Hi everyone,

So far I called myself a lucky Shutterstock Contributor as my Clip Sales gained in general reasonable royalties. I had a few of the $1.50 sales, though, but now even that got 'topped'.

$0.60 for an HD clip of 29 seconds!

I sent a complaint to Contributor Support ... to be answered by a "fellow" contributor ...

"Hi, My name is [xxxx] and I�m a fellow Shutterstock contributor for over 9 years and also an expert user. I�m happy to look into this issue for you.

Shutterstock offers promotional deals or bulk packages from time to time. This sale is part of that program. Unfortunately, there is no way to opt out of these sales, but at least this will help to raise that footage in the search engine placement.

If you need more information, please let me know and I will reroute your request to Shutterstock agents for providing possible help."

I don't take the microstock business serious anymore, take the royalties as a welcome pocket money on top of my income, but still, this hurts, feels like a prank.

Btw: this "fellow" contributor posted only once in the Shutterstock Forum, back in 2010, I can't find his portfolio, if there is one, but he managed in the meantime to answer 9,510 of our questions and complaints ...

Rob

I noticed this morning (Australian Time) that more than a hundred new entries in some Asian language appeared over night in the Discussion Forum. And it becomes more widespread while writing here.  I have contacted Vince, but he might be still asleep. I noticed already yesterday, that my Footage Gallery was switched to Chinese or Korean or whatever, although I didn't touch that option. And furthermore, 2.5GB uploaded footage clips disappeared (but there might be another reason for it), not showing up in my Submission Folder. Something is going on in the background - and that is not good. Hope, Admin is waking up soon and sort it out quickly!

I know I would get you 

No, but seriously: I was just uploading a new batch of images, two of them showing a woman in high heel shoes posing outdoors. One of the keywords is 'sexy'. You get more than a million results for the search 'sexy woman' on Shutterstock, some of them are mine. So it had worked before. And why shouldn't it, as long as it is an appropriate description!? But obviously not anymore! The system didn't make 'sexy' redundant, I had to delete the word before proceeding.

Is this a new policy? And if, since when? And why? And even more interesting, are there more keywords we used to use and are now banned? Did you have similar experiences?

Regards

Rob

Hi Folks,

Over the last week or so my account balance is growing, but my number of downloads is still the same (in the overall statistic). Although one new file appears to have a download without a view. I won't complain as long as the money is coming in, but still, I don't understand why.

Anyone with an idea?

Regards

Rob