Agency Based Discussion > Shutterstock.com
Missed minimum payout for the first time in 8 years
Hildegarde:
Reality. With so many people or their spouses out of work due to pandemic, some people simply cannot afford to close of any avenue of income-- it can mean the difference between being able to eat or not.
You can bet SS knew that and used the timing to their advantage.
That being said, earnings on SS are pathetic. Sales with low earner agencies now overtaking SS. I just had 1 sale on new to me agency---that sale alreadhy more than made on SS this month.
I am not uploading new work to SS. As soon as sales with new agencies add some income, wil lbe ditching SS.
Microstockphoto:
--- Quote ---If you and everyone else had disabled your ports on 6/15, how different things would be today.
--- End quote ---
dry your salty tears, i've stopped submitting,
offisapup:
The harsh truth is, SS and iS might be the worst, most exploitative agencies around but they are also the only agencies that bring in consistent money for contributors like myself. Adobe has been a big zero the last couple of months. On Alamy, you're lucky if you make a sale every couple of months. So if contributors like myself shut off our SS ports, we won't see any money. And we need the money.
So the protests are great but judging by responses from SS, they don't really seem to care. They're okay even if 80 percent of their contributors migrate elsewhere and if their trustpilot score drops to zero because most probably, they're headed to dump the company to some rich buyer and make billions. But people who aren't millionaires like myself need the money and will take whatever we get as long as there's a little bit of money to be made. Those are the times we live in.
The Stock Coalition made a deal with Pond5 and that's great. Great for video contributors. But people who sell images just can't afford to shut off their SS ports and move to Pond5 because pond5 hasn't sold a single image for some of us in years. They care as much for image ports as SS does for contributors.
Shelma1:
--- Quote from: Hildegarde on August 18, 2020, 12:36 ---Reality. With so many people or their spouses out of work due to pandemic, some people simply cannot afford to close of any avenue of income-- it can mean the difference between being able to eat or not.
You can bet SS knew that and used the timing to their advantage.
That being said, earnings on SS are pathetic. Sales with low earner agencies now overtaking SS. I just had 1 sale on new to me agency---that sale alreadhy more than made on SS this month.
I am not uploading new work to SS. As soon as sales with new agencies add some income, wil lbe ditching SS.
--- End quote ---
Reality sucks for me too. I was a very successful vector artist on Shutterstock. Disabling my port will cost me tens of thousands of dollars this year. I’m currently unemployed. My guess is that the vast majority of contributors don’t count on Shutterstock royalties to eat, though I’m sure a few do.
I’m not talking about a permanent disabling of accounts, though that’s what I’ve chosen to do. I’m talking about a large number of people making a temporary sacrifice for two weeks.
The fact is that if most people had disabled their ports on June 15 things would have turned out very differently. Their library would have shrunk tremendously. Buyers would have been completely frustrated. Investors would have been asking what the heck happened. They would have had a massive loss of sales and would not have met or exceeded profit expectations. SSTK would have dropped instead of rising. They would have been forced to roll back the royalty cuts, and everyone might very well have regained their temporary loss when buyers either came back or switched to other sites for the assets they needed.
cascoly:
--- Quote from: Shelma1 on August 18, 2020, 12:17 ---
If you and everyone else had disabled your ports on 6/15, how different things would be today.
...
So it’s better to get much less over a period of years than to sacrifice two weeks of royalties once?...
Instead of losing two weeks’ pay, you’re losing 13 weeks’ pay if you had a 50% royalty decrease for the second half of 2020. And in 2021 it will be much worse, because the vast majority of people won’t get back to their “old” royalty rate, which is still 50% lower than it used to be, for months, if ever.
--- End quote ---
sorry, that's not a fair comparison though - whether you boycott or not, you're still getting paid less, so any boycott loss is additional, not instead of, other losses
and you're still working on the assumption that the boycott would attract enough participants to make SS take notice - and as this was only a token gesture, SS knew it wouldnt last
deciding whether to keep a portfolio on SS is a personal/business decision - thinking it would change SS is wishful thinking
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