Quote from: stockastic on January 10, 2015, 14:31

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on January 10, 2015, 10:33

He's a billionaire because he masterfully played the game of business and managed to make a fortune off of ordinary people. Bravo! Well played.

I can't quite manage a "bravo" for this guy, who's made a ton of money as a middleman by gaining control of a market and exploiting photographers around the world, grinding their margins to dust and causing many skilled and creative people to abandon the business.  Yes there is some skill in evidence here, but also a very large component of being in the right place at the right time.

We don't have a 'buyer's market', or a 'seller's market'.  What we have today is a 'middleman's market'.    Somehow, I don't feel this represents the original dream of the internet and crowdsourcing increasing opportunities for everyone. 


I look forward to a day when the photographic community finds ways to route around Shutterstock entirely.  That will get a 'bravo' from me.

The ultimate measure of a man is what he does with power and wealth as his true worth is built upon the legacy of his deeds.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one would never wish to live.

Greed flourishes by a thousand tiny surrenders to self seeking, selfishness, self interest.

And here we are... Jon's actions bearing fruit!

Quote from: FastRacer on June 01, 2020, 12:38

Quote from: thx9000 on June 01, 2020, 12:29

Quote from: gnirtS on June 01, 2020, 12:14

Looks that way - they cant even get the robbing contributors bit correct.  Everything is appearing as an SOD.

Greed and incompetence. That's a potent mix. If you aim to drive a business into the ground that is.

Thing is, THEY are laughing all the way to the bank. It�s only being driven into the ground for contributors. The noobs who are ok with $.10 an image are all lined up, ready to go. Tens of thousands of them.

Short term maybe. Long term they'll eventually share the fate of iStock. I don't know what kind of spin they put to this in their corporate meetings to convince themselves it is sustainable but there is no way they'll be able to keep old and attract new contributors producing relevant and quality content. After that it'll be a vicious circle ...down the drain. It's not the first nor the last time a leading company shoots itself in the foot

I don't think they ever thought it would be sustainable. They made a mint going public and the goal has always been, to fill their pockets, at our expense.

The business plan has been built around devaluing our assets to gain market share and that has not changed. The focus is on attracting more contributors, using key contributors to attract more contributors and offering the lowest pricing model to attract buyers.

They fully understand this is not sustainable, at which point they do just what they have done. When profits & market share drop, prop stock prices up by robbing the contributor piggy bank.

I don't care enough any more, to check what key players have been doing with their stock and stock options. I am out and have been out for a while. Will never be back. I don't do business with morally bankrupt crooks.

SS has NOT changed RECENTLY. Once Jon decided to go public, he committed to throwing contributors under the bus to gain market share. Key employees put in place during the IPO publicly stated, that the objective was to lower prices with the intent to gain market share.

It is sad to read this thread and see, that some people are only now, waking up. Jon committed to exploiting contributors and running down prices in 2011. They intend to do so, until there is nothing left to wring out of contributor hides.

They fully understand that there is a limited window in which to exploit contributors under the downward trajectory that is their business plan.

Does anyone here belive they will not continue to lower prices until they have destroyed; even new contributor ability to make a slim dime. SS's business model has been an unsustainable pyramid scheme, for most contributors, since 2011.

And yes they banned people from the forms before & deleted ports when contributors complained about poor treatment. They were largely unresponsive on the forms in regard to serious contributors problems, from the very beginning.

As you can see on the forums there is always a fresh new crowd of contributors waiting to take advantage of algorithms; which benefit new contributors. And always new contributors, who are willing to buy into the lies and belive, that it will never happen to them. Because of course, they are strategic workers who produce superior content.

As always, some will disappear from stock and move on, just as many old timers did from MSG when they woke up to find sales had dropped by half because of algorithm changes tuned to give IS contributors jumping ship, a competitive advantage because they were at lower pay levels.

Now might be a lovely time to re-read their blog post about their sumptuous new headquarters in the Empire State building



I encourage anyone's social media shaming of these greedy jerks to go heavy on the contrast between their luxury real estate in one of the world's most expensive markets and how they're trying to squeeze the small businesses who supply them. During a pandemic no less - to add a rich layer of icing on the cake!

Do a search for #ShutterstockESB on twitter to see the "Silicon Alley" elite at play in their new space... Especially sickening in light of the new royalty scheme

It is not like we did not have advanced warning... it has been clear for a very long time that SS does not value its contributors. All we needed to do is pay attention to their actions over the long term. And yet we continued to give them the benefit of the doubt time after time; while they continued to let us know who they are via their choices.

We need to ask ourselves... do we value ourselves & our work. I have not contributed to SS for some time and they will never get another creative from me.

https://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/shutterstock-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2013-financial-results/msg366316/#msg366316

The time to stand up to SS was long ago... Why anyone is surprised at these actions, is beyond me. I tried to set off alarm bells long ago and was met with a great deal of push back & disdain.

SS/JO = Pure greed and nothing more... Actions have shown for many years; that they do NOT value contributors! Contribute to SS @ your own peril.

Devastating news. I met him once in Cologne, when he was still with Shutterstock. Great guy full of life with a big smile. Very inspirational and very dedicated to working with photographers and artists.

Terrible loss for his family and young children, but also a terrible loss for us. He was one of the really decent people with a keen, sharp mind the industry has.

My deepest condolences.

Could not agree more, a huge loss for his young family, our photo community and the world in general. Scott was an outstanding individual and he will be missed.

More ramblings of a Trump hater 

If the Pope stood up today and said Donald Trump was the second incarnation of "jesus" democrats and liberals would still hate him for no other reason than they have to hate him.

It might come as a surprise to find that there are a good number of Republican NON Trump supporters who hold him accountable for his numerous contemptible and documented actions; because many of those actions are in polar opposition to the actions Jesus thought were of paramount importance.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on June 01, 2017, 21:52

Has SS changed much over the past 15 years? I wonder how much of the current system is band-aid'd 15 year old technology.

Look at part of a glassdoor review (from April 2017) of a departed software engineer

"Preventing the company from having high uptimes is a massive pile of tech debt, the fixing of which is often prioritized out of existence. Several attempts have been made in splitting up the monolithic Perl app that runs the store into several smaller microservices; however, since no resource planning, performance measurements, or any other sort of proactive actions were taken by the developers, the microservices have only increased the number of single-points-of-failure. Compounding issues is a relatively-new directive that all new services *must* be written in NodeJS, and while this is a positive trend from the previous directive of "you can write your code in any language you want";, the extremely-questionable choice of NodeJS was made by a small committee of developers, with no input from other teams in the company.

As such, development at Shutterstock is a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions, which both developers and infrastructure being ill-equipped for the scale and challenges that need solving. Projects at Shutterstock used to be in pretty much every language under the sun (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS, and Go used to all be supported runtimes), so it's commonplace to be handed code in a language you're unfamiliar with. As a result, services are rewritten every time the assigned developers change (which is frequent, due to high turnover), and as a result, there are many instances where two or three microservices running to serve the same function.

The developers themselves are a mixed bag. As stated in Pros, there are some very smart people here, but they're sadly dwindling in number as the days go by. Instead of hiring experienced developers to replace them, managers instead hire very-inexperienced developers, often right out of college, or very inept developers, who actively make poor coding choices and lower the overall stability of the site further. Since these developers often function by pushing untested code into production with minimal test coverage, problems go undiscovered until they cause production problems, and only after several hours of looking at red herrings first.

The toxic nature of the culture at Shutterstock means that teams are rarely willing to work together, instead hoarding infrastructure resources and institutional knowledge in blind grabs for power and prestige. Shadow infrastructures are commonplace, only being discovered when they cause production outages or break in some other way that affects the developers who created them. At this point, the Infrastructure team is expected to support and fix these solutions, without being given either the manpower to do so, or the authority to remove these teams' abilities to create their shadow servers again. As a result, the infrastructure is in a constant state of flux, and a recent decision to move the entirety of the infrastructure to the cloud was both poorly-justified and badly-planned, and will lead to more outages in the future.

A lot of these faults and problems lie squarely at the feet of management, who have to be among the most inept group of executives I've ever worked for. Middle management is easily the worst, with good management is often coached out of the company, replaced by others who are too busy playing politics to manage effectively. There are way too many middle managers, and others are promoted to management positions without experience or a clear directive. As a result, managers often battle with one another over responsibilities and power, and burying each other in meetings is far more common than it should be. This directly affects morale and productivity, and engineers are often paralyzed into inaction for fear of making the wrong move and losing their jobs.

At the C-level, the poor performances continue. The CEO is a megalomaniac who micro-manages the site and the work teams are doing, often wasting tons of resources and time by refusing to allow more-qualified employees to handle the day-to-day operations. The tasks he sets are almost always impossible to complete on time, and he has no qualms about dismissing managers that he feels have failed him, even if the failures were due to his poor planning or lack of understanding of his own company's technical stack. This further increases stress and fear among the engineers as well.

Overall, working at Shutterstock is a frustrating, unfulfilling experience, and there is almost certainly a better company in NYC that would make better use of your skills, and respect you more as a person. Avoid!"

This should come as no surprise to any of us. The site has not been functioning for at least 10 years. jon has consistently stiffed contributors and choose the bailing twine approach each and every time numerous bugs became impossible to ignore. Based on his business plan to run prices into the ground; I have always suspected he and the people he brought on board for the IPO, believed the money would be made before the site imploded. As such they never invested the capital and resources needed to develop the site for the long game.

They made changes to the search engine to facilitate the IPO and flow of sales between pay tiers to boost stock prices. For years, jon has been consistently making choices for short term profit with no regard for the welfare of his contributors or employees.

These "bugs" have been going on for years and shutterstock has done little to resolve the numerous issues.  As long is money is flowing in on SS's end they do not care how the bugs impact the welfare of their contributors.

Quote from: gbalex on April 20, 2016, 10:10

Constant bugs on SS

This is the message I receive when trying to log on to SS.

"Your connection is not secure

The owner of contributor-accounts.shutterstock.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website."

That's a Firefox problem not SS problem. I get the same alert on Adobe's website.

If it was a firefox issue, I still would not be able to get in. I waited three hours and signed on again and had no problem the second time.

Quote from: MichaelJayFoto on March 29, 2016, 14:01

Quote from: Photostocker on March 29, 2016, 13:49

We contributors should set up our own stocksite where the royalty rates are something like 90%. 10% is only for the runing company and the website. And we need webtool for the copy and paste all the photos and keywords from the iStock if contributor wants to leave from the iStock.

Sure. Because customers are just waiting for that. And the site obviously is going to run flawless once set up because it is run by photographers who know what they're doing. 

Eh-Hem, I am a photographer, I have set up my own stock site selling purely my own content, it looks far more professional than iStock's site ever did/does. It has very simple pricing, it is easy to navigate, was built on a free and open source CSS platform, nothing is broken, the site can accept both credit card and PayPal payments, and it runs smoother and faster than the iStock site ever does/did.

Granted I don't have a sizable collection when compared to an agency that crowd sources from millions of potential contributors, or the traffic to be successful with it (yet), but it isn't hard to run circles around iStock's web programmers in order to build a stock site that works and people find easy to use, yet I still consider myself very much a coding hack at best. I set it up over only a few month period, on a part time basis, whilst tweaking and working the bugs out. Imagine what one could do if all they did all day was develop a stock site as a full time endeavor?

When I think of the iStock site programming team though I imagine a bunch of children with mental disabilities who can't control their bowels sitting in a bathtub together, whilst floating amongst their own turds, squeezing them like Play-doh, and giggling away as if they haven't a worry in the world.

Good point, I think because most people are inexperienced in building sites they over estimate the technical abilities and expense needed to build a successful sales platform. And the micros have taken full advantage of this. Heck their sites are full of bugs which they make no attempt to resolve.

Quote from: r2d2 on February 19, 2016, 11:06

Quote from: enstoker on February 19, 2016, 09:55

Every day more and more sales on Fotolia.
&
Excellent support from Mat and agency support team, as well.
TNX Mat.

Realy refreshing !
Nice weekend to all 

ecited, thank you, impressive...

Yes they make PR (you call it support) in this forum. WOW!
They give us 33% commission and make millions.
Suggestion: Stop the "support" and pay a fair trade commission of 50%.

For what should i say thank you?


No wonder that the agencies can make  what they want with us...

Baby-steps in the right direction are still steps. Fotolia scores some brownie points with their communication. Expecting leading agencies to suddenly start paying a fair 50% is unrealistic, considering those of us that could have helped prevent that trend years ago, failed miserably at doing so.

Only way to send a message is to sacrifice the worst of the leading agencies. Easy choice. iStock. If enough contributors severed ties with those scumbags demanding they lower the 85% commissions they rape from your content or pull their ports. Shutterstock, etc. would eventually notice and things might start to change. Or else "they could be next". But no, here come the sad excuses. Change takes sacrifice boys and girls, personal and financial. But the result in the end would be well worth it. Can't take the hit all at once? Drop exclusivity, stop uploading, speak out more, take a few down at a time. Do something or admit defeat.

Every single one of you that still contribute to and defend iStock are responsible for extending the state we are in now. Every time the idea of a "union" or some kind of collaborative effort gets shot down by frightened, uneducated, voices that dismiss the idea before it begins, we ensure our future stays as is.

Even a small yet vocal, organized, focused group represented by a handful of trusted big time contributors would change the game for us. The naysayers overlook the power of a vocal minority and the fact that the "big corporate, faceless" overlords are scared to death of negative public sentiments and will placate to preserve reputation. Consider politicians, television networks, etc. We don't need more than a measurable enough percentage of content represented, with a loud, consolidated voice to start developing momentum to push back with.

Many are underestimating the power we'd yield with a simple coalition, and over-estimating the disadvantage of the lack of total participation and the quality of the new content that deliver those ridiculous high stats that scare you so much. Simple communication and clear, honest goals would keep the recruitment healthy.

Or just keep complaining to thin air while bending over repeating, "yes sir, may I have another"...

I should rename this thread "Please Sir May We Have Some More"

http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/last-ss-raise-may-13-2008/