Artbeats used to be the real first royalty-free video company in the 90s which seemed to thrive when the net made clip downloads accessible. They used to offer the best quality anywhere with film scanned pyrotechnics and other effects which cost a lot to produce. 

They were also very expensive at $499 each in some cases. Now they are closing their doors in 7 days and you can get the entire clip collection for $2,599 on two 8TB drives dang!!!   Wonder if they tried to sell to other sites for pennies on the dollar and had no takers.

I remember how hard it was to get a clip on their site as an independent producer and was turned down when I tried which seemed counter-intuitive since they had clips of much lesser quality than what I was offering.  Maybe this barrier of entry is the one that did them in by being unable to grow the collection and adapt to microstock offerings which offered all sorts of quality and price points.  For any TV, production house or Movie studio, the bargain bundle may be worth a look for 14k clips.  For me, I will pass and rather invest in a new camera.  Adapt or perish! 

The email I got from Artbeats below:
____________________________________________________


Artbeats Will Close With a Bang
IN 7 DAYS Artbeats shuts down their website.
CLOSING SALE

We are offering the Artbeats- Owned library of 14,000 clips on hard drives for your use long after we are gone.

Price? Only $2,599.

Your project deserves the best footage.

For a small investment, you can have the entire Artbeats-owned library at your fingertips. BUT only until February 28th. Once Artbeats closes, this offer will be gone.

Buy Now: Call Julie Hill at 1-541-863-4429 or email [email protected].

� Includes all of our premium footage
� Relevant for years to come
� Shot on the best cameras available
� Includes highest resolutions up to 5K
� Includes our popular Aerials, Driving
Plates and and many more categories

Frequently Asked Questions
How many hard drives and how much
space does the library take up?
We will deliver two 8TB hard drives. Total space used is around 14TB.

What is the breakdown between SD, HD, 4K, etc?
2,775 SD
5,914 HD
198 2K
865 3K
3612 4K
645 5K and 6K

What kind of interface is included for searching the clips?
No visual interface is present. However, an Excel spreadsheet is included that contains all the metadata. Keyword searching within Excel will yield filenames of clips matching your search.

Does the price include shipping?
Yes, for USA. International shipping rates are calculated on a case by case basis.

Can we use the clips for any project?
For the most part, yes. But to see the License Agreement, https://www.artbeats.com/license/?tag=20180221.

@MatHayward

Seems I am out of luck. By just allowing pasting a block of keywords on the already approved files it would be enough. Only Fotolia/Adobe asks for this keyword relevance order in the stock world and as such the tools to make it possible should be easy to use and not cumbersome for all stages of file adjustment. 

All my new uploads are being ordered properly on my end for a couple of months but I found out about this relevance after the fact over a year later than I uploaded must of my footage.   Why have two different interfaces at the time of upload and later?  The code is already built it is just a matter of calling that code object for already approved files.

Hundreds of hours of wasted time fixing this is really no fun! 

@MatHayward

Thanks, Mat but I am not talking about the recent new uploads. I am trying to order all my previous footage keywords as I uploaded this footage with the keywords from my CSV which is not ordered by relevance. Adobe/Fotolia uses keyword order of importance which is now forcing me to order these.  If you guys could add a way to copy and paste keywords in blocks it would be a real lifesaver for older uploads.  I have thousands left to order and with the current interface, it is really a slow and painful process which could be streamlined if we had the same interface as recent uploads to fix the older ones.  Any help would be appreciated. 

I opted in, for now, it may work ok after all.  Willing to give them a chance and support them.  I would rather see them pay us 80% commission and use the 20% to grow the business and client department than venture into the PP world.

They state you can opt out at a later date if you need to which is a good thing.   We all know how iStock's PP was a horrible experience, but the VB/SB team may be able to pull off something good for all involved.  Stay tuned!

Official Adobe thread: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2396734

From probably the best upload interface now it went to nearly the bottom of the heap.  The old interface wasn't broken and worked fine, give us the option of reverting back to it SS.  Uploading like this is so frustrating with barely any visual space on the right side. 

The keyword suggestions now have to go to a new tab and copy them back, before they filled on top. This is extra work and clicks. I could go on but in short, it is not a step in the right direction! 

Unless they completely change the commission structure it makes no sense to upload new content to iStock. I have about 2000 files that are not in their collection since they slashed commissions.  Maybe they will get bought out by a bigger company some day that gets the Getty debt under control and commissions to a competitive level. Not holding my breath!   

Stats are finally gone today, we cannot see any sales until the 20th on ESP. It was good while it lasted

My favorite ghost stat page: http://www.istockphoto.com/user_stats?id=(YourID)&Offset=-1&DownloadsGraphFileType=

Keep uploading 4k, in a few years time HD will sell less and less. 4k now is selling very little for me even when I've been uploading all 4k since 2012.   They are already working on 8k for cameras and before 5 years 8k cameras will be in most semi professional cameras and many phones.  Overkill? Yes but you can never have enough pixels when you are doing VR video for example which will increase penetration as technology evolved. VR is not like the 3D craze, VR will be a way to deliver video experiences for a variety of industries.

Yes that makes it easier but it is still a ways off from the regular iStock reporting. So many collections and amounts that are laughable like 20cents for a full HD video file sale!

I would like to know how I can extrapolate these figures to regular color bars in the iStock site.  I simply cannot tell what is for what month and or sale type all is combined into a listing that makes no direct connection with any past reporting.

Why not keep it as it was just in the different site. The pie chart should correspond to the color bars we were seeing at the iStock site.  My guess is this is by design to make it close to impossible to figure out.  Selling my footage selling for mere cents is also insane. 

My current video royalty as a non-exclusive is 17%  the new increase will give me 20% or 3% extra.  This would be good if the actual commission was competitive i.e. $22 USD for HD and $46 USD for 4k  but no we get $12 USD for HD or 4k like jjneff has stated.  It is some improvement but far from being competitive. I will continue to avoid uploading new footage until we get competitive revenue as non exclusives in video, it is simply not viable as a single Video Blocks HD sale is worth 4x an iStock HD as non exclusive.   

It will be some time before the other royalties in Photo and Vector and their subs start to trickle and impact the graph and see how we have fared there.   The whole point of Subs is that owners of the plan squander a big percentage of their daily download allotment so that makes it viable for the companies and us contributors.  However it could go terribly wrong with these adjustments.  I will wait and see how it evolves before condemning the new breakdown.

Thanks to sites like Video Blocks and the new Adobe Stock which mirrors Fotolia, I am having an uptick in sales this year compared to the downward slide the last 5 years.  I am close to increasing my revenue by 18% this year which is encouraging. 

I signed it, however I feel that Getty takes more out of the pie than most instances of infringement from our revenues. 

Working with agencies that offer better royalties are the only sustainable way for me to continue to work today, If I relied on Getty alone I would have thrown in the towel years ago as my revenues would continue to decline month by month. Hopefully they will realize that paying us a fair share goes a long way to make the business stable and more rewarding for both parties in the long term.