I just went to my dashboard, clicked around, checked stats, all work ok. Safari on ipad.

byron dont listen to rinder the old fool, he has no real interest in your portfolio all he wants to do is knock you down and trash all over you and he'lll come up with a 50 year old story how he's been around since the 1800s shooting with magnesium flashes etc and that he makes 100k for a single photo yet he is still here selling images for 10 cent on shutterstock. he still has over 7000 images there and adding which makes him a hypocrite as well.

no one is allowed a different opinion from the masses up here, if you have you'll get trashed, mocked, insulted and patronised, just see the comment from martha as an example and she is supposed to be a sweet old lady

And yet that�s exactly what you do/are doing 

Quote from: cathyslife on September 03, 2020, 13:29

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on September 03, 2020, 11:10

I figured I'd keep "nagging" on twitter until lazaralinsilviu's portfolio is gone

https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1301550615798005760

I can't tag @Shutterstock because they've blocked me, but if anyone they haven't blocked wants to retweet any of these public shaming messages, that can't hurt

I will.

Whether your tweet tagging them did the trick or they just got around to my email about this, I received a message that the portfolio had been terminated. It's now down to about 400 images (from 1400)

Excellent, either way!

Give Martha a smarta$$ apology too. She corrected you first. LOL. 🙄

This is disturbing: �Freepik said the hacker obtained usernames and passwords for the oldest 8.3 million users registered on its Freepik and Flaticon websites.�

8.3 million+ users. No wonder we aren�t making much money. 🤬

I keep saying, we all tend to look at Pond5 as a safe haven when running away from SS, but it's like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Unless the coalition can somehow negotiate costs so this doesn�t happen, I agree. I will wait and see if that happens before spending more time uploading my stuff. Not like I�m missing out on tons of money anyway. There isn�t any point for them to advertise �set your own price�, if they price match everything anyway.

Going exclusive at microstock prices would be incredibly risky in the current market. I used to think if Shutterstock went exclusive I would consider it...look how that could have turned out.

I agree. It was barely a good idea for some people even 5 years ago. Let alone today. Image exclusivity would be good, and I don�t know why all agencies don�t offer that. Must be some financial reason why they don�t.

Don�t click any link in an email. Go to the site and see if it asks you for a new password. Sounds like a phishing scam.

This is Pond5�s formal letter to the Stock Coalition:

Dear Members of the Stock Coalition,
Greetings! My name is Greg and I�m the Head of Content at Pond5. To those of you who are unacquainted with me or with Pond5, I want to extend a hearty welcome. We�ve been in close dialogue with your leadership over the last few months and thought the time was right for us to reach out directly and fill you in on some of those discussions.
Pond5 wants to be your agency. We pay the highest royalties in the industry � both for exclusive and non-exclusive content. We allow our contributing artists to set their own prices for their work, and we allow you to opt in or out of the programs that make sense for you. Recently we�ve been actively assisting Coalition members in on-boarding large portfolios with the help of personal Account Managers. We�re bumping your customer service tickets to the top of our inboxes and making sure your content gets prioritized treatment in our curatorial queue.
But we also understand that, as a video-first marketplace, we have work to do to grow our photo and illustration business. Step one, of course, is getting the content, and you�re helping us out with that just fine. Looking ahead, we�ve budgeted out development resources to deliver, over the next several months, improvements to our image experience including a search U/X overhaul, collection clean up and algorithm enhancement, and SEO tweaks that will help boost organic traffic to our photo and illustration pages. This will be coupled with appropriate marketing efforts to effectively �relaunch� our image offering and put us on the map when it comes to stills licensing.
In the even nearer term, we�re working with Coalition leadership to put together a branded collection on our homepage featuring the work of coalition members, and will be looking to feature members� content as frequently as possible in our social media channels.
Great partnerships are built on communication, so we�re going to be meeting regularly with the Coalition to assure alignment and receive your feedback. In the end, we�re all going to win if we can shift the market towards agencies that pay a fair rate and allow creators the choice to represent their content how they see fit.
If you have any questions, our support lines are open and we�re happy to hear from you. I know we can make great things happen by working together.
All the best,
Greg Andreacchi
Director, Head of Artists & Content

So no mention of royalties, except that they �pay a fair rate.� As I said earlier, maybe it�s in the pipeline. Good that they are offering help to those with big portfolios, though. It would be nice to see them do well in the image arena, to replace SS.

I know they just got paperwork done to become an �official� organization, so maybe it�s in the pipeline.

Quote from: cathyslife on August 14, 2020, 16:25

But on the other hand, the coalition doesn�t have anything in writing regarding contributor commissions. Plus, they can reset your price to whatever they think is right, defeating the whole �set your own price� sales pitch. If I am mistaken, and the coalition DOES have a price guarantee in writing, please let me know. I was thinking the whole point of the coalition was to negotiate things like this. I know they just got paperwork done to become an �official� organization, so maybe it�s in the pipeline.

Cathy, I say�

We all need to give the fledgling Coalition leaders representing us a chance to get their footing, and then grow and (we hope) flourish � and finally show what some kind of cooperative effort like this can accomplish � before we start jumping down their throats over what they have not yet been able to deliver.

First of all, I�m not jumping down anyone�s throat. Good grief, you too, Martha? 🙄 I was trying to get some info. I guess you don�t have an answer. Read more carefully.

But hey, you got a +3! 👍

Agencies just made a pile off it is all. Trads threw high quality concept stuff up for pennies and killed their own market off (yes more complicated that than of course, but it was  factor). It could and should have been micros for amateurs starting out and small business who could not afford thousands for photos, so that we had a place to go when we improved and higher paying clients to go with.

This is exactly how I viewed microstock. My stuff was never meant to compete with �trads�. I was a graphic designer working for small companies. I�m over there designing newsletters and magazines, and one image cost $300+. It was a hard sell getting the boss to approve even one photo for the project. When microstock came along, it was a great solution. I could buy 3 or 4 or more micro images, not quite as good quality as a custom shoot or from �trads�, but acceptable to get the job done. But then, �trads� decided they could clean up by selling on microstock. For us buyers, it was great...�trad� quality for microstock prices. But then those of us who were just starting in photography are now competing with pros, and the race to the bottom began.

I was encouraged by a friend to jump into microstock for exactly the same reason she did...we were designers who thought we had a pretty good handle on what was needed and what would sell. We weren�t trying to put anybody out of business...we were just trying to fill the gap between large companies who could afford big budgets for photography from the �trads�, and the small companies who could not. And make a few bucks along the way.

As my skills improved, I totally expected to move to RM �trads� and out of microstock, and in fact sold some RM images directly to a large card printer. Then life happened, other things became priority, and I just continued with the microstock. Today, I still sell images but I don�t even shoot anymore. My choice.

Multiply my story times how many hundreds of thousands contributors there are, and we are where we are. It�s only gonna get worse, as long as people are ok with the agencies making all the money, and taking peanuts (or pretty soon, nothing) for their work.

As far as the OP, it will be difficult to predict anything like that, because the same image can be a blockbuster at one site, and hardly ever sell at another. If you are deactivating or removing at SS, you should do it on principle. When buyers can�t get images or clips that they used in their comps, and the quality of what�s left is not something they can use, they will go elsewhere. The more people take quality out of SS, the better chance everyone has of getting sales at other places for more money. Hopefully.