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Messages - DallasP

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1
Adobe Stock / Re: New Rank in Adobe community - but why?
« on: December 15, 2020, 10:18 »
I know you old people value the forum format but, again, the AS discord is always popping. https://discord.gg/gsDXsrbcpf

Edit: Also. Mat, your dog is cuter than poop.

2
We wouldn't still be having this conversation if everyone had boycotted shuttercocks ...

3
I watched this video yesterday.

https://youtu.be/Dfqp9xD188A

"This video tells you about the outcome what can happen if you disclose your stock photography earnings publicly. Even sharing screenshots or writing about your earning in any post or blog is a violation of Shutterstock terms of service and will get your account banned!"

Has any also experienced account disabling for this reason?

Ya know ... if ya'll would have boycott SS when ya'll said you were going to, you wouldn't have to talk about them anymore.

4
Site Related / Re: Where is Everybody?
« on: December 04, 2020, 14:52 »
MSG used to be pretty active. Now there's a handful or less of new posts or replies daily.

Right, you would think with the lock down, we'd have more people participating?

The Adobe discord is popping. Daily stuff about challenges, news, updates ... whathaveyou.

5
123RF / Re: Security breach - change your password
« on: November 16, 2020, 14:25 »
I also got the emails from 123 and pwned,
"Please be assured that 123RF is now secure " oh great, NOW its secure, what was it before???!!!!

There seems to be no penalty for these companies allowing hacks to happen, clearly they could have stopped it beforehand, because NOW they have fixed it. Who knows how it happened? could have been a hack, or an internal employee leaking the data, or weak systems.
But its just 'oh were sorry" now weve fixed it. It should be investigated and if found to be a company failure to protect our data, they should be fined.

If it's online, it's prone to hacking. This sort of thing happens constantly - it would be difficult to prosecute and would discourage service providers from doing ANYTHING when a breach did happen for fear that they'd be prosecuted. They did the right thing only storing them as MD5 really ... the hash still has to be brute-forced to figure out the password, which is a slow process. So ... now your contact info is out there, like it wasn't already.

I almost enjoy when these things happen, even when it's my own account. These gentle reminders are good to change passwords and to not use the same one for everything.

6
General Stock Discussion / Re: RPD in SS and AS
« on: August 04, 2020, 15:59 »
I  understand that. But "big picture"wise generally speaking, it's a lot cheaper for someone to purchase stock photography than it was 10+ years ago. That's really the root of the problem in addition to the agencies very low payouts. The agencies are responsible for that decline in value via their pricing policies and they themselves may ultimately fall victim to it...pricing themselves out of business.

That only happens in businesses with real fixed costs ... SS financials are pretty solid (especially now).

7
Wull, worth noting before digging too much; they are reporting non-gaap ... which is irritating. They can do whatever the fuck they want with these numbers. But, we'll carry on.

Revenue decreased by 2% to $159.2 million.
Net income increased $15.7 million to $19.0 million.

Subscribers increased 29%, to 223,000.
Subscriber revenue increased 8% to $62.7 million.

Notable, revenue DID decrease but, not nearly as drastically as their operating expences at the massive -14% overall. All of their operating expenses decreased 14% during this period compared to 2019. Resulting in a wicked $476% increase in net income (over q2 2019. Free Cash Flow is 2.5% more than 2019.

It also, wouldn't seem as though we've touched their constant subscriber growth, which grew 14k during the quarter ... my layman's financial analysis would be that this is a great stock to be in at roughly half of it's current price. My contributor analysis is that I don't want to submit at $0.10 per download ... and my overall analysis is that we need more people to dump their portfolios or just accept the that the future of Microstock is pennies per download.

I'd have loved to see more action out of the other agencies to take advantage of the situation. I for one would be tickled if Adobe offered some sort of exclusivity, mostly because I'm tired of uploading to a dozen mediocre spots to get more nothing for more time invested.

8
CanStockPhoto.com / Re: Insecured?
« on: July 25, 2020, 13:08 »
The certificate expired today.

There's no way to know if the owner will bother to update that.  I'm guessing not.

Not that I still expected to get paid, anyway.

I'm sure they'll update it in their own time. It's a free Let's Encrypt cert. Just takes maybe ... 10 minutes to install.

9
Hi All,

Running adobe premiere, and would like to edit 4k video.

May i know what is the minimum graphic card requirements? would like to get a budget card instead.

Adobe website has a list, https://helpx.adobe.com/hk_en/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html#gpu-acceleration

mostly nvidia geforce card, and amd radeon pro..a question is amd radeon pro same as those amd radeon RX?

Would like to hear your guys opinion what kind of graphic card is good enough for a 4k video processing.

Thank you.

I think you can get a 1050ti for ~100usd. It's been a great card all around for me. Gaming, editing, and rendering.

Edit: No, Pro is not the same as RX. I believe the RX cards support raytracing.

10

Sales aren't really picking up at other places

It's starting to feel recessionary, isn't it?

11

My conspiracy theory is that Facebook is about to buy Shutterstock and wants the prices pushed down so that they can give our stock assets away to their advertisers.


You could be on to something. Higher earnings at their PE so that Oringer can buy more cars n crap.

12
Shutterstock.com / Re: Mr. Crafty is at it again
« on: June 28, 2020, 08:21 »
He has also deleted his LinkedIn profile (yesterday I think). Can't imagine how he thinks this will play out.


lol. I think he just blocked you Jo Ann. I still see him on linkedin.

13
I still can't understand why some people are so fixated with $0.10 downloads.

For years I've been selling images on iStock for as little as $0.02 and as high as $20.00.

I presume those that are unhappy put too much emphasis on Shutterstock rather than spreading their assets among many agencies.

Because, each of my stupid little things takes at minimum 20 seconds just for upload, and max on the flags for instance, about a day. I'm not on iStock either and quite frankly, them and SS can go fuck themselves ...

14

Could it really block their servers?
We all agree to reactivate our portfolios at the same time (we decide on a GMT time that is convenient for most of us - 17.00 GMT [?])
Then two days later we deactivate our portfolios in the same way.
And we continue like this every two days

It's surely set up on a queue or cron sort of action to only process so many at a time. If I were to build it it would just be a single bool column "available" or something but, I doubt simply enabling or re-enabling is enough to cause much server stress. (since that would be a problem they'd surely have had to address already when receiving their umpteen million pictures per day.)

15
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock just became iStock 2.0
« on: June 05, 2020, 19:36 »
I just would like to ask: Has anybody seen Mat from AS lately?

I keep hoping they'll pop in with an exclusivity option. Uploading and everything is just SO fricken easy at AS. I'd probably track down my random crap portfolios to do it. lol.

16
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock just became iStock 2.0
« on: June 05, 2020, 19:16 »
But what if they went back to the old pay system. Would you take SS Wall Street stock as payment ?

Let's mental math your question, since you're stuck on it ... at the 10 cent rate it would take 400 subscription sales to buy a SINGLE share of Shutterstock. Which would net you the 1.60whatevercent dividend if owned for an entire year.

Or sold, your 40 dollars. Seeing as how the stock is worth closer to 12 dollars (or as low as $5 actual book value) and it were an option. I'd probably do it for 100 sales IF they weren't diluting shares already.

I'm glad that you're interested in stocks and stuff, I really am but, Wall Street is mostly a place where people lose money ... so it's important to use your brain. They're already the largest image supplier, which means they've already nearly saturated the market to it's upmost potential. So you have to rule them out as a growth stock. As a value stock you're looking at ... idk 18 years for your $36 back in dividends. Since there's low growth opportunity, don't expect increased dividends ... and since they're already cutting costs to squeeze the last pennies of earnings out of their revenues, and giving them to shareholders to artificially boost their share price anyway, my guess is that they're hoping to be acquired or they're going to ride out that 300m as long as they can.

Buy it when the price is less than the cash-debt. Not a cent more. It's a crap company and a crap stock.

Edit: (Cash - minus - debt) divided by outstanding shares. There's software to do that for you but, I don't know if it was clear. You can quickly do it in your head or with a pencil and paper if you don't have access.

Second Edit: NOT the reported book value since their only true assets are servers and servers have a lifespan of ... meh 10 years give or take. They are sold for about half their book. Tech companies are difficult.

Third Edit: and to do that, they'd have to dilute the shares ... or someone would have to be willing to sell theirs for that $40. Math dude ... math.

17
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock just became iStock 2.0
« on: June 05, 2020, 15:54 »
But what if they went back to the old pay system. Would you take SS Wall Street stock as payment ?

No, Even with the buck and a half dividend it's way overpriced and already rides total market cap for the industry (low growth potential). I'd buy it for $10.

MAYBE $15 but, definitely not where it's at.

18
SS Wall Street stock is going up today...I wonder why...

Increased dividend. But, shitterstock is still literally a crappy stock. lol.

19
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock just became iStock 2.0
« on: June 05, 2020, 15:24 »
No one's going to like this.....but what about being paid in SS Wall Street Stock and no 10 cents sh*t. Now I know a lot of you are saying what a stupid idea and yes it is but you must admit it is original...now you can use your bad words at me...

At least if you buy a share you get a buck out of it. Takes ... what, an hour to make $36 in many places. lol.
(please don't buy SS shares, it was a joke.)

20
Shutterstock.com / Re: Shutterstock just became iStock 2.0
« on: June 05, 2020, 15:22 »
The coronavirus is hitting the world economy... as well as the Microstock companies. And this is the reaction. The golden times are gone for EVERYBODY not only the Microstockers.

As can be seen from SS's first quarter report, it wasn't really hitting them though.....

They would have done this either way, Corona or not.
Very much this. Lots of companies are using it as an excuse at the moment. I heard from tech workers who were being laid off from companies who are making out like bandits thanks to the lockdown and remote working etc. 

See also SS using the unrest over social inequality sell social media censorship as white knighting. Companies like SS will use anything to their advantage regardless of any ethical concerns.

A lot of companies who's work could be done remotely laid people off or decreased hours JUST so that they could take advantage of the free business loans and such. Not just tech.

21
Im wondering if there is more to this whole Shutterstock debacle, such as if they might be positioning themselves for better valuation to be sold or merged. I have been involved in two mergers in my career and our main goal was to make the financials look good for a minimum of the past three years and Id say five years for larger companies. That sets the valuation to maximize selling price.

I only bring this up because I this smells like something much bigger than just instant gratification.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/dking/2016/06/13/preparing-for-the-sale-of-your-company/amp/

idk. They more than doubled the dividend though. With so much insider ownership it looks more like they want to live on that 326m ...

22
Regarding the above post - why would someone not be entitled to the payments in their account if they close their account and the amount is great than $35?

Increasing shareholder value? lol.

23
Agree with Jo Ann.

If you go to business websites and their own investor information and news, you can read the CEO happily announcing that they have no problems paying out the dividend, that there is no worry at all that the dividend might be cut or suspended due to corona and that cash flow is excellent.


The words of CEOs are almost meaningless usually but, that measly 2% dividend isn't too difficult to pay out with their $300m cash sitting there and everyone's (all'yalls) assets to back them for future quarters.

Oh ... I didn't see this Q4 was a measly $.57 EPS. They aren't doing great. I'd almost feel bad if I gave a f*

24
People keep saying (hoping) that customers will go to Adobe. They will go to Istock and Getty, unfortunately. There is bigger possibility for that, it's a bigger stock company.

idk. I personally have the Adobe Sub for pure convenience as I'm sure many creatives do. Same bill, same apps. Literally 3 clicks to have what you need.

25
Dreamstime.com / Re: Dreamstime increasing royalties
« on: May 29, 2020, 19:35 »
I've kept uploading to DT, even though they were not a big earner for me.  The upload process was so easy, it was effortless to keep a portfolio.  Also, although they had a $100 threshold, I could cash out as soon as I reached the amount.  I did not have to wait for the threshold AND the end of the month.

In the last six months, DT exploded for me (relatively speaking).  Four of the last six months were my BME's.  Since I put a halt on uploading to SS, DT will be getting more exclusive photos.

Thank you DT for treating your contributors better.

I've been doing some 3D stuff and mostly just putting them on AS because it's a super easy export from Premiere but, this is looking like imma ditch some stuff.

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