Hey All!

Just wanted to let everyone here know that Envato has officially been certified as a B Corp. Here's an excerpt from our media release about what a B Corp is:

"Envato is now one of over 3000 certified B Corp companies in 71 countries and 150 industries around the world, joining a list of other Australian B Corps such as Culture Amp, KeepCup and Bellroy.

Administered by the non-profit B Lab, B Corp certification is awarded to businesses that have a positive impact across five key domains - workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment - and in doing so, lead the way in using business as a force for good."

For more details about it, you can check out our post here: https://envato.com/blog/envato-certified-b-corp/

Have a great day!

Hello,

My name is James and I work at Envato. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree, it's not the best approach. As others have pointed out, there are different perspectives on how to conclude a portfolio review that leads to a no. We've had an internal debate about it (with people presenting thoughts just like what people have presented here) and ultimately we agree that not responding isn't how we want to move forward.

While we've tried to make it clear what the process is, we want people to know just how things are going and when we've finished our evaluation. We've begun work on changing the way the application process works and how it connects with all our systems (not as easy as writing an email unfortunately) and I expect we'll have an updated process to be launched very soon.

If you have any thoughts on words we can use or ways we can share news like this with compassion and empathy, I'd welcome that input. It's never easy to receive a no and if we can do it in a way that encourages people to keep going, that would be my preference.

Thanks again for calling this out and letting us know how you feel and how we can do better.

James.

Hello!

Thanks for trying to help authors understand their tax obligations. To ensure clarity, our tax team (some of the smartest tax experts I know) have provided me with some information that might help you and others understand their obligations.

Envato has a requirement from the IRS to disclose the gross payment, before platform fees. You can read more about that on the IRS' website at the following link. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1099msc

The backup withholding tax rate that is applied (for example, if you do not have up-to-date W forms filed with Envato) is 24%, not 30%. The exception to this is if you are in a country without a tax treaty with the US. In that situation, the Royalty Withholding Tax rate is 30% and only applies to earnings from customers in the US (the Backup Withholding Tax applies to all earnings).

We apply the Royalty Withholding Tax on the Item Price (List Price minus Buyers Fee). You can learn more about how taxes are calculated in our Author Help Center. Here's a link: https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000471243-Tax-Information-Form-W-8-Requirements-for-non-US-Authors

We work very hard as a team to ensure that you receive as much of your earnings as possible. We also do our best to ensure that where there are reporting and collecting obligations, Envato supports you as much as possible by calculating, reporting and collecting on your behalf.

If you have any questions about how taxes are calculated, about the status of your W forms or anything else related to tax, you can reach out to our tax team at [email protected].

This is amazing! When I accepted the terms for Envato Elements I incorrectly assumed it was another one of those (this is good for you but not really good for you) deals like other stock agencies pass along. Because of this I just assumed I'd be making pennies. I signed up and forgot about it, and continued on my merry way only uploading new content to my top three earners. Last night after receiving an email from Envato I was like "oh yeah, I signed up for that, I should see if I sold anything" I was expecting to see an account with perhaps $10 or so. Oh was I wrong! Envato Elements somehow since July has become my top earner! Thank you thank you thank you for treating contributors the way you are! Thank you for realizing my hard work is worth something! I will be uploading new content to your agency first.

Glad things are going well!

**AHEM**

Feel free to shout that from the rooftops (or monthly earning polls from certain third-party forums). We're not opposed to photographers letting others know that their earnings are growing with Elements and PhotoDune.  ;-)

Seriously though, super excited to see that things are working out well and your earnings are growing. I am curious how this might impact your plans for future uploading/publishing. Does more earnings change how often and how many items you upload? What impact does tooling play in this?

I'm also curious to know what, if anything we can do to help you understand our content requirements and subject matter needs. We're hoping to ramp up what you get from our team in the way of feedback and input so, happy to hear what format is best for you.

They kept a minuscule amount of images out of my 20k portfolio (while sending me emails of praise about the high quality of my content) and logically, those aren't generating any sales. I waited a month, got zero sales, told them to delete my images, close my account and sod off. What a bunch of imbeciles!
In the praise email they even specified photos they especially liked that were actually NOT selected from my portfolio. Sent them an email "uhm, you know, those pictures you liked so bad were not selected", got a reply with "hang on, my bad..." and that told me everything I needed to know about their new approach to fcking things up.

I guess I am one of those imbeciles you are referring to. Nothing to say except to apologise that the experience wasn't great. There's been a lot of learning through this. We're doing a lot of training with our team of reviewers and in a few instances, they were off the mark in terms of our standards and what photos met those standards.

You're not the only one who was frustrated about sending emails to people with work done to try and find examples that we liked and that we thought weren't quite right, only to have the ones we liked identified for disablement.

Based on a few threads I've seen around here though, it appears that Envato is not alone in trying to figure out how to balance the size of the library with changing customer needs.

We're working hard to create a better experience for photographers. PhotoDune has gone through a massive amount of change in the last few months and we're on the tail end of that now. We've gone through the introduction of ADP (being able to set your own prices for items), removing content that doesn't meet our requirements, introducing a new way to earn with Elements, and soon, a redesign of PhotoDune. That's a lot in under a year and there are bound to be mistakes and crossed lines.

I think there's like 1.2 trillion photos expected in 2017 which creates a need for stock content that stands out amongst what someone can produce with a low-end DSLR or smartphone. The good old days of stock are over. At Envato, we're hoping to create a sustainable earning environment for photographers. We're looking for creators to join our community who understand the industry is changing and are willing to try new ways of earning with higher-end content.

I hope you'll reconsider disabling your account but if that ship has sailed, maybe there are others here willing to try something new, feel free to reach out to me directly.

This conversation while starting out as complaining about complaining has had some good insights as well. Just to give you some insight from an 'agency' perspective.

When you look at the original thinking around selling stock, the goal was to have as much content as you possibly could. The more content you had the better because you were guaranteed that a customer would find what they were looking for (sales for everyone).

With quantity, however, comes noise. It becomes clear after you hit a certain number of photos that while customers might be able to find something, the process of finding the right something takes longer and longer. Agencies respond by adjusting search algorithms to try and give customers exactly what they're looking for at the expense of photographers.

Still though, customers get more frustrated because it's harder to find a photo, photographers get more frustrated because their portfolio's revenue per item drops and while agencies might make the sale, their expenses increase as the number of items not selling (and the cost to maintain them) continues to grow exponentially, reducing their profitability.

For a marketplace like Envato, the tension between quantity of items and photographers earning a livable income is one we are wrestling with. We're also wrestling with the issue of customers not finding what they want.

Looked at another way, we have a growing number of photographers going after the same pie which means less for individual photographers. So while the amount of effort to create and maintain a healthy portfolio is the same, the return for that effort has been getting lower and lower as more photographers enter the industry.

So what levers does a marketplace like Envato have to be able to shift the needle so that the photographers we do have are earning a livable income in a way that keeps Envato profitable?

1. Increase the number of buyers
2. Reduce royalty rates
3. Eliminate content that doesn't sell
4. Limit the number of items a photographer can upload
5. Limit the number of photographers on the marketplace

While the first one is obvious, if the rate of new photographers coming to the platform outpaces the rate of new buyers, you have the same situation and in a highly competitive industry like stock photographry, marketshare shift is an expensive activity.

The second one is what some agencies have done, but not Envato. It's not really in our values to lower royalty rates to photographers.

We can eliminate photos that don't sell, but what if those photos are really amazing and the only reason they haven't sold is because they're buried? Does that serve customers and photographers well? We don't think so.

We can limit the number of items a photographer uploads but from a purely competitive perspective, why would we limit content uploading and give competitors the opportunity to showcase great content just because we don't 'have room' for any more photos? What guarantee is there that the photos uploaded will be the best?

 That leaves us with limiting the number of photographers on the marketplace. But how do you do that? How do you tell people you've accepted before that they're no longer able to sell with you? How do you pick and choose the photographers with the most potential to have the highest number of selling items?

There's not really an easy way to go about it. But the industry is not what it was five or ten years ago. As has been mentioned here already, the sheer number of stock photographers is exploding.

At Envato, we're committed to helping our community of authors (what we call creators) earn a livable income and for stock photography, that's meant some tough decisions in the last few months.

What we've seen is that customers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding in what they buy and rather than give them a library of photos they have to search long and hard through to find what they want, maybe we should do a bit of that curating for them and present the best we can get.

So, that's what we're trying to do. We've updated our quality guidelines to try and give photographers the information they need to understand what our customers are after (based on the data we have from them).

We're cleaning up our library. One of the hardest things we've had to do is evaluate portfolios against our updated guidelines and tell people that what was once acceptable doesn't fit where we want to be and asking them to come back with a new sample portfolio that does meet our updated guidelines.

Our goal is to create a stock photography marketplace with really high quality photos our customers love to buy and ensure that our authors are able to earn a livable income.

This wasn't going to be a pitch but now that I am here at the end of my rant, I'll open it up to you. We're not perfect. We get things wrong. We make mistakes and sometimes even make decisions that don't seem to make sense.

But our values are the same. We want photographers in our community earning a livable income. We're not competing to be the biggest agency on the backs of photographers, we're hoping to be a better marketplace for photographers.

We want to support what you're doing, give you the tools and information you need to succeed and walk alongside you as you grow a sustainable business.

If that's the kind of relationship you want, let me know. It's not going to happen overnight and there will be growing pains as we work to get there, but don't doubt our sincerity. For those of you who have ignored or left Envato in the past, take another look. Reach out. We're not going to bite and we'll do our best to honestly and sincerely support you.

Thanks,

James.

P.S.
On the original topic's point of complaining or going negative. That's easy. If you've got a negative thing to say about Envato there are tons of threads and posts and blogs around the web you can feed on. As someone who actively reads and responds here, I will say that when the conversation is constructive, it's incredibly valuable to us and other photographers. You're the experts, we lean on you to tell us what's up, but we're humans too.

The internet is an easy place to go negative without thinking of the consequences. I personally, on this forum, have had my family threatened. I don't think that's representative of this community but civil discourse where different perspectives are acknowledged goes a long way in advancing the cause.

Yes I am out also finally out today (I ask about that in Jan 2016)  but you know how slow is this company, I can not send Thank You note to

James Giroux
Author Development Lead
Envato

because I can not find e-mail contact only phone or mail

I have an account here at Microstock and do read all your comments. I specifically pointed email recipients to our forum post because responding to authors via email would not have been scaleable.

If you have any questions about the process or next steps, please feel free to ask them on the forum post.

A lot of the comments here are around low earnings, and that is part of the reason we're working to transform PhotoDune. Library growth has consistently outstripped sales growth, and an increasing number of items (and authors) have never made a sale. All of this despite an ever-increasing stream of customers we know frequently use photos in their projects.

Our updated quality and commercial demand guidelines are more detailed than before, so it's clear what we're evaluating and, based on our data, what we believe customers are looking to buy.

Some authors haven't posted new content in several years, other items while meeting previous guidelines if reviewed again would likely not pass. Some authors were posting the same image with small variations or in a sequence. These actions filled up the library without providing true choice to customers and lowering the overall quality of the library.

Sales on other marketplaces didn't factor into our decision-making. For Envato, what we're aiming for is a sustainable library of photos that gives customers a genuine choice and provides more opportunities for authors to earn.

As far as balances go, at the moment we're finalizing amounts owed and preparing our systems for a final payout. As the forum post says, for anyone with balances under the minimum threshold who sold on PhotoDune exclusively, you'll be sent an email with the final balance and our finance department will send you a payout.

Exact timelines are still being worked out for this last part but it's not going to take long.

Again, if you have questions about the process, please feel free to ask them on the Envato forum post.