While hunting around for more press on the new Composition Aware search, I happened upon an article about Nick Flynn leaving SS for Rokt as Chief Revenue Officer

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rokt-amps-up-growth-with-new-chief-revenue-officer-300533539.html

I know nothing more about Rokt than what's on their web site - "They click buy and we say hi", whatever that means...

I went to see if Glassdoor had anything interesting about SS that was recent and there were several very negative reviews from the last couple of months.

"Sales Solution Manager" who has left wasn't positive. (emphasis mine):

"The monthly targets that are given to you are unattainable unless you have been with the company for a while and have a pipeline built up. At this point, they are running out of leads to give their agents. so they are recycling old leads from the previous month which have been contacted multiple times in months prior to that. Do not believe what they tell you during the interview process, you are going to feel like you are selling magazine subscriptions or you're a used car salesman. The management team, with the exception of a few, will micro manage you. For some reason they keep bringing on new sales agents, which is taking away the only "quality" leads they have from the other agents. I can go on and on."

Someone from finance who left said:

"Absolutely horrific management in the Finance Division. The Managers and VP's have no idea as to what is going on, except for pushing orders down that have no meaning or translation into the daily work.
No opportunities for career growth."

Another ex-employee:

"The leadership team is as incompetent as they come. The founder/CEO is a big man child who changes priorities every other day. Instead of working with teams, he forces them to do what he wants, leading to other projects getting delayed or launched half assed.

CFO is also the COO, which has to be a conflict of interest but at this place, he continues to amass more power. He's squeezing every ounce of revenue from legacy products.

Executive team is a revolving door other than CEO/CFO, with most of them leaving after a year.

The GM structure forces all of them to fight over resources like little rats. They're glorified sales leaders instead of actual strategists.

The core product is dying and they don't seem to be preparing for the future. Instead they're doubling down on acquiring more companies that focus on stock assets.

The tech stack is as old as the company and of course no progress has been made to fixing the issues because of "too many priorities."

Get ready to work long hours because there isn't a clear focus.

Advice to Management
You won't listen but I'll share the feedback anyway.

Stop hiring and firing middle management. Either commit to making it work with them or focus on hiring more people who can get work done.
Show that you care about your employees and maybe they'll work hard without being threatened or forced to.

Stop coming up with crappy ideas and reduce the amount of time dedicated to products that just plain suck.

For once, look at what's worked well in the past and invest a little bit money into that, like brand.

Stop trying to use free snacks and food as s recruiting tactic. Those aren't benefits, they're perks."

Forget it.Deleted thanks joAnn.

I would not worry too much.
As always one unsatisfied person makes more noise than 100 millions satisfied���

People who leave will often be negative. However I think there is a ring of truth in what they say. The only real "growth" seems to come from acquisition and their core business seems to be struggling. Next quarterly figures due end of month;-)

Funny, I was just reading other bad employee reviews myself. It seems like the only happy employees are the at home image reviewers.

"Working in customer service is very tough, productivity targets are unreasonably high, systems and/or the website seem to always break down or have bugs, there is a shady subscription auto-renewal practice in place and more than 50% of all customer contact is asking for refunds and complaining about this practice, which management expects you to defend."

Thank you Jo Ann for sharing this article.
I'm not surprised.
Shutterstock is going down. Down, down, fast!

Contributors work for SS, too, and it's obvious SS is an openly contributor hostile company.

We can see this in their approach to image stealing - they choose to sweep theft under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist. No respect to contributors whatsoever.
We can see this in their "new ideas" like Shutterstock Custom which is basically robbery. Offer to pay contributors a silly amount for ALL RIGHTS of their work (if they are desperate enough to agree).

The CEO is financially independent and has checked out this sand box of his a long time ago.

"Sales Solution Manager" who has left wasn't positive. (emphasis mine):

"For some reason they keep bringing on new sales agents, which is taking away the only "quality" leads they have from the other agents. I can go on and on."

This sounds familiar. What exactly do they mean by product? Is that their sales packages, website or the images themselves?