Adobe doesnt care about stock regardless of how much of the percentage they get. They have the best sales and pay to lure you in, then bury you in rejections so you spend more time editing which leads to you spending monthly subscriptions to their software. Thats their goal. Free profit with no work or labour as cost to them. I'm noticing a pattern where the better your images are for quality and catagory for past sales, the more bogus rejections and longer review wait times you get. I think AI images is an excuse. The more images you sell, the more work they have to do processing payments meaning more cost to them in labour. I think they want garbage images that dont sell as long as you keep paying for their software subscriptions to make them. Their higher payouts keep you coming back.
My existing port sells regularly but good luck adding to it. No more building a sales strategy for growth or adding seasonal images. Having no control over your own portfolio makes it all pointless. Maybe a lower payout agency like Shutterstock would at least be useable for potential growth in the future.

So... my lifetime download count on the dashboard reset to zero on January 1st. I dont recall this happening before. Is lifetime now defined as 1 year?

Quote from: Pauws99 on August 13, 2018, 02:18

Quote from: derek on August 13, 2018, 02:07

This Q-result every quarter, I'm beginning to think theyre cooking the books! after 14 years with this outfit I know people in every camp and I dont know ANYBODY who's doing any good or who really cares if the place is down or not??.

come on Paws whats  youre opinion youre good at this?

My opinion is as they are audited accounts and Oringer could go to prison for a very long time if they were fraudulent they are most likely correct. As has been said over and over again new supply far outstrips demand therefore most contributors will lose out. Its really that simple.

The supply otstripping the demand!  jeez we have known that for year now, nothing new!  no I dont buy that anymore theres got to be something else. before it was just some people, some camps crying and complaining NOW it almost everyone!

Wow. You mean all that crying and complaining that certain people were doing was actually about something real? I guess crossing fingers and wishing hard didnt make the problems go away after all. Its just easier to attack them rather than stand united against a company thats screwing you with your own property to make profits for themselves.

Supply is outstripping demand at Shutterstock because they made it so. I believe they opened the gates to anyone to desperately inflate their library and make as much money as they could for themselves before the stock photo market totally collapses. This is why sales are down everywhere:

https://unsplash.com/

Decent quality photos for completely free. Multiple sites are out there like this and they are growing fast. Web traffic stats show free sites getting constant high growth while most micro sites are falling. Shutterstock web traffic shows an increase but I'm sure thats the flood of new amateur contributor traffic and not paying customers.
Sites like Unsplash have convinced tons of naive photographers to give their portfolios away for free so they could stick the word free on the front page and generate mountains of traffic for themselves, starving out the existing market. This new trend does nothing but train consumers that our images have no value and that they DESERVE our images for free... even for commercial use. Why would they pay anything for images now?
There are tons of unaddressed legal issues at these sites that will create problems for them in the future such as the lack of releases but its pretty tough to compete with free in the minds of consumers. I believe the only course of action to take is to draw a line in the sand and that line is quality. Let the garbage images be free and the consumers will tire of it and will pay for quality again. Thats Shutterstocks mistake. They prioritize the garbage over the quality.

The ironic part is that all of this happened because contributors allowed it to. Its our property. Its our photos that make these sites even possible. Contributors chose to follow Shutterstocks poor choices and stick their head in the sand. What would happen to Shutterstock if contributors stood up to them and said no. What if contributors united together and opted out of sales on their portfolios in protest? They cant ignore their store literally shrinking. They cant ignore that loss of sales, especially under these conditions. Its our images that make all of this even possible.

Food for thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M_OZWtpokc