Quote from: Tabimura on June 03, 2020, 09:23

Here's an idea: A petition stating that on 1st of July all the contributors that sign it will disable their portfolios for 3 days.
Now - for this to work it's necessary to reach big contributors with big portfolios, to really make an impact. It's a matter mostly of how to contact them, rather than them doing the 3-days pullout, because I saw on forums contributors with hundreds of thousands of images saying they will stop uploading. If the petition gathers only level 3-4 portfolios with few hundreds to few thousands images it's no good.
BUT, imagine that if we muster a total of 30% of the whole SS library to simply disappear for 3 days, it would definitely make an impact, like a strike. Surely, the big contributors will take a pay hit but they're already taking what SS served us, so I'm thinking it's worth it.
The meaning of this would be for SS to acknowledge the fact that without us they're not worth not even 10 cents and to listen.
I am doing stock full time, I have a portfolio of almost 50.000 images and some 2500 videos and I cannot simply disable my portfolio forever. I need to sustain my family and the SS money MUST come in. However, I stopped uploading and will not resume until all this is cleared up and we know where we stand. Also, I can and I am willing to take a 3 day even 5 day paycut, just to smack SS in the back of the head and let them know that they have to change their appalling royalties scheme. Or there can be strike 2, strike 3 and so on.
In my view, this would be more effective than some bad reviews on trustpilot and whatnot, but we have to get together on this somehow. I never made a petition or whatever is needed to put this idea in practice, therefore I encourage more learned people to do it.

I can't see a situation in which the top earners didn't have fore warning of this and cut their own deal, throwing us under the bus in the process. Part of our cut will pay for their deal.

Probably there are some special deals out there..
But in the facebook group so far i've seen people with 600k, 440k and 110k portfolios who have it the same as us and looking for option what they can do

Here's an idea: A petition stating that on 1st of July all the contributors that sign it will disable their portfolios for 3 days.
Now - for this to work it's necessary to reach big contributors with big portfolios, to really make an impact. It's a matter mostly of how to contact them, rather than them doing the 3-days pullout, because I saw on forums contributors with hundreds of thousands of images saying they will stop uploading. If the petition gathers only level 3-4 portfolios with few hundreds to few thousands images it's no good.
BUT, imagine that if we muster a total of 30% of the whole SS library to simply disappear for 3 days, it would definitely make an impact, like a strike. Surely, the big contributors will take a pay hit but they're already taking what SS served us, so I'm thinking it's worth it.
The meaning of this would be for SS to acknowledge the fact that without us they're not worth not even 10 cents and to listen.
I am doing stock full time, I have a portfolio of almost 50.000 images and some 2500 videos and I cannot simply disable my portfolio forever. I need to sustain my family and the SS money MUST come in. However, I stopped uploading and will not resume until all this is cleared up and we know where we stand. Also, I can and I am willing to take a 3 day even 5 day paycut, just to smack SS in the back of the head and let them know that they have to change their appalling royalties scheme. Or there can be strike 2, strike 3 and so on.
In my view, this would be more effective than some bad reviews on trustpilot and whatnot, but we have to get together on this somehow. I never made a petition or whatever is needed to put this idea in practice, therefore I encourage more learned people to do it.

So far i've been holding on without disabling my port just in case there is an organized movement for doing it together. So I'm in if this becomes a reality! (i'm not a big one tough, 16k images). I'm willing to take an even longer disabling. And if sales at Adobe continue to grow nicely i can consider it for forever as well
Now with the help of that facebook group it is possible to even personally contact some contribuors with tens and hundreds of thousands of files

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I got 2 subs sales on June 1st, each for 0,38$ (0,35$ +10%)

I got the usual .35

.

I was 100% convinced that my earnings would go down after the change, but I still had a bit of hope that, while most of my sales would be for much less than what they were before, there would also be a few sales that were more than what I used to get, so I hoped part of the loss would be evened out by that and maybe I would make a 25-30% loss comapred to what I earned before. That was, apparently, way too optimistic

At least after the first day I can say that it does not look like this. I am getting almost 0.10$ sales only and the highest I got was 0.14$ and that was a SOD (And apparently, at least to admin statement in the SS forum, the problem where SUBs ended up in the Single & Other Category was fixed, so apparently I am really getting 0.10$ SODs), so my earnings are down by over 70%.

And with that came a sad realization: It does not matter what we do. Even if 50% of all Shutterstock contributors leave Shutterstock (Which is a high number and won't happen), Shutterstock will still make more profit with this change than they made before, because a 70% profit loss on my side means a 70% profit gain on their site. They calculated the change so drastically, that they can basially afford to lose half of their contributor base and probably even a good portion of their customers and will still come out of this with a higher profit than before.

I'm feeling your pain, i'd just like to point out, it's nowhere near 70% gain for them. They were already keeping around 70% of what buyers pay, now they keep around 85%

So they've made some cleaning up on Facebook... i think it won't last for long

Implementing things with an uncertain amount of delay could be a good strategy the confused the masses armed with pitchforks, trying to be organized for a boycott

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Good point brought up in another thread...if you disable on June 1, do you think SS will send you May�s payment by the 15th? Ethically they should. But Doesn�t sound like they are playing fairly.

They should. Disabling photo and video sales is not account closure

It all makes you wonder what the employees on SS think about all this.

I am sure many of their friends are creatives and they have seen that in the pandemic they lost all income.

And now the company they work for cuts these peoples income with 6 days notice and kicks those who ask too many questions and complain too much of the platform. Even if they spent years building their ports and really depend on their stock income.

And the major owner, Jon Oringer, approves all of this.

Many of the employees must be uncomfortable that they have to implement these things. Obviously, far from all of them, but there must many.
We should keep voicing it at as many places as possible that they are actually destroying peoples lives.

How is the situation in New York now with lockdowns and such? Is there any possibility of a real life demonstration in front of their office? Is there a community of New York based contributors?

Quote from: cobalt on May 30, 2020, 14:15

I don�t want them to close. I very sincerly hope they prefer to work this out together with us.

The way they are currently responding, it's not likely they're going to change anything. The problem is, even if they do work something out this time, there's the next time. And next time. It's clear their goals have changed and there's zero concern for contributors. The way the industry currently is, and is headed, one less large untrustworthy micro company might be a good thing.

The only thing I would be concerned about that i haven't seen any other agency having those high value sales yielding $70-225 for the contributor. That's a really nice thing at SS and no other sites seem to have this kind of business.

OH, on a second thought, Alamy has those...   but much fewer than SS