You haven't checked out what's been going on.

Between last night and this morning - i.e. less than 24 hours - there were nearly 200,000 fewer images & illustrations on Shutterstock. Remember the boast up top that says they add 171,000 images daily. So the swing in less than 24 hours is at least 370k

I am afraid 200.000 fewer images in 24 hours is close to nothing if you compare it to the size of the database. 200.000 compared to over 326.400.000, that's 0.06%. And even if they keep losing that many every single day for the next week (when the wave of people disabling their ports now that they see how the new earning works) and then maybe again as many every day at the beginning of next month for another week, when people who, like me, want to give this a try and se ehow it works out, then that's 2.800.000 images they might lose. That's still just 0.86% of their database and really nothing, especialy if you mix in the numbers of images that are added daily - then they even come out almost even.


Shutterstock has just way too big of a database to really care about losing 1,2,3 or even 10 million images. Heck, they could probably even lose 50million images and it would not change anything for them.

Dentist imagery will become out of date, within five years, all industries move on, when you are dealing with clients in the dentistry or medical sectors the demand that the imagery is up to date.

You can continue to argue against every completely random example I picked to get a point across, it's not changing anything. Just pick an example yourself and think about whether you think it will make a difference to customers and Shuttesrtock whether they have 100.000 images of that topic in their database or "just" 50.000. images.

Everybody should put in their portfolio description for customers, that they should buy images at adobe stock.

I would not advice to do that, not with Shutterstock's tactics to permanently terminate accounts if they do something they don't like and that would probably be on top of their list.
If people are 100% certain that they will not want to return to SS ever, even not should they possibly change their roality structure again, then yes, but I assume these people would have terminated their account permanently anyways, not just disabled sales.

I don't understand people who disable their port at SS because they don't accept to get 10� for a sale while they have a port at IS where they can get as few as 2� for a sale

I can explain this to you, or at least try. For me, what I look at is the ratio of work I put into making the photos and submit them and what I earn from them that is important - "them" as in a collective of all my work in opposite to a single individual image. Since I pretty much upload the same images to multiple agencies, the work and time for the photos is a constant number. What is not is the earning I get from them.

So far I have submitted to IS and will continue doing so for a simple reason: They have been one of my top 3 best earners very similar to Shutterstock in income with a port of similar size and a similar number of downloads each month.

Since it's the same time and effort that goes into every agency, why should I say "I submit to SS for an earning of X$ each month but I am not doing it for the same amount to IS" Why? It's the same time and work that went into it and it's the same money I walk away with at the end of the month. 
Imagine it a bit ike a housekeeper who gets a fixed salery each month. She is happy to do the work for the amount of money she gets, but some day she sees a list where every single task that is involved in her work is listed with an individual price and she says "What? Cleaning windows only gets me 0.50$? I am not doing this job anymore!".  That would be silly if the overall payment per hour was good, right? That's a bit how I see it. Even though IS has this crazy 0.02$ sales, they somehow always manage to pull in enough medium sales to make up for it and the overall sum is right.

If Shutterstock had just changed around their earning system to something where some sales would make you less, but others more, but it was still divided in a way that the overall sum was not too different from what it was before, it might have worked out. The problem is that Shutterstock has never really been an agency that managed to pull in great licence for me and most of my earnings come from SUBs. With royalities for these reduced by over a third, there is no way Shutterstock will get even close to the former number at the end of the month.

Maybe it's too early to tell, maybe there is still  hope, but the first 2 days of June give me a different impression. I only get 0,10$ - 0,14$ sales and if all of June will be like this I will end up with only a third of what I used to make on Shuttertock and what I still make on iStock with almost the same port. That's why I will stay on IS, but will deactivate my account on SS by the end of the month, should my earnings continue to be as low as they are now.

Thats interesting in a way.

We were told the SODs for sub value were things like FB adverts and so on NOT subscriptions.
So it seems we get 10 cents for those as well NOT just subscriptions.

The 0.10$ SODs might possibly be a mistake and supposed to be SUBs. At least I just had a customer download two images who frequently buys from me (always same city and same topic of images, so I know it's the same) and the images used to be SUBs previously and are now listed under SODs.

btw I see many contributors talking (almost complaining) about how they still get the same rates. It's as if they are begging for lower rates, very odd!
Maybe SS changed their mind but if people continue this then we will surely get them.
I'm going to lay back for a while, wait for SS next move and then take action. What I will not do is complain about getting the same rates

Again we're behaving like cattle getting in line ready to be milked. I'm signing off for now, take care peeps!

I don't see anyone complaining, just people being surprised or confused.

It's understandable that many people want to see their earnings with the new rates, becaue untill now, we can only speculate how much the change will affect our earnings. With all the different packages Shutterstock offers and also the aspect of different prices for packages in different countries (which no mod has addressed so far) and the fact that Shutterstock gave us absolutely no info about which packages make up what percentage of sales, we are kept pretty much in the dark. That's why many people want to see the lower rates. To finally understand what they can really expect. No one is asking or even begging for the new rates. We don't want them, but since we know they are coming, we want to finally understand them and their impact on our earnings.

And there is really absolutely no way Shutterstock changed their mind and just keeps it a secret, when the whole microstock world is turning into an angry mob against them and people are disabling their portfolios. If they, for whatever reason, changed their mind, they would have announced it the moment the decision was made. They are probably all just still sleeping at this time and the change was not set to be implemented automatically.

I suspect its more likely image ranking.  Images are ranked (search hits, click ratios, sales etc).
Older contributors with older images simply had more chance of selling due to the small library size at the time.  As a result those images ranked highly and remain so compared to the huge influx of unranked new images.

Alamy, AS and others we know rank images.
So i dont think its a per contributor ranking, more than fact that an older image thats sold before is going to have a lot longer and more opportunity to rank higher.

Yes, I am sorry, I think I expressed myself not so well. I did not mean that Shutterstock favours older contributors, but older images that had more time to build up sales. But these images usually belong to long-time contributors.

 I have talked to old contributors who said that still, till today, they have some old images that sell on a daily base. I am a fairly new contributor, joned around 1.5 years ago and on Shutterstock I was really never able to establish any kind of such "bestseller". I have images that sell from time to time, but really nothing outstanding and my income comes from selling many different images rather than a few often. It's the opposite for me on Adobe though. There my income comes from a few images only that sell very regularly.

It is just possibly my computer's cache, or is the number of Shutterstock's image count and new images count not updated anymore? Or does it never get updated on weekends?

I've been realy curious how the announced changes would affect the image count  and kept an eye on it. Since the announcement the number still went up because of newly added images, but since 3 days the number stays at exactly 326.237.838  and new 1.199.139 images added weekly. Since I doubt that number stayed exactly the same for 3 days, I think that maybe Shutterstock disabled the updating of that feature so people could not see how many contributors really disabled their portfolio - unless, as said, it's a cache problem with my computer.

This is really a great move, but am I the only one who finds the timing incredibly....convenient? Shutterstock announced a cut of our royalities and two days later Dreamstime announces a rise in royalities? Does seem a bit like an attempt to gain some publicity and customers and attrackt as many contributors who are possibly leaving Shuttersock at the same time?
Either way, I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth (too closely) and am happy about the increase in rocalities either way, whatever the motives.