Quote from: BalkanskiMacak on February 21, 2024, 09:43

Quote from: JuhaSa on February 21, 2024, 09:37

Quote from: micens on February 20, 2024, 05:25

Because no body answer on this, ask again :/

"When I want to renew the code I get this message :This code is from a country or region that does not match your Adobe ID.
Last year everything went well."

What we to do with this problem? On Adobe support I do not get any valid answer

Is Creative Cloud available in your country

https://www.adobe.com/special/products/creativecloud/pdfs/cc-availability-matrix.pdf

The main issue is that, independently from the availability, it was working before.

So, maybe Mat would care to elaborate why they are suddenly kicking contributors out of the programme?

I can quote the learn and support page with what I believe is the relevant information.

https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/royalty-details.html

"Contributors located in countries where the apps are not available are excluded from the Bonus Program."

thanks,

Mat Hayward

The problem is that we didn't face the issue in the past years, how come? Why don't you reply to that part I already mentioned?

And don't you think this is pretty disgraceful to kick contributors this way?

Seriously, AS is pretty shameful, here... Should I consider to find an illegal copy? Up until now, I was refraining from doing it, but since you are willing to treat us different ways based on the country we are living, I'm not sure I have any more consideration for this...

So, like many here, I got the error "This code is from a country or region that does not match your Adobe ID.".

The process is normally to contact Adobe's Customer Support, which I did via chat.

When the guys so it's a contributor redemption code, they transferred me to another agent, supposedly to help me.

I've been waiting on the chat for two hours now.

Judging by the number of messages I could find here, on contributors groups on Facebook, and on Adobe's forum, it seems it's a widespread issue.

Maybe Mat could give us more details on what . is happening?

Optimistic scenario:

• They indeed don't change anything to their review process, and only the huge amount of legitimate rejections get added to this "data set", which will satisfy people who are trying to upload blurry duck in pond pictures taken with a Nokia 3310 (there are plenty of such people in Facebook groups).

Pessimistic scenario:

• We are starting to see a lot of automated BS rejections.
  

In any case, I guess I'll paused the uploads on SS for two weeks, just to see how things are going, what's happening to others with rejections, and if imsStudio makes some changes (as I'm using this solution to upload). If I see that a lot of automatic rejections start to occur, I'll preventively generalize the use of case number to all the Commercial pictures I'm submitting, to make sure that they will have some manual review. 

In the past few months, I got as well a few "automated" rejections, it always happen this way when I upload a batch:
-a few pictures are getting instantly rejected, usually for noise/exposure
-the other pictures will follow the usual process

Regarding the pictures that are instantly rejected, there's no way they will be accepted, whatever I do to correct them.

I found, however, a workaround: adding an old case number to the rejected pictures. In this situation, the picture gets reviewed and approved within days.

There's definitely an AI issue here. I guess raising the problem to their support might work in a few cases (I got a few approved this way as well).

At the moment, I'm stable year-to-date, with a +/- 5% difference since the beginning of the month.

It's important to mention, however, that sales are traditionally extremely low at the beginning of the month, and that licences other than subscriptions usually start to appear in the second half of January. It's kind of happening this year, and it's always been the same in the past few years. That's why January is usually totally unbalanced. I guess it comes from the fact businesses are a bit slow to pay their invoices in the beginning of the month for plenty of reasons, and compensate in the second part.

So, one year after SS started to implement their shameful new scheme, I wanted to check a bit more in detail what was the impact on the revenue. Given I'm measuring my monthly performance from the 26th of a month till the 25th of the following month (mainly because the very last days of each month are very busy for me), I already have some data (even though it takes in account a few day with the old scheme).

Important to mention: my portfolio is 99% images, 60 to 70% editorial (I'm working part time as a correspondent, so I tend to recycle a lot of unused images on microstock).


Revenue is down, yes


Globally, on Shutterstock, my revenue decreased by 9% since the new scheme has been implemented.

Not that bad, you may say? Well, in parallel, I considerably increased the numbers of files for sale.

If I look at the yRPI, we get a totally different picture: it decreased by 37%!

Actually, external reasons could explain this decrease:

• March and April 2020 were outstanding. As a result of the pandemic, I got a much higher demand in editorial files, and I got lucky with other things. I seriously couldn't expect pictures of facemasks and hazmat suits from a 2019 footage about asbestos removal to be reused in such a context, for instance. When the volumes got back to normal, the comparative performance went lower. 
• Due to the pandemic, I ran out of higher quality files. Without possibility to travel, to attend festivals, fairs, exhibitions, concerts, and with a political life close to zero, I had to find alternatives. The only ones I could get was life under covid, and what I would call "premium duck-in-pond pictures" (pictures of everyday life topics, but shot with the highest quality gear and more elaborate processing). As a result, the interest was lower than usual. 
• To counter this lower interest, I increased my production, especially about Covid-related photos. Taken individually, their RPI is much lower. Considering the low production costs (no need to travel, and a pretty easy keywording), the operation was financially ok, comparable to some of the microstock trips I made.

So, what is the reason behind this decrease? My portfolio, or Shutterstock?

To compare, let's have a look at the other main channels, as I submit almost the same files to every platform (except, of course, Adobe).
IS

• Revenue: -1.7%
  
• yRPI: -32%

Alamy

• Revenue: +19%
  
• yRPI: -17%

Dreamstime

• Revenue: +25%
  
• yRPI: -14%

Adobe

• Revenue: +50%
  
• yRPI: -8%

Bigstock

• Revenue: -29%
  
• yRPI: -50%

DP

• Revenue: +28%
  
• yRPI: -18%

123RF

• Revenue: +19%
  
• yRPI: +8

So, as we can see, globally, the RPI decreased everywhere, Bigstock and IS, especially, are a bit concerning, but
SS is comparatively doing very bad.


Even in terms of global revenue, we can see that SS badly impacted the numbers:

• Total revenue evolution including Shutterstock: +4%
• Total revenue evolution without Shutterstock: +11%

So, we can definitely see there's something wrong coming from Shutterstock.

Structure of the revenue on Shutterstock

I went as well a bit deeper, to check the performance per type of sale, and I found something interesting, the only slightly encouraging signal:

• Revenue from subs: -31%
• Revenue from SOD: +8.5%
• Revenue from Others/Enhanced: +50%

As we can see, while the year has been a disaster for subs, the other types of sales increased, spectacularly for the case of others.

I double checked as well if it's due to some unusually high sales, but it's not: I haven't got any sale sale on SS above $99 in the period I took in consideration. In parallel, both for SOD and Others, the monthly numbers since June 2020 have been better than the previous year in 7 out of 12 months. We are talking about a sustainable growth. (in comparison: subs revenue was lower in 11 our of 12 months).

So, it seems SS sales are starting to behave like IS. SOD/others have a greater impact on the revenue than before. As a result, it means the revenue is much less stable than it used to, as these sales are much less frequent. We're not yet at the level of IS, however, were two or three sales in a month can increase by 100% my monthly performance.

Conclusion

Was the year bad on SS? Definitely yes! It was worse than most of the platforms. However, if the trend on SOD and Others keeps on being the same, I should be able to partially recover from the subs massacre.

Is it my main point of concern? Actually, not! The decrease on IS is much more preoccupying, as the decrease cannot be explained with a change in their scheme. The goal, now, will be to see how sales will go when I will be able to put for sale my first post-pandemic pictures, but I still don't know yet when will this be possible.

In case, here's Alamy director's Linkedin. I think she may want to know personally what we're thinking of such things...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-shelley-0b71a149/

Having a very strong week on AS this week and pretty good on SS.

I have no explanation for why every day this week AS earnings are at least double what they've been the last several weeks. I thought maybe I was one of their featured top sellers this week, but I checked and that's not the case. Maybe they're doing a strong advertising push?

Anyone else seeing very strong sales on AS this week?

Well, the week was good, but generally, the year started "pretty" fine on AS (the blue line is the monthly revenue for AS)

The month looks ok for me, most of the platforms are working the way they should, and I got a few good news coming from Alamy.

There's only one platform doing significantly worse, it's Bigstock, but it's not like I care about them.

So, here's the final comparison to January 2020:
Revenue: -41%
Sales: -2.64%

So, as I sometimes say, this month was un dolor anal.

Actually, I'm much more preoccupied at the decrease in sales than at the decrease in revenue: my portfolio is significantly bigger than in January 2020, but the number of sales is lower. I'm still extremely upset at the revenue decrease, but I can expect things to get better be less bad in the upcoming weeks thanks to the season and the sales levels.

One positive thing: I got an increase of sales and revenue (+5.5%) on SOD and Singles compared to last January. Both in 2020 and in 2021, I didn't get any outstanding sale in this column (the highest one was below $4 in both cases), so it means there's still something growing out of there.

With the new scheme, I had actually previously noticed that , while my subs were getting murdered, the Singles, Other and SOD were stable, or were even getting better. It's hard to say, however, if this comes from the new system, or if it's due to my strategy: I'm mainly editorial, and I'm focusing more and more on small niches that start to add up where the supply is close to non existent and where I'm usually the only option (I'd say the second).

Globally, it's pretty bad. I am at the moment around -50% compared to last year, as many here.

That being said, here's a bit more insight:

• the first 10 days of January have always been lower than average: businesses are just reopening avec the Holiday season, and the budgets are not always renewed. It's especially the case for On Demand, Extended or Enhanced sales (there may be a billing question with SS about it, I wouldn't be surprised).
• it was the case as well this year, but it got even worse due to the new scheme.
• as the weeks pass by, every year, the activity starts to kickoff, and I'm usually ending up with an average performance for January.
• in terms of volume, this year, the same phenomenon happens, as I have for instance generated 80% of my sales and revenue for the month in the past 7 days. In the end, the differences between the beginning and the end of the month should just be way more dramatic than before, due to the combination of the seasonal phenomenon with the first SS levels being reached pretty fast. In the end, I will probably face a 30% decrease compared to last year.

So, in the end, it's still bad, but not as much as I could expect based on January's first days. But anyway, screw Shutterstock.

So, your title mentions videos and images, but you are only talking about videos...

Regarding photos, however, I totally don't share your analysis, based on my experience.

 I just counted over the past two weeks. On the first submission, I usually get 20% rejection for these stupid noise and focus reasons. It's definitely more than before. However, after resizing the files, the final ratio is much closer to 1 or 2%, which has not changed a lot over the past few years. Even better, I have the feeling that the initial rejection rate is falling a bit.

So, in a nutshell, I have more the impression that SS is trying to limit the amount of files being put for sale using bogus reasons. If you insist, however, they end up accepting your photos, because, in the end, they don't want to lose opportunities. That being said, it looks like video submissions are a bit more problematic, indeed...