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Messages - increasingdifficulty
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76
« on: August 24, 2019, 23:38 »
i would change the title to:
because of declining shutterstuck sales are now 50% LESS than adobe.
regarding the last years, the word more sounds a bit odd
Sure, if it meant the same thing, which it doesn't.  Shutterstock sales would then be around 33% less than Adobe. I must be fun at parties. 
77
« on: August 24, 2019, 02:34 »
If you upload an aspect ratio other than 16:9, some (I think most) sites will convert to 2k (4k DCI to 2048x1080), some crop to HD.
Right. and the base price is $15. duh!
The "Good" thing for buyers is that selecting a large HD file that was down converted from 4K is usually a great detailed image highly available to manipulate in post. Maybe, this also in time make native HD (1920x1080) also a thing of the past? EDIT I mean that uploading a 400Mb 4K clip, produces an 800Mb HD file available for sale.
Now this entire post was Greek to me. What are you talking about?
78
« on: August 24, 2019, 01:28 »
No I don't want to have a 5 inch display.
Could you explain a bit more what you are missing with the GH5? Was the issue that the built-in display is too small?
79
« on: August 24, 2019, 01:26 »
There is nothing to determine. HD is 1920x1080.
If you upload an aspect ratio other than 16:9, some (I think most) sites will convert to 2k (4k DCI to 2048x1080), some crop to HD.
720p "HD" is a thing of the past. When they say HD, they mean "Full HD"/1080p/1920x1080.
---
The standard is 3840x2160 for 4k (which is really not true 4k, but UHD), and 1920x1080 fr HD.
80
« on: August 23, 2019, 12:44 »
Any clue to how to get some more detailed information?
I'm feeling at peace with the world today so I'll just go ahead and give the details to you. They have a fixed fee of $4, and if you are non-exclusive, 55% will be deducted after that fee. That means that the maximum cut is just under 45%, getting closer with higher prices. If you choose $49, you will get 41.3%. If you choose $99, you will get 43.2%. If you go for the minimum price of $5, things start getting a lot worse, leaving you with just below 9%. If you go exclusive, the maximum cut is just under 87.5%. I don't think any other site beats that. I have an exclusive elite account with decent prices, and I get around 80%. People talking down AJ are quite frankly just people who are disappointed they didn't become millionaires... The sales volume of AJ is many times higher than Pond5, we're talking 1,000s of %. Of course, the competition is ENORMOUS, and it's very hard to be seen. Tracks are lost in the search, and people cheat, upload duplicates, come up with ridiculous titles, buy their own tracks, etc. That is something you have to live with. Make great music, promote it OUTSIDE AJ, price it right ($5 will make you very, very little money...), and I believe the earnings potential is hard to beat by any other site where anyone can join. It absolutely used to be MUCH easier, but it's 2019, and it's crowded everywhere. You just have to be 10 times as good as before, and get the SEO, promotion, and pricing 100% perfect.
81
« on: August 22, 2019, 16:30 »
I actually need to add a 5inch monitor.
I doubt you can find a light setup with a built-in 5-inch monitor, if that's what you're asking? If you're looking for light, 4k60p, you've already found the camera - the GH5. I film with the viewfinder all the time and it's much easier to see details. I would never add a big clunky monitor on top, but then again, my eyesight is still very good (and will hopefully stay that way). Are you asking if there is a camera with a BIG 5" display that shoots 4k60p that is also small and lightweight? I think the answer is no. I could of course be wrong.
82
« on: August 12, 2019, 05:26 »
Hello, i've been doing some research on this two codecs, and i couldn't really decide which one is better for stock. Any suggestions much appreciated !
You can break it down like this: Size vs quality. Ease of use for the buyer (editing speed). If you have ever edited a real project, like a short film, you know that h265 is a pain in the... h264 is better, but intra-frame codecs like ProRes are the best. Much, much easier for the computer to handle, which means editing ProRes is a dream compared to h265, which is a nightmare. h265 is more effective than h264, which means better quality at the same filesize, but the buyer would likely have to convert it to another format before editing. The middle ground is h264, OK to edit with, and good filesize. I prefer doing everything with intra-frame codecs, UNLESS the filesize becomes too big. So for a 30-sec 4k clip, I would probably choose h264 over ProRes, but ProRes for the majority of my clips, especially if they're only in HD. If you have timelapses or other clips you've shot in RAW, you can retain more color information (10-bit vs. 8-bit) with ProRes or h265. Inter-frame codecs are delivery codecs first and foremost, while intra-frame codecs are intermediate editing codecs.
83
« on: August 12, 2019, 05:13 »
I am looking to buy a professional camera.
Looking at the reviews on youtube added more confusion.
Mirrorless camera? are they worth buying or shall I opt for traditional one?
Which one should I go with in long run?
This is like asking "what car should I buy?". And the answer is of course "it depends". There is a lot to choose from, especially if you don't know what you want. However, if you do know what you want from a camera, often only 1-3 choices remain. --- Is your focus photos or video? Or should it be good in both areas? What is your price range? Does weight matter? Do you focus on human portraits, wildlife, landscapes, documentary (walking around in cities), sports? No single camera can do all of these things the best, so you have to do some thinking before you can narrow it down. --- Light weight important? Go mirrorless, go smaller sensor. Human portraits with buttery smooth quality? Go full-frame. Video features and light weight? Go Panasonic mirrorless. Video features with a focus on landscapes to portraits. Go full-frame mirrorless (Sony, Panasonic, Canon, etc.) Focus on wildlife photography? Smaller sensors can be advantageous, but auto-focus in a mirrorless system might not be able to compete with a DSLR. Maybe something like a Canon 7D would be a good choice then... --- As you see, this can go on forever. Try to figure out what you need more exactly, and there won't be too many cameras that can do just that at a high level.
84
« on: August 09, 2019, 12:09 »
May I ask in what program do you work or what do you recommend for graphics/animations?
Sure, while animations are not my main focus, I use After Effects mainly for simpler 2D/2.5D stuff and compositing, and Blender + Cinema 4D for pure 3D. I know After Effects pretty well, but I would consider myself a novice in real 3D work still. I can produce sellable content, but it takes a long time... Learning more every year though. It's important to be curious, creative and open to anything if you want to be able to skip the 9 to 5 in the long run. And do the opposite of what the "industry pros who have been in this game a long time" tell you.
85
« on: August 09, 2019, 11:57 »
Storage, like I said, is less than 1 cent per 1000 videos. (Significantly less, actually).
Their website says they have over 822,000 clips. You can't seriously be suggesting that their total hosting costs are 'significantly less' than $8.22 a month?
Your math is off, 822,000/1000 = $822.
Actually, your math is off. It's $8.22. I'm sure you know that there are 100 cents to 1 dollar. Anyway, both $8.22 and $822 are extremely wrong.
86
« on: August 09, 2019, 11:46 »
(That's if each clip in their entire market place was downloaded once).
Those are storage costs. Meaning with 0 downloads it still costs that much. Add the traffic costs on top of that. Other than that, now your numbers are a bit more realistic. Although I don't have any 4k clips under 100 MB, the majority are over 500 MB (some 1+ GB), but who knows what the average is. And of course add in the downconverted HD that is usually around 100-200 MB. Yes, back in 2016 they had $30 million in revenue with 80% profit - extremely good! It's not 2016 anymore so anything could have happened... It's not exactly unusual that stock companies go under. Furthermore, a quick search will tell you that the average salary was in fact $100,000 per year with 100 employees, and they were planning on hiring many more. --- This doesn't really matter much, however. What matters is whether the marketplace costs more than it makes, and whether they see that changing or not. Even if they have a profit of $15 million, it's not smart to keep a part of the business that's losing money, that they don't believe will change. Some business owners keep money losing divisions, but that's just based on emotion, not numbers. When you employ 150 people, of course you would rather cut parts of the business that don't require firing employees. --- Of course WE don't like it, but it's business. I would do the same.
87
« on: August 08, 2019, 11:11 »
Storage, like I said, is less than 1 cent per 1000 videos. (Significantly less, actually).
$0.021 per GB. All of the data needs to be accessible at any time, as they have no idea which clip will be bought. SB themselves are reporting a nosedive in marketplace sales. Pretty much every contributor active on various forums has reported a nosedive (often to $0) in marketplace sales since the end of 2018. It's likely the marketplace only brings in four figures or a low five figure amount (SB's cut), which means - not profitable.
88
« on: August 08, 2019, 11:04 »
And BTW - videoblocks does not use petabytes for the the 'client' side of things. The videos are highly compressed, clients do not *preview* 100,000 videos at a time (maybe "10" or "15" in a day) - so the costs are VERY very minimal.
And where do you think they store the original files? In their basement on USB drives? The original files all need to be available at all times. Shutterstock, P5, SB all have very big hosting and bandwidth costs. Shutterstock and P5 most of all, but not cheap for SB. Maybe you should approach them as a consultant and you might make some good cash?
89
« on: August 08, 2019, 10:13 »
So funny. HISTORY of storyblocks. (BTW - for those that cite "cost" for hosting videos -
it's actually become dirt cheap to host videos, i.e., 1 cent per 1000 videos/month, so
"cost" really is not a factor for any of these decisions).
I see, do you run many companies that need to use Amazon/CloudFront to store petabytes of data that needs to be available to the entire world at high speeds? Look it up. You don't use a free DropBox account and post the public links... --- Did someone hurt you personally at StoryBlocks? Do you know the purpose of a business? Did you know that if a part of a business isn't profitable, a smart business owner closes that part. We don't have to like it, you don't have to like it, it's business. If the marketplace was profitable, they would keep it. Evidently it costs more than it makes, so it must go. I'm wondering why you haven't started your own site we can contribute to so you can sit back and see that $30 mil roll in? Let us know when you've found the $0.01 storage.
90
« on: August 08, 2019, 05:04 »
thanks
Here's an example of what I meant: Take the "evolution of man" concept and search Shutterstock. On the image/illustration side - thousands and thousands of competing images. This is a concept I imagine would be quite popular in all kinds of situations, but almost any illustrator can quickly make a copy of this idea. Search the footage side ("evolution man animation"), and what do you know, I find maybe five possible competing clips. FIVE! And they could easily be done much better - I'm thinking walking animated primates with those moving sketch outlines. And I believe that would be an incredibly useful concept relevant to many content creators. That was just off the top of my head, and there are thousands of examples like that.
91
« on: August 08, 2019, 04:56 »
Is having content online such a burden? They could have closed the upload,but kept the files.
Yes, it's a big burden if you don't make enough money from it. Depending on the size of the library, it can cost $10,000-200,000 per month to keep it online (or more, YouTube could be in the hundreds of millions per year range), and if sales don't cover that, there's obviously no point. Evidently, sales are now below or close to the storage costs, which means shrinking the library that doesn't make them any money is a rational business decision.
92
« on: August 08, 2019, 02:43 »
Any disk can break. From the cheapest to the most expensive.
So keep everything in at least two places - one disk + online, or two disks.
4TB drives are quite affordable and if one breaks, it's a lot faster to replace the content (that you of course would have a copy of) than 12TB...
I organize my content by location and year, so it's easy to find the right disk when I need it.
93
« on: August 08, 2019, 01:23 »
Would so love to do stock full-time but for now it is just a pipe dream that seems to be getting less of a possibility.
I make a good full-time income in an expensive Western country from stock (license fees + other royalties). I can't say I spend 40 hours a week on it though, much less than that most of the time. I guess I'm a bit too lazy... But on the other hand, when inspiration strikes, 12-hour days fly by just like that. It's hard to quantify exactly, and if you count thinking about work, procrastinating and reading forums, yeah, then it might be 40+ hours. I will say that only a small part of that comes from still images. My advice would be to focus on the most difficult (but of course still commercially viable) areas of stock that you still think are fun. So instead of making a simple 2D illustration that artists can churn out in an hour or less, maybe make a stylized animation that will have much less competition. There is so much you can sell as stock, and more opportunities turn up all the time as new applications or trends become popular. Spend time on YouTube and other social platforms and see what the content creators are using. More likely than not, they didn't make the graphics/titles/animations/music/sfx/etc. themselves - they used stock media. I frequently see my stuff being used just browsing YouTube or scrolling down my Facebook feed.
94
« on: August 06, 2019, 11:30 »
How many contributors doubled its portfolio and doubled the income?
Well, the world doesn't work like that, unless you are the only person in the world. If you double your portfolio but the total portfolio of everyone quadrupled, you have actually cut your relative portfolio in half. If the number of customers doubled in the same time you might (statistically) expect around the same earnings.
95
« on: August 04, 2019, 03:38 »
Lots of people are uploading videos with decent quality now. Just recently we have gotten capable cameras, gimbals, drones,....
Exactly, but what is more interesting to me is that some of the so called "industry pros who have been in this game a long time and deserve to get sales more than anyone else" are uploading tons and tons of mediocre (to bad) stuff at premium prices. Do yourself a favor and look through some of the newest couple of hundred (or thousand) clips from the "doom-and-gloomers" and you find 10 similar angles of run-of-the-mill drone clips in dull lighting conditions, blown out skies, blown out highlights and terrible dynamic range, tons of snapshot quality stuff, etc. etc. While they have a number of bestselling clips that are really good (but of course now with tons of competition), either they got lazy and comfortable now, or they got lucky before. That, combined with customers now demanding higher quality and the new talent being able to provide it. I sometimes find the lack of self-awareness fascinating. Step up your game.
96
« on: August 03, 2019, 16:14 »
contributors at pond5 are complaining a sudden huge drop from april...
if it was all about competition and new contributors like you said the drop would be slow and steady....
Yes, and contributors who aren't experiencing that drop continue on working as usual. They don't go on the forums saying "listen up, sales are normal!". For me, June is the best month of 2019 so far, followed by April. If 30 contributors experience a drop it does not necessarily mean the end is near. It COULD mean that, sure, but it also could not. Do you think Pond5 decide to make changes that lower overall revenue on purpose? Of course not. But they get more valuable data in a week than any contributor in their entire career. They can follow customer behavior closely, they see EXACTLY what they click on, when they leave the site, and when they stay, look for more, and purchase. Any radical changes likely come as a REACTION to downward trends, not the other way around. If customers on average spend 30% more, but 50 contributors make less, that is still called a reasonable business decision.
97
« on: August 03, 2019, 09:09 »
THIS test had only been running that long. And it most definitely would have caused a massive slowdown for any sellers offering clips above the excluded price points. Yes, and you replied using that as the reason that liveoutloud's sales had "been dropping like a rock" since February. So we should have interpreted that as them ruining sales on purpose since February? In case you didn't know, this test was accidentally stumbled upon by a contributor. That's not "considered" to be shady, that's straight-up behind the back betrayal of trust.
Yes, I have read all the posts in all of the threads regarding this. Every single one. My wording was a polite way of saying it was shady. I fully agree there. I test the search almost every week to see if action needs to be taken. I haven't seen this price discrimination before.
It is incredibly naive to assume this was the only sales damaging blunder they've made this year.
Well, sales damaging for some does not mean sales damaging for all. You have around 35-40 people posting in the P5 threads. They make up a very, very small part of the 17.5 million total clips online. What I find very naive is the constant talk of "caring about the individual contributor". With many thousands, this is only done by trying to raise sales on average. Some individuals will always suffer. Of course, in all of our minds, "me" is what is most important. My 2019 is better than my 2018, so from my perspective the so called "sales damaging blunders" have not been sales damaging at all. And this is with the 20% non-exclusive cut since March, so the amount spent is actually a lot higher than 2018. The same would be true for SpaceStockFootage, even though that's for animations mostly. His average is close to the same DESPITE the cut.
What a condescending comment. And the irony is the failure to understand that search results don't bring up every clip every made. On a specific given search term, a clip isn't competing with "17.5 million clips". Many searches have fewer than 500 results, many other niche topics less than 100. When Pond5 excludes every clip over $50 or $80 from a search, that is a major problem that more contributors in that price range should be aware of, and very vocal about. Attacking the intelligence of the contributors who are actively speaking up about this is just unnecessarily rude. Try to comprehend that.
This wasn't directed at you, and I apologize if you interpreted it that way. BUT, I stand by that many of the P5 posters SEEM to not understand the basics of an incredibly high increase in supply. Just because they sold a lot when it was easier does not mean it will stay that way forever.
98
« on: August 03, 2019, 08:56 »
$1.49 per clip per month for 2019 so far. They've been increasing again (slightly) from a bit of a dip though... if you don't include January then it's $1.59... and if you go just on the last three months then it's $1.67.
Ah, so it's not all doom and gloom then! Consistent with my results (footage), a slight improvement over 2018 so far.
99
« on: August 03, 2019, 05:00 »
I don't think many (if ANY) contributors actually make much more than $1.50 per video clip per month....
Well actually...
...(not animations)
Ah, ok... never mind! 
Yes, let's not compare apples to Teslas here, not too useful. I make many times more than $1.50 per asset/month on other types of media at P5, but that's not really relevant. By the way, you earlier said you were getting around $1.60/clip/month at P5 (2018), how has your experience been in 2019? Up, down, the same? Is there a crisis situation regarding animations?
100
« on: August 03, 2019, 02:39 »
Check the Pond5 forums. They were/are conducting a test. This test puts a $50 price cap on some searches, and a $80 on others.
As shady as one could consider that test to be, it was only live during these last two weeks, so hardly responsible for any slowdown since February... Demand is growing, supply is growing faster. It really is as simple as that in my opinion. It's not easy anymore, and even with the best clips around it's a struggle to be seen. It seems a lot of people have a hard time understanding that the chance of YOUR clip being in front of the eyes of a buyer at the right time when there are 17.5 MILLION clips to choose from is pretty small. We humans can't imagine how great of a number 1 million is. When something is easy to make and the equipment required to make it now is available to most people, supply goes up and the price comes down.
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