i Have files there that are over 300 downloads and are good sellers on other sites too. dont really know what to do, but if they are picked by adobe(not by me, cuz adobe may pick any of them if they want to). Many over 100-200 over the past years. considering that adobe does give us relatively good money for the downloads, im quite in a pinch here...

Yes, so the conclusion is: Beware!! Or just hack into their system and check if the transaction was not a fraud. The worst thing is that i cannot really prove that they did not send an email about this. i did not get any email from them, but i cannot prove it.

This is sad. I cannot see how can agencies like this still exist, after so many years.

i did not receive any email from them....

i lost there 600USD when i last checked. i got their final email. They are saying that i should know my buyers....

"Jackie Ha (Creative Market)

Jul 18, 8:13 AM PDT
Hi there,

Unfortunately, you are not eligible to receive the earnings on your account due to a breach in our Terms of Service agreement. Our team conducted an investigation on this issue, and we found a large number of active fraudulent accounts related to your shop. Per our terms, you are required to alert us of any suspicious activity related to or involving your account:

    You agree to immediately notify us of any unauthorized use of your registration information or any other breach of security related to your account or the Service, and to ensure that you "log off"/exit from your account with the Service (if applicable) at the end of each session. We are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your failure to comply with any of the foregoing obligations.


Creative Market takes account security very seriously, so we thoroughly investigate any issues that are brought to our attention, including cases where shop owners are concerned about potentially fraudulent sales in their shop. Prior to the closure of your account, we had received no correspondence from you regarding these suspicious transactions from users that all have spammy names and usernames (such as jsadkashdashd and lkasjdksadas). Due to this breach in our agreement, we have chosen to withhold the remaining earnings per our terms (Shop Owners, Section 5):

    Creative Market reserves the right to withhold payment or charge back to your account any amounts otherwise due to us under these Terms, or amounts due to any breach of these Terms by you, pending Creative Market's reasonable investigation of such breach.


I hope that helps clarify things! I've passed your request to completely delete your account to my colleague that handles those specific requests.

Sincerely,
Jackie Ha
Creative Market Support
https://creativemarket.com
https://www.facebook.com/crtvmrkt
https://www.pinterest.com/creativemarket"

thank you for the help everyone, i will keep you updated how things work out

Well, i tried to contact them several times, they are not answering my emails nor any posts. This is unbelievable, i mean okay, 400USD is not a big money, but even so, if i had 10 dollars there it would be a problem.

yes, that was the main idea, clean out my portfolio there, and remove all of my photos, the problem is that they are not responding to my emails, and there is no other way to contact them. i have 10K+ portfolio on shutter, fotolia, and getty, never had this issue.

its a shame that there are still these kind of sites. if they dont respond i do not really know where to write. im not really sad about the money, but the fact that there are still agencies that treat their contributors this way. i hope none gets in the same boat.   

Well, actually it was going nice, and i had sales on it, but i've got banned. just wanted to share the experience, hope there wont be many others. not much money, but i had 300USD there, which was not "fraud" and was not taken from my balance, that money also disappeared.

also, my sales which were fraud, were purchased several months ago. some of them 1 year ago. it took them a year to realize fraud purchase and then they banned my account. insane. i knew about some fishy sites over the internet, but never thought that this site which works for more then 1.5 years for me goes like this.

I will share my latest experience of the site. Just yesterday i got a message from creativemarket that one of my photos which was sold, got a refund of $15.00, it was issued to asdasd asdas for the purchase of my product. Then i got 15 more with other names like dfgdfg and sdfsdf and alike. Also i have noticed that i cannot log into my account, and my password recovery was not working. this was in the email:

A refund of $15.00 was issued to asdasd asdas for the purchase of your product Industrial interior of an old factory for the following reason:
"Unfortunately our credit card processor has notified us that this was a fraudulent purchase. We've banned the fraudulent purchaser, and refunded the purchase amount back to the credit card used in this transaction."

So i wrote to them, and they replied next day with this, and this only! :

It has come to our attention that your shop is driving a disproportionate amount of fraud. In order to minimize our financial liability, we have chosen to permanently close your shop and your account. This also disqualifies you from creating new accounts or applying for new shops on Creative Market. Any new accounts found will be closed automatically without notice.

The keyword is "OUR" financial liability. no email, no notification, no nothing, they have closed my account, god know where are my photos from there, god knows if they are already on some chinese websites or not, and they just removed my account, with the money on it without any notification.

So if you guys have some buyers there with fishy name, get your money out of there and close your account, because they going to close it as soon as they look into it, and they wont say a thing about it. i saw some other forum posts there talking about this, but until now i did not know about them. there are people there who got the same problem. 

and only for the records

Prores 422 ----> PhotoJPEG ----> Mp4  (----> decrease of quality, file size, bit depth)

you can do a pixel by pixel comparsion, it should give you a result of the same as above, but it is not so relevant, cuz the problem in quality differences comes out when videos are i motion and you are looking at darker areas. try to export a photojpeg or prores video of some fire or low light scene in MP4 and you will see the horrible truth that the mp4 codec is not able to compress them well. you can enhance the compression with adding grain to the footage, so the darker areas will be compressed better, but photojpeg and prores is far better in this kind of a situation.

Also there is a problem with programs doing their export the different way. For example DaVinci Resolve exports shi**ty mp4 files, altough other file export is way faster than in media converter or premiere pro, and timeline editing is a bliss, also less noise and bending. (i did not use final cut so i do not know about it). best program is mpeg2 streamclip but it can hardly handle 4k, and has very few editing possibilities. the footage exported from mpeg2Streamlicp had the less artifacts and bending.

i would really prefer if stock agencies allow h.265/h.264 with an optional request of the file with a better quality. this would result that we would need to backup files with incredible file sizes but things on stock would be smoother, and upload time would decrease a lot. this is a wish that won't come true.

the most important thing we don't know, is this: what quality does the buyer need. so until this question is declared there is only one answer to this topic: upload the best quality and resolution, in the best container for your file.

i upload PhotoJPEG to all stock agencies. Altough i can acquire very good results using h.264 encoding (you have to add some grain to the video so there will be no bending, and the compression will result better quality), but uploading the best quality you have is the best option i think.
If i had prores (i had it when i used Blackmagic and a MAC) i would upload prores, but now 5dMK4 has MJPEG. Mp4 files will be under heavy pressure when editing and color grading.
The problem is that contributors do not really know what to upload. i would prefer h265, or h264 because of the small filesize and reasonable quality. i do not really think, that people on the internet would need giant files for their websites and tv commercials and stuff...still...i upload humongous PhotoJPEG-s, because i do not know what quality would be needed, also i upload them in 4k UHD.
The sales are not going well on 4k, but my way older footage, made with a nikon d90 (720p HD, 25Mbps) are selling really good. Sometimes i have a large download, like 120dollars on a 4k file, but that is not an everyday thing.
Stock sites really should declare something...i mean uploading pictures is so easy. Jpeg and that is that. i mean we could upload TIFF-s, Png-s, PSD files, but no, we upload JPEG, and it is good for everyone. Meanwhile, footage has several extensions, containers, etc. uploading in prores and photojepg is somewhat similar to uploading TIFF files. Large files which can be color graded better than MP4 files. But MP4 should be enough for many buyers. There are a lot of videos which are looking like a disaster after converting them to MP4 from better quality. And it is a pain to convert every footage you make to a different codec which suits it the best (altough this would be the most "quality-optimized" solution).
So until we really don't know what are the downloaders buying, there is no really solution for this question.
the smart little geek behind his notebook does not even know what is prores 422, and what is 4.2.2 stand for. but he will download it cuz it is the best quality he can get. then he converts it into some sh**ty codec with the birate of 15Mbps and he is  really happy cuz he has the best video.
on other hand i do not know if there are some people who would use our footage for professional stuff, which indeed needs the quality.

Quote from: sharpshot on March 27, 2017, 10:43
I'm the one with sales from 2017 but only 2 so far.  It's sad but perhaps inevitable.  The small sites that don't spend lots of money to attract buyers end up losing out.  I don't know why sites like FP and GL don't merge, seems like their only chance of survival in the long term.

yes, but i think they dont even have the intention to merge. it would be the best tough...thanks for the help and information, i think FP is over for me, and i get my portfolio offline there. Bummer,i liked that site.

Quote from: sharpshot on March 27, 2017, 09:56
I find it difficult to believe you were getting $50 a month from FP and now nothing?  I have never made anywhere near that much there but I'm still getting the occasional sale.  I will asses the situation when I next reach the payout level.

most of my sales come from that image and it is only luck i think. but still...it is really strange. i looked at my tax information, and other stuff, and everything is working fine. that is why i assumed it is dead, but there was a comment that somebody made sales from 2017 so i presume it is alive.... anyways, it is sad to see a site go dead. they treated the contributors well.

Quote from: sharpshot on March 27, 2017, 09:56
I find it difficult to believe you were getting $50 a month from FP and now nothing?  I have never made anywhere near that much there but I'm still getting the occasional sale.  I will asses the situation when I next reach the payout level.

well, it was 40-50 per month until a year from now and from september it is dead. that is why i asked here. i also have my photo in the promotion section on the homepage for a lot of time now and got a lot of sales from that. (and the promoted photos are not changing for almost a year now)

Quote from: Pauws99 on March 26, 2017, 20:06

Quote from: 50% on March 26, 2017, 19:11
featurepics? Wow you must have a lot of spare time!

Yep I'm an optimimist at one time the were slow but not the worst but they got slower and slower them and Yay seem dead in the water. Panther media on the other hand were never alive for me ;-)

panthermedia is very dead for me. 10K pictures on it and no sales almost   i tried out small sites like these, but no luck. only on Pixta. that site sells a lot of photos for me.

The frustrating thing is that only shutter, fotolia and getty has good sales and payouts. And also pond5 for me. and it is scary that stock photographers depend a lot on them. and lately Shutter is doing very sh**ty things...

Quote from: 50% on March 26, 2017, 19:11
featurepics? Wow you must have a lot of spare time!

i think you do not need a lot of time (circa 2 min) to upload and manage your files. they have 50% commission so i supported them as well as graphic leftovers (dead too)

Quote from: sgoodwin4813 on March 27, 2017, 00:24
My last sale there was September 19 so I am seeing the same as the OP.  I like them in general due to easy uploads, fast, reasonable reviews (in the past at least), 50% commission and no subscriptions.  The problem is that sales were always very slow, and dead since last September.  I haven't uploaded there for a long time due to an unknown problem with ftp - not worth the effort to get it sorted out.  I would if sales pick up but unfortunately don't see anything happening any time soon.  My suspicion is that they are just coasting along to get what they can before either folding or selling out (if they can find a buyer).  I wish they would be more successful because they treat contributors well as far as percentage.

The same for me, it got me 50USD per month, and i only have to upload fies, that is 1 click so no time needed for getting around. But from september i got no sales. i think it is over for them. no reply from the support team, my uploaded photos are still in pending phase. I think i am going to deactivate and delete my portfolio from there before they start to get cheeky.

I just checked my featurepics account. Did not do this for the last 5 months and i noticed that there are no sales from 2016 September. Also my photo on their homescreen is still there as featured pic with the same photos for a lot of time. i got several sales until september and from then not a single one. They also do not reply to emails.

Featurepics is not my main site but it would be good to know if it is still online, or threre is something wrong witth my account, am i missing something that happened, etc...

How are you guys doing on Featurepics?