Scary to contemplate, but with Shutterstock offering comp images to ad agencies and their new partnership with the Art Director's Club in New York, I foresee things moving in the opposite direction...direct competition with Getty, resulting in more extended licenses to larger clients and gradually increasing average earnings per download.

Quote from: Ron on February 27, 2014, 12:31

Quote from: Shelma1 on February 27, 2014, 12:29

Actually, a couple of photographers are doing well too.

It aint me, promise.    Doubled my portfolio but not one sale since Dec 18, 2013. My site dropped 400,000 places on Alexa. Something happened and killed my sales. And I cant stop the free fall.

I think it has already been established that a few people are doing "well". That is a relative term. It would only take 5 sales in the past year to be doing well, as compared with the majority of those networked.


It would have been so useful to get some sort of stats from those who are/were doing well, anonymously of course, such as x amount of images, social media plan, how many sites interlinked, etc etc.


Nobody wanted to share that kind pf data with everyone in the network tho.


I think i just made some constructive criticisms about SY. But watch how many minuses i get. Yeah, that cult. 

I've shared every sale. I've also followed several people's advice, which may have helped. They didn't have to share their advice...after all, at the end of the day, we're competitors. Helping me might hurt an illustrator who was willing to share his advice. And aren't you the one who insisted you were only interested in your own site and helping yourself? How about you share here how many sales you've had and all the details about how you achieved them. Hold on, let me make some popcorn.

There are 174 sites, yet your post got only 4 minuses. Cult? Huh?

I don't get the cult thing either. I think we're a bunch of people who are just tired of being a bit unappreciated by some of the microstock houses and are looking for an alternative way to earn income with our work. We're hoping that linking to each other gives us more visibility and gives buyers an alternate way to search more images than just those on our individual sites, which might help keep them coming back. We're helping each other navigate and boost SEO and Twitter and Facebook visibility.

It's a way to build a store with the added bonus of supportive people and more visibility.

From their last email:

So you know, we also have some transaction corrections that will result in additional amounts being added to contributors� accounts. Clean-up requires some work, but that work is in progress. The amount is not high�but the point is that we are making progress and for those who were asking; yes, our review is producing adjustments and in the contributor�s favor.

I hate to say it, but this email actually makes me trust them less. There are other errors too? And come on, they found these errors on their own? Really? It had nothing to do with many contributors wondering aloud why their PP earnings dropped so drastically in November after such a fabulous October?

Now I don't trust any of their PP calculations from the get go. Are we supposed to trust that a company that's made so many mistakes and is finding more mistakes won't make even more mistakes correcting the mistakes?

Nope, those are your words. Seo is based on links to and from sites. The more links, the more advantages. A few in SY have a ton more links than most. No where in there did i use the words you are saying. That is you and your buds doing the name calling.

You can call something a Ponzi scheme without actually using the words "Ponzi scheme."

"One only has to look at the massive amount of links the top few people have to your site in Webmaster Tools to see what is going on...It sounds an awful lot like just another internet scheme...get a whole bunch of people to do your selling for you so you can live off their backs."

That's a pretty clear description of a Ponzi scheme, IMO. Your words.

Quote from: ShadySue on February 25, 2014, 09:54

I wonder how much Kelvin knows, but isn't letting on, or isn't being allowed to share.

Kelvin always seems straightforward. So I doubt he would step into a conversation if he had something to withhold. My guess is that closing photos.com is mostly to do with brand consolidation. Though the well reported EU trademark ruling perhaps did not help either. Thinkstock has always been the stronger brand.

I cannot understand why people want this to be anything more than a mistake. I agree with those saying that the accounting should be better. Perhaps consolidating the brands will pave the way for better accounting and reporting.

I certainly don't want it to be anything more than a mistake. The problem is that I simply don't trust them any more. They can't get their website operating properly though other stock agencies are able to do so, they can't get their accounting straightened out, and they're the only place I've heard of that's clawed back earnings due to credit card fraud and "irregularities." Not to mention the "irregularities" that were only admitted a few months ago because so many contributors reported suspiciously low earnings on exactly the same days. They certainly didn't notice that themselves.

Overall it just seems like they're either incompetent or worse.

More detail and transparency about what this latest mistake was, how it happened, and how the numbers were crunched to fix it would sure be nice.

Almost $800 for me. #^$%$&#*&^#%.

Quote from: jrwasserman on February 24, 2014, 13:34

The practice goes back forever. I used to buy stock occasionally from stock agencies and they would send me a whack of transparencies. We paid for what we used (and returned the transparencies). It's the way the business operates and to not allow ad agencies to download comps would be counter productive.

yes this practice does go back forever, but way back when your agency actually had people that worked with people, not some computer dealing with another computer and there were controls in place more or less. i think this practice is bad news. if i can give my clients a very low res image for layouts then so can SS. why not give them an image for layout purposes at 72dpi and 600 X 400 or tops 1200 X 800 saved at 50%, it's enough for layout and can't be used and if they want the image then they have to pay for it. lets not forget this practice way back when was managed much more so than today, and there is a prevention that seems SS is not applying.
this sounds like a total free for all if you ask me, absolutely no way to manage this free layout package.

Ad agencies have been using the Internet to search for/download for comps/etc. for years. Really, it's only new to Shutterstock. Anyone with images on Getty has had this option with their images for quite a while.

They only make this available to large, reputable companies. For example, when I worked at Young & Rubicam, art directors had access to these images, but when I worked at smaller shops with fewer than 100 people they did not.

why can't they use smaller images? The question is: why would they, when they can get large images from Getty? all this does is put Shutterstock (and our images) on the same playing field.

The reason ad agencies don't get stock subscriptions is because they don't pay for the images themselves...their clients do. The cost of licensing the image is included in the budget for the work being produced. Smaller graphic design shops may buy subscriptions, but the large agencies who negotiate the big extended licenses for their clients do not.

Ad agencies will simply go back to Getty and Corbis if you charge them for comp use or try to force them into a subscription. They can get access to images there for free.

I've worked in large ad agencies my entire career. Art directors there have had access to large unwatermarked "previews" from Getty, for example, for a long time. Though there's potential for abuse, I haven't seen it happen. (I'm not saying it never happens, just that i personally haven't seen it.)

Most of the art directors I've worked with avoided iStock and Shutterstock because they couldn't present work to clients with small watermarked images. This new policy gives Shutterstock the opportunity to compete with the large RM agencies and also gives our work the opportunity to be seen and licensed by companies that would never have considered it before.

I guess I feel comfortable with it because it's the "normal" way of interacting with stock houses for those of us in the ad industry, and because I see huge potential for us to make much more money from a single sale.

I discovered if you hit the refresh button after uploading the image shows up. Give it a try.

Amazing they did this on purpose. Absolutely amazing.

Article & suggestions from Forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/04/13/wordpress-under-attack-how-to-avoid-the-coming-botnet/

Who was the email from? I'm a little skeptical because I haven't received an email, though I'm on WordPress and I use Wordfence. It could just be an attempt to sell the pro version of WordFence, or it could be a scam (or it could be true). I wouldn't click on any link in that email.