Happy 6th anniversary.

I'll second the advice you heard earlier about scaling back on the love for Adobe Stock (or any of the agencies). In September I'll celebrate my 20th anniversary of contributing to microstock. I've been in love and had my (virtual) heart broken multiple times with multiple agencies.

None of the agencies, least of all Adobe Stock, have contributor's interests at heart. We are just a small part of their software subscription universe. At the moment, they're trying to convince investors that Adobe is an AI "winner"; investors were worried that subscription income will nosedive as a result of the rise of AI tools. It's been a rocky path for them (and the stock price is way down from the $638.25 peak earlier in the year).

This article from Friday seems to be on point - but perhaps read it tomorrow so you don't cloud your anniversary with not-very-positive views:

https://petapixel.com/2024/05/03/adobe-throws-photographers-under-the-bus-again-skip-the-photoshoot/

While I'm not disputing that their growth is definitely slowing, there's not really anything in this chart that gives the impression they are ''going bust''.

If you compare their Q1 2019 revenue from licensing content to Q1 2024 - i.e. 5 years ago, where you'd expect to see a lot of growth, especially considering all the companies they've acquired since then - they're essentially flat. $163.3m in 2019 versus $173.8m in 2024

Paid downloads 2019 were 47.2 million versus 35m in 2024. The size of the collection has grown (832m versus 275m). For number of subscribers I have a Q1 2020 number of 209m versus 499m in 2024

They've been trying to plug the growth hole with acquisitions and still end up flat. I noted all the frothy exuberance about the new DDS business in the earnings call; that and Envato are their latest efforts to get back to growth.

At this point they have no more contributor royalties to loot and had better hope one of these other bets pays off

I would guess DepositPhotos, as Dreamstime and 123rf are taking AI images and they don't want that.

DepositPhotos was acquired in 2021 by VistaPrint (a subsidiary of Cimpress). Even though their latest quarterly report wasn't great, the Vista section is the biggest part of the company and I can't imagine a sale would be cheap at this point.

In Shutterstock's earnings call yesterday they talked up the continued growth of their data licensing business. That was growing (big percentage but small actual cash) whereas the "Content" revenue was down 10%. To put that in context, the $20m growth in DDS (data licensing) was just about equal to the $20m decline in content revenue - but a 90% increase sounds so much more impressive when talking the business up to investors.

What Shutterstock needs is a huge amount of new (well keyworded) content to grow their data licensing business. I'd take a guess that Deposit Photos is largely an overlap with SS's existing collection and so of no real value to them.

I think they're way off base with their projections for growing the DDS business, largely because big as their library is, it is way too small for many/most of the training uses. From the earnings call:

"On the supply side, to match the demand we are seeing for data, we are focused on growing our base of contributors and the depth and breadth and size of our library. Our contributor base has increased by over 40% to 3.4 million in the past year alone, and our library growth is accelerating, growing 34% to almost 900 million assets in the last 12 months. We have never seen contributors in data grow this fast and we believe that the flywheel is spinning faster. "

Again from the earnings call, they see Envato as a feed into their DDS business as well as revenue from the $16.50 a month unlimited subscriptions:

"The acquisition adds an extremely talented contributor community who have brought a diverse library of 6 million videos, 1 million audio clips, 500,000 design templates, 300,000 3D models, 200,000 graphics and fonts, and 10 million images, all of which have tremendous potential value for both our creative content customers and our data customers."

One of the analyst questions was about a possible deal with Apple (who is still in the starting blocks with regard to AI) and whether that would increase the expected revenue from DDS: "And then on the DDS business, is $60 million still the right number to think about for Computer Vision? There were some rumors that an Apple deal was signed early in the quarter. ". SS wouldn't say anything specific about a deal with Apple.

Paul Hennessy replying to a question talks about Envato and the DDS business:

"On the Envato question, more content. I talked about the growth in content in our core business; more content, diversified content, specific content that we may not have is all great opportunities to grow our data business, and there�s interest from data partners in wide varieties of content and as much as we can give them. So we�re seeing real change in that market where we are wondering if people would be demanding all product types and we�re actually seeing a level of insatiable desire for a diversity of content types with all sorts of levels of specificity increasing. So we�re bullish."

Another analyst asked about growth in the contributor base and library (separately from the Envato acquisition) and Hennessy produced this totally content free buzzword salad:

"And regarding the contributors, our content growth, the scale, organic and otherwise, what I can tell you is as our business evolves from purely serving the needs of advertisers and folks that would have more traditional use for our content, as we opened up the aperture to include accepting content for data, the market follows that trend. And so now we�re seeing demand and supply pouring in, relating to giving us content across content types and across content use cases. So we think that that flywheel spins very, very nicely for in our favor and is actually spinning faster because as we have more content, that theoretically helps our conversion rate because we�ve got more to offer our customers that are � have more traditional use, that creates a broader opportunity for our data buyers."

So now you know!

Edited after the US stock market close to add that SSTK (Shutterstock) closed down over 6% at $39.22, pretty close to their 52-week low. I'm guessing the investment community isn't as excited as Mr. Hennessy.

The heady days of a stock price at $121 in October 2021 - courtesy of that "margin optimization" (aka pilfering contributor's royalties) seem to have been unsustainable. Couldn't happen to a more deserving company.

When you can't grow your core business, acquire another company SS announced their Q1 2024 earnings this morning and most of the numbers were lower than Q1 2023. The stock was higher (market hasn't oopened yet) I think because they beat analyst estimates, not so much because anything was really good.

Look at their presentation on why acquiring Envato is good for SS

https://investor.shutterstock.com/static-files/2ec3aa7b-1877-45b1-9be6-3fa663cc64b2

If you look at the chart where they brag it will more than double subscriber numbers, they show it's currently 499k (end of Q1 2024). At the end of 2022 it was 586k. It's more like plugging the hole and trying to avoid further drops...

https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/shutterstock-reports-first-quarter-2024-financial-results

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shutterstock-enters-into-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-envato-featuring-envato-elements-the-unlimited-creative-content-subscription-302134019.html

Look at the paid download numbers - down to 35m from 42.7m in Q1 2023, and subscriber revenue down from $90.6m to $83.9m

Today's custom royalty levels are both up and down - $1.01 (versus $1.03 yesterday), $0.31 and $0.39.

 It's hard to match these tiers up with past royalties, but I think what is now $0.39 was $0.42 back in Dec 2023

Today I see custom licenses at $0.31 and $1.03 - versus Friday�s $0.32 and $1.06

As there is no minimum royalty, the more images are used in these packages, the less we receive

I've been tracking royalty changes at Adobe Stock for a while - started because of the "unlimited" packages where there is no floor on our royalties; we get 33% of the customers' calculated price-equivalent.

This month I saw a $0.32 royalty for the first time - previous low was $0.33 and those had been rare (March 2024 there were just 3)

April has seen custom royalties all over the place (although I haven't seen any $0.29 cent ones yet) but some of that has been good news as the higher end of custom royalties has gone up from the $0.90-0.99 range to $1.00-1.05.

In March there were zero royalties in the $1-$2 range and 35% of my month's total was from the $0.90-$0.99 range (average $0.97)

In April so far, 28% of my total has been from the $1-$2 range (average $1.04) and there's still 20% of the month's total in the $0.90-0.99 (average $0.99)

Overall RPD for April is $0.74 versus $0.65 for March

I don't see any reason for long-term optimism about income from Adobe Stock - they will discount "assets" to keep their creative product subscriptions competitive and Canva is clearly gunning for that business too (purchasing Affinity's software is exhibit A). Contributors have no meaningful protection from aggressive discounting and we don't benefit from increased usage by unlimited customers.

However, at the moment there are still enough higher end custom royalties to make April decent.

...So what about  �69,151.50 is on one image?

I multiplied 6050 images x a charge to the OP of �11.43 for one image to arrive at the �69k figure for legal costs to date.

From the email the OP posted:

"To frame your expectations your liability for costs incurred to date in connection with these claims (1 of the 6050 images removed as part of the injunction compliance to date) stands at �11.43."

Adobe hasn't provided us with a user interface for this feature, but you can do it by editing the URL

See a post I made earlier:

https://www.microstockgroup.com/fotolia-com/what's-your-weekly-ranking-and-how-many-images/msg600772/#msg600772

You can look at search URLs for syntax examples, but after the URL there is one question mark and then additional filters are prefaced with an ampersand, so for transparent images sorted by downloads in my portfolio you'd use:

https://stock.adobe.com/contributor/4221/jo-ann-snover?&filters%5Btransparent%5D=only&order=nb_downloads

If you wanted to see everything except transparent images it would be =exclude versus =only

Some of the things you might find useful:

&filters%5Bgentech%5D=only

&order=creation

&order=nb_downloads

&order=relevance

&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Azip_vector%5D=1

&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aillustration%5D=1

&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aimage%5D=1

&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Aphoto%5D=1

&filters%5Bcontent_type%3Avideo%5D=1

&filters%5Bis_editorial%5D=1

&filters%5Billustrative%5D=include

&filters%5Btransparent%5D=only

...I am clear that I do not have to pay taxes since the agencies already pay them through the 30% withholding, but...

I am a US resident and am not an expert in tax law or the IRS, but I wanted to clarify what you said about withholding.

Taxes are owed on the basis of your return, filed with the IRS. The return will show the calculation of total tax owed and also the amount already withheld during the tax year. If there is a difference, you either pay the extra or get a refund.

There is no correspondence between what you owe and what was withheld - although it's important to try and have the right amount withheld to avoid incurring penalties for underpayment during the tax year. So you could owe more than the 30% withheld and the only way to know that is complete a return.

My suggestion is that you get whoever helped you to set up the LLC to help with the tax issues - or recommend an accountant to do it.

Hi Matt,
Went to check now and I have 500+ downloads, and 30+ uploads in 2023.
However, I did not get my redeem code. I went to double check my upload approval, and most of them occurred in January, even though the files were uploaded  early December.
Is this supposed to be like this? Do I not qualify because of that?
I thought the rule was "images uploaded in 2023".

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/royalty-details.html

From the above (emphasis mine):

"An active contributor is an Adobe Stock contributor with at least twenty (20) submitted and approved qualifying assets in 2023."

Regardless of the explanation there is a problem, I never go under $150 a month and feb it shows $5 for the month. I do not believe my warnings can drop like that and iStock owe a lot of money to a lot of people for February. Everyone should raise a ticket.

If you had royalties of $155 for February and refunds for $150 (from all those November licenses that were refunded), that'd leave you with $5 net. Your earnings probably didn't drop (if you exclude the refunds)

Getty's charts are useless and are incorrectly showing your percentages of February's total sales. They are tallying the negative refunds with the positive sales and presenting the net result. In my case they stay Premium Access was 31% of my February total, but it was actually 40% if you just count the royalties for February and not the November refunds.

When you look at your royalty statement (the PDF), do you see a bunch of licenses that are negative numbers?

Look in the Getty forums - Kelvin Jay has provided a statement and said there's no need to raise a ticket as they know about the problem. I doubt ticket responses will provide anything useful as an answer