wages that are lower than minimum wage without repercussions.

Absolutely hits the nail on the head.

It's bad enough when exploitative corporations tell a marine biologist, a hotel manager and two engineers (and that's just my circle of friends) that they have no employment rights when driving vans a ridiculous, and probably unsafe, number of hours per day to earn a living in present times, but when others in the gig economy lie down and agree that's the way it should be, it's probably time to despair.

Of course it's right to fight. The arc of history may bend towards justice but only if it gets a damned good kicking as the struggles of the trade union movement demonstrate. For the hard fought rights gained over 200 years to be dismissed with 'oh, that's the way the gig economy works' is, at best, short-sighted. If the push towards 'non-employment' continues there will be no employment rights for anyone other than those with the power to negotiate a golden parachute payment before starting work.

Someone pointed to SS employee reviews on Glassdoor a week or so ago but I could not find a reference to Comparably

https://www.comparably.com/companies/shutterstock/ceo-rating

Mr Pavlovsky does not seem to be loved by his minions: as CEO bottom 5% in similarly sized companies in NY area and in USA generally.

After a minute or two a pop-up appears asking you to rate Shutterstock either as an employee or a customer.

Quote from: cascoly on June 15, 2020, 23:15

Quote from: douglas on June 15, 2020, 07:49

Quote from: Mrblues101 on June 15, 2020, 05:13
I just want to share the record i am taking about images on SS database after june 1, i just copy and paste the text of SS bottom page:


June 15- 324.009.728 images, 993.927 new images per week

The effect is actually greater than this. That figure of 324,009,728 is what SS says is in the database in the line you mention but is always a little out of date. If you just search with blank search criteria it shows there are 322,772,035  images available i.e, more than 1.2M less than they claim.

only if that overcount is a 1 time event -- probably should subtract from all other data, too

You ask for evidence but don't look for yourself: just go the Search page It's not a one-off overcount, they only update that stats line roughly once every 24 hours. So at the moment it says there are 323,198,590 images in the collection but the search returns only 321,178,133. Similarly the "added weekly" was revised downwards in the last hour from 973,279 to 934,868 and is probably now already too high as the downward trend has been consistent since 1 June (when it was 1.16M).

I don't know what constitutes 'a tsunami' in statistical terms but a 19.5% drop in weekly submissions should have the inhabitants of Shittystick island at least looking for a few sandbags.

Quote from: Mrblues101 on June 15, 2020, 05:13
I just want to share the record i am taking about images on SS database after june 1, i just copy and paste the text of SS bottom page:


June 15- 324.009.728 images, 993.927 new images per week

The effect is actually greater than this. That figure of 324,009,728 is what SS says is in the database in the line you mention but is always a little out of date. If you just search with blank search criteria it shows there are 322,772,035  images available i.e, more than 1.2M less than they claim.

Quote from: cascoly on June 13, 2020, 00:56


but what shows is the futility of any boycott -- even removing 2 million images would only reduce the total by 1%.  no one will notice.  delete 20 million and SS will replace them quickly (and no portfolio consists of all best sellers - likely 20% of a portfolio produces 80% of income)

delete your images for other reasons, but don't imagine it will affect SS at all.

When I disabled my images I thought the same thing: it would not make a difference to Shutterstock but, to hell with that, it was a statement which had to be made and I was not going to sell images for 10c.

I was encouraged to see the figure for uploaded images per week fall from 1.6M on 1 June to below 1M today, probably more important than the total number in the collection as much content ages quickly.

I needed an image this evening which I would normally have strolled out the door and shot. However, I am still in partial lockdown at the other side of Europe but knew I had one pretty close to the view required, formerly on SS, now on DT. I found it on DT (happy to see it on the first row after only uploading last weekend) but, because I was curious, was stunned to see how few images now matched those keywords on SS.

So a boycott is not going to make a difference to searches for "happy smiley people doing happy smiley things" or "isolated tomato". It will be the specific images missing from SS, because it covered almost everything and everywhere, and these will not be instantly replaced by image factories, rather than the generic which will be their undoing as the result of frustration on the part of buyers.

Quote from: Chichikov on June 10, 2020, 10:25

Quote from: NeonRobot on June 10, 2020, 08:49
Freepik and ss now have much in common 
And yes we must turn off imagery faster, coz they profit 3 times faster.

I have seen now that the group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/261369748434285
has a new administrator: a brand ambassador of Freepik!!
Unacceptable for me.

The new administrator, Antonio Gravante, is now the new ex-administrator having flounced off in a huff. Seems this group's admins have a shorter life expectancy than football managers.

Quote from: Firn on June 05, 2020, 18:55

So, that explains why none of my sales there this month have earned me any additional 10%.

So this promised increase not only came at a very convinient time, but they also left out a quite important detail from their mail announcement. 

Och, yer jaw's trippin' you! You've been negative about everything all week. Lighten up, it's the weekend and this is a rare bit of genuine good news. I don't claim to know how Dreamstime code their application but, from the way I would do it, applying a commission change to an existing plan would be a nightmare. They are already paying considerably more than DT, albeit with low volume sales, so look forward to the bonus as you move images across to them. If you already have all your SS images there, what difference does it make to you?

Quote from: Dog-maDe-sign on June 05, 2020, 18:19


"Error: Due to the massive uploads, you can only make 7000 submissions per week. Please continue the upload process after 7 days have passed since your first submission."

I think it's just a temporary throttle. I was getting 504 Bad gateway error messages this afternoon EET then, when that resolved, it was the message you saw. The 504 just means servers are overloaded (often because virtual space is not properly assigned) unless it's a DDOS attack on behalf of the evil empire (surely not?!) so they throttle the edit traffic. No idea how they do their hosting but it's a fairly easy problem to resolve if hardware is available in a data centre or in-cloud. If it's as a result of folk doing the same as me, moving all their SS stuff across to DT, I'm happy to live with it for a couple of days.

Quote from: Firn on June 03, 2020, 13:02
You can continue to argue against every completely random example I picked to get a point across, it's not changing anything. Just pick an example yourself and think about whether you think it will make a difference to customers and Shuttesrtock whether they have 100.000 images of that topic in their database or "just" 50.000. images.

You are also discounting the effect the numbers will have on investors. Shittystick made the growth of its collection one of its main pillars in pitching to investors over the last 18 months. Now, especially if other agencies totals increase, they are going to be in the same awkward position as the UK government. For seven weeks the government briefings showed how UK COVID-19 cases and deaths were in the middle of worldwide comparisons. Then the cases and deaths rose above all other countries and, suddenly, the figures stopped being displayed in the press conferences because 'they were no longer relevant'. Shittystick will have the same problem in reverse about growth in their collection.

Whether it's dentists, tomatoes, sunflowers or marijuana, SS may have plenty of images but who is going to pay for studio time, models and props for the images which really sell if the return is 10c? And there may be plenty photographers in rural India happy to earn 10c a snap (and may be very good photographers) but they are going to struggle to satisfy requirements of "tall fair-skinned blonde woman in snowy city street" or "village life in Transylvania". 

Quote from: Horizon on May 31, 2020, 16:29
Oh come on people this is an agency which hardly sell anything at all and now because of the SS scam they are increasing royalties.!

In the last couple of months my sales on DT have gone from practically nothing to a very small bit of something. Similarly, their contributor UI has improved dramatically - I rarely have to change the automatically suggested categories and all the information I want is easily found. Can I say the same about Shittystick? Nope. Interface has not improved, sales have gone down.

Relatively speaking, DT is a small agency: that's why it doesn't sell a lot. I uploaded 300 images tonight which were on SS and not DT. If everyone disabling their portfolio does the same, then it's not such a small agency and the results could be good for all.

Almost every company was a small business once. There is no reason they have to stay that way.   

Quote

I added the "I don't know" options for video-based questions.

If you select "no", you will be taken to the next page to enter what you would consider minimum baseline guarantee in the new scheme.

That's what it says in the description of the question.

Thanks - form submitted. Maybe it's just me but until you explained the subscription question I had taken "leave subscriptions alone" to mean leave them as they are now, i.e. pre 1 June, so would have answered "yes".

Sorry, I feel churlish seemingly sniping from the sidelines when someone else has made an effort but the questionnaire does not address my concerns.

•    I don't shoot video and there is no N/A answer or the option to skip.


•    Not resetting after 12 months is better than resetting after 12 months but I would not consider that change a victory. It's the wrong pitch with which to begin a negotiation.
•    Percentages/subscription blah blah. That's the mechanics. The question for me is what is the absolute minimum I would accept for a photograph to be licensed and that is probably $0.33, same as Adobe and a couple of cents less than DT.

It's wonderful how everyone from lawyer to photographer is now an expert epidemiologist. I have no idea what the best strategy for virus containment/herd immunity/healthcare impact spread is but I know if travel bookings are collapsing, airlines and booking companies are going to be advertising more and will buy pictures. What should we learn? All those companies who said their workers could not work from home now have employees working at home, which means the disabled people they didn't want to hire could also have been working from home. Oh, and public healthcare is maybe quite important, USA?