Hi there Rasika,

I think a support case came through that is probably yours.  I have responded to Adobe support and they will no doubt get back in touch with you but let me try to provide some guidelines for the future here as well.

in general, we want to provide you the contributor as much opportunity and creative expression as possible and provide the creative customer with a large and high quality library where they can easily find the perfect clip to add to their project.

As the content lead for motion, I have provided our moderation team guidelines for accepting similar clips.  In general, I have loosened those guidelines because a different take, magnification/zoom/focal length or other factors can result in a clip that a customer wants.  It's tricky though - there are always going to be grey areas and opinions on what constitutes a unique clip or not.

However, it doesn't make sense for us to have both an ungraded file and a graded file of the same clip.  Especially if the files are 8bit color where the idea of "raw" isn't really applicable.  Once you get to 10bit color or greater with cameras such as a RED, ARRI and some others, then the idea of a RAW version may be very appealing to some.  As Adobe Stock develops, we may be able to offer a customer a choice of a raw clip versus a graded one.  The team here certainly have discussed many ideas and we hope to bring them to our users in the future! 

Today, I like to suggest to contributors is to submit a lightly graded version of your clip.  This means that it isn't flat like a clip shot in log might be and it brings out the luma range (black to white) and lightly touch the color (based on your preference).  The end goal is that the novice buyer will see a beautiful clip and the experienced editor/buyer will see a clip that fits and provides enough latitude for them to push the color to whatever the need is.

I hope that this provides some guidance and if you (or others) have any questions please feel free to hit me up with them here.  Please note that I'm technically on holiday so my response to answer may be a bit slower than normal.

Thanks and happy shooting!
Dennis

While this might be good advice in an ideal world, we the contributors also need to earn money, and if you lightly grade your clip, it will probably not stand out in a sea of vibrant clips, won't get picked up, and will end up in the 0 downloads abyss.

Extremes, on microstock, always perform better than something closer to "normal". And I can say that just based on my portfolio (around 50k assets).

So if the contributor submits "normal" clips (lightly graded), they won't be picked up, and the people who decided to go all-out on their grading (think of orange-teal, crushed blacks, heavy vignetting, cheesy stuff like that) will reap the rewards. Then you'll get a feedback loop of contributors trying to out-compete each other in terms of grading, and the actually good and usable footage for further post will be buried on page 27... if anyone even decides to submit usable footage, given their lower "sales potential". Just my take on it.

I used to upload my drone footage in dlog and heavily graded versions, and the graded versions outsold the "raw" by a factor of more than 10. And I bet the "raw" would outsell the "lightly graded" version because the "raw" is only gonna get downloaded by someone looking for footage shot in log, but the lightly graded version will not be downloaded by anyone... because it won't be seen by anyone.

I understand what you're trying to do, but what's good for the platform isn't necessarily good for the contributors. In other words, if you apply game theory principles on this issue, submitting lightly graded versions doesn't confer an advantage and is not an evolutionary stable strategy, as a "parasite" (heavily graded clips) can abuse the propensity of customers to notice bright vibrant assets first.

If they are sincere and truly want exclusive contents, they should allow contents exclusive.

Otherwise, it is just a pretense to cut artist's shares.

Yup. Super manipulative.

I'm already on page 8 of my 30% price hike.

Microstock is a volume business. If you have something really unusual, it probably should be on microstock sites in the first place.

You mean the opposite, right?

Anyway, pricing could stay the same - the agencies could just increase the commission to the artist. That would motivate the artist to create more assets with such high value, while also not alienating customers with "weird" pricing schemes. Just an idea.

Shutterstock was vastly superior a few years ago (months on the x axis), then Fotolia/Adobe caught up and on some months even surpassed SS. Then they traded blows, but SS stayed on top. As for this February, SS earned 20% more, but that means little because shutterstock calculates the withholding tax when payout is due (and it's 30% for my dumb country without a treaty) and fotolia calculates the deduction immediately. So they might have earned the same so far.

I don't care either way because I added around 20k files just to keep my earnings at roughly the same level (with a downward trend) as a few years back

Same here. I was beginning to wonder I'm the only one.

So much about "this is great news for contributors!". Sure. Like always. Bye storyblocks.

I mostly just upload the static 4k version, the editor will know how (much) to pan and zoom.

I tried uploading some versions with pans/zooms, but they didn't induce any increase in sales.

Good for you. My sales numbers are actually lower for August than in the last 6 months.

They have better rates at some of the agencies. I know they said at Shutterstock, you'll get a bit more than you would normally, even after the 15%.

How's that possible? They get higher royalties from SS or SS charges more for their clips?

How do you know that not all your video sales are US sales?

Fair point; but I think it's highly improbable that among 100s of sales, all of them are US-based. Could be, just highly improbable.

A moment ago the staff of Dreamstime wrote on the message board: 'We've been working to fix the bug. You should no longer receive these emails.'

While they were "fixing the bug", I just made a filter to delete all emails from *@dreamstime.com

I got more than 300 of those, I didn't have the time to wait for their engineers to fix it. I'll leave the filter still on tho, never got anything useful from them anyway *shrugs*

Well $19 is the minimum... goes up to $199 for 4K. And 60% is better than 0% I guess.

So is 1% #thumbs_up

Sean, do you by any chance know if Stocksy is interested in timelapses/hyperlapses? So that I don't waste anyone's time if there is no interest.

Check it out: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/08/making-visible-watermarks-more-effective.html

However, in �On The Effectiveness Of Visible Watermarks� recently presented at the 2017 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR 2017), we show that a computer algorithm can get past this protection and remove watermarks automatically, giving users unobstructed access to the clean images the watermarks are intended to protect.

The vulnerability of current watermarking techniques lies in the consistency in watermarks across image collections. Therefore, to counter it, we need to introduce inconsistencies when embedding the watermark in each image.

This might be the reason that shutterstock is not included in the post, as they implemented variations in their watermarking procedure, as well as contributor names. At least in regards to watermarking, shutterstock seems to be ahead of other agencies.

However, the researchers say that this might be only a temporary measure, as methods might be developed which circumvent this problem:

While we cannot guarantee that there will not be a way to break such randomized watermarking schemes in the future, we believe (and our experiments show) that randomization will make watermarked collection attacks fundamentally more difficult. We hope that these findings will be helpful for the photography and stock image communities.

So if there is a time to push the agencies to decrease BOTH the size of watermarked images AND add variations in the watermarking procedure, it's immediately. I advise you to write to agency representatives to solve this issue asap. The agencies which will keep large previews with no variations in the watermarking procedure will lose my contributions, as I'll just assume that's a vulnerability that'll make my whole portfolio available for free (in a limited resolution, but still) to anyone. And that's a no-go for me.