I'm currently at level 5 will be level 6.   
Looked at this situation for close to 2 weeks and this is not good.
Really really bad.  
 
In fact, it was so bad, I thought everyone was starting from level 1 this June when I saw the sales numbers coming in.

There is no way on-demand sales are going to make up for the suddenly taken away subscription profit even looking at the past data.
Shutterstock you know that.

Shutterstock, you have always been a subscription based business,
And you promote subscriptions,
and You are THE "subscription" agency.

And that's just what you did.
You've capitalized on the subscription profit.
The profit which should have been going to the creative contributors.  
 
And even more,
the ones who have been attracting buyers and pulling your sales throughout the years are long time specialists in creating subscription-attractive or subscription-optimized images. They know what sells in a subscription base environment.  They've honed their skills for subscription.  
They are the ones that will be hit the hardest. Including me.

Who is going to be rewarded by this?  You?

If you are going to do this the right way Level 1 should start at 35% and 5% increments per level. Even that may be not enough to make up for the lost income. Especially since we get a reset at January 1st.

In the past I have been with really terrible hosting companies, and evil domain registrars, and bad minded companies like Fotolia, but THIS is the WORST TURN OF EVENTS I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED . And It is my understanding that the global internet creative community also thinks so.
 
We will not be uploading to Shutterstock anymore.
New images will go elsewhere.
Will probably keep what's already there for a while,  
but eventually will be pulling out our class A images.
We will not leave images which go elsewhere in shutterstock because
we know better not to upload the same material to different agencies. 

The way this was executed is in a different class of "Evil".
And this was a CEO-annoucement material. Not a 6 days before notice in a casual style mail or forum posting material.
 
You killed everyone's motivation.

And you killed your own precious reputation. And in the middle of a pandemic.
 
Shutterstock you're not Facebook, nor Google, nor Apple. 
Go back to the basics.  Go back to the long term perspective of things.

 
And to the fellow contributors.
I have been, and still am a image buyer before I have been a contributor.  Buyers will follow the attractive content. Takes a little time but don't worry about that.